alcohol deaths – Opiate Nation

Gilded Grief

(Short topical blogs based on Opiate Nation – translation into most languages in tab on right.)

While reading Rising Strong by Brené Brown, I was struck by a thought she shared about our American culture and the absence of honest conversation and the hard work it takes for us to rise strong after a fall on our face – a failure. She worries that “this lack of honesty about overcoming adversity has created a Gilded Age of Failure.”

Gilding is a perfect word-picture for this characteristically human behavior: applying a very thin coating of gold to a plain, inexpensive object that gives it the appearance of gold. This is what we do when we are dishonest about our feelings. We are choosing to make our real, plain, and common story appear better than it is.

“We’ve all fallen…but scars are easier to talk about than they are to show with all the remembered feelings laid bare…We much prefer stories about falling and rising to be inspirational and sanitized…We like recovery stories to move quickly through the dark so we can get to the sweeping redemptive ending.” (Rising Strong, Introduction)

Avoiding Pain

(Thirteenth in a series of topical blogs based on chapter by chapter excerpts from Opiate Nation. Translation into most languages is available to the right.)

We are living in particularly precarious times – for people born since WWII, unprecedented problems the world over – seemingly beyond our ability to control or to deal with effectively. With the Coronavirus pandemic, complex problems have arisen for our global society to attempt to solve, from the manufacturing and transport of medical supplies and personal protective equipment to the best medical treatments and the development of a vaccine – which is viewed by many as the magic potion but only if the majority of people could be convinced to ‘get the jab.’

During this extraordinary year pain has come into most of our lives in ways we have not experienced previously: physical pain from contracting Covid19, emotional pain from being isolated or from watching those we know or care for becoming sick and dying, and mental pain from the anxiety caused by all the unknowns surrounding the pandemic. For people living in poverty, these problems are compounded.

Epidemic Worsens, Hope Wains

In a March 6, 2018 public health report on NPR, Rob Stein reported the grim news on recent CDC statistics: across America, overdoses from opioids increased by an average of 30% in 2017––some areas were as high as 109% while others remained stable at 20%––occurring in every region and every age group of men and women. The latest data could underestimate the overdoses, because many people who overdose never end up in the emergency room (like our son) so are not accounted for.

“We think that the number of people addicted to opioids is relatively stable. But the substances are more dangerous than five years ago,” acting CDC Director Anne Schuchat says. “The margin of error for taking one of these substances is small now and people may not know what they have, due to availability of newer, highly potent illegal opioids, such as fentanyl.”

Sadly, 20 years on in the opioid epidemic, things are still worsening and government policies are doing nothing to help. Declaring it a “health emergency” but failing to fund quality public health care and the long-term recovery expenses that are essential for opiate recovery is creating a false sense of well-being when there is none.

“Emergency room staff need better training to make sure people with substance-use disorder get follow-up addiction treatment,” says Jessica Hulsey Nickel, president and CEO of the Addiction Policy Forum. “Too often, addicts are simply revived and sent home without follow-up care, only to overdose again. We can use this near-death experience—use it as moment to change that person’s life.”

These overdose deaths have contributed significantly to life expectancy in the US dropping for the second year in a row. This is alarming public health officials since life expectancy gives us insight into the health of a nation––the last time we had a drop was during the AIDS epidemic.

In another study about “Deaths of Despair”, Anne Case & Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton University, report “It’s also a crisis in which people are killing themselves in much larger numbers—whites especially. Deaths from alcohol have been rising as well––we think of it all being signs that something is really wrong and it is happening nationwide…The decline of well-paying jobs, security and good benefits may be fueling a sense of frustration and hopelessness,” Case says. “That may be one reason fewer people are getting married and having children outside of marriages.They have a much more fragile existence than they would have had a generation ago. As a result, these deaths are related to the fact that people don’t have the stability and a hope for the future that they might have had in the past.”

Hope for the future––something we all need––something that is increasingly hard to find in our fragmented society. Many, many voices are calling us to return to the basics for sustained human health and growth: real community, true spirituality, public and private integrity, simplicity of lifestyle, and sincere and tangible love for each other: love is a verb

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/03/06/590923149/jump-in-overdoses-shows-opioid-epidemic-has-worsened

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/12/21/572080314/life-expectancy-drops-again-as-opioid-deaths-surge-in-u-s