It was some photography and film from the period combined with interviews of people who had lived through it. Many told stories of suicides among family and friends that were like those I heard from my family who had two close family friends, one a farmer and the other a banker, kill themselves in a tiny Midwestern farm town.

I'd call what we're in a Soft Depression, not quite as dramatic as the 30s and without the added environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl, but it still has the same social effects. We see people drive up and park in front of the little park across the street, they meet a dealer, and shoot up in the car. After blissing out for 20-30 minutes, they pull themselves together and presumably drive home. Many of these people drive late model cars. Most are white though most of the dealers are black. Social collapse is quite widespread. In some ways, it's worse than the 30s. As that documentary highlights, people helped each other back then by doing things like establishing their own gift economy to forming a crowd to stop evictions and foreclosures. I heard those stories too.

It is an astonishing sign of social collapse when life expectancy shrinks in the absence of some virulent plague.

Thu, 11/10/2016 - 7:04pm — duckpin

Euro-American males, ages 45 to 54, are dying at an

unexpectedly high rate. This group is made up of high school graduates or high school dropouts. This even as other age and racial groups are either holding their own or having their life spans increase.

Those who study this think the primary cause is the loss of factory jobs that paid a living wage and offered a retirement after years of tedium. Causes of early death include alcoholism, opiate overdose, and suicide which are all indicators of misery. Like the cotton farmers in India, over 100,000 deaths by suicide so far do to industrial agriculture displacing traditional sustainable agriculture, desperation has overtaken this population because neoliberal policies have stolen their jobs. Voting for Trump, who at least acknowledged their plight, was a natural outcome.

Obama has been running conservative economic policies.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2263690.stm

Wednesday, 18 September, 2002, 23:02 GMT 00:02 UK
More suicides under Conservative rule

The suicide rate increases under Conservative governments, research suggests.

Australian scientists found the suicide rate in the country increased significantly when a Conservative government was in power.

And an analysis of figures in the UK seems to suggest a similar trend. ...

... The researchers took into account periods of drought and World War II, because of their economic and psychological impact.

Suicide rates were higher during periods of drought and lower during WWII.

But after adjusting for these factors, the figures clearly showed the highest rates of suicide occurred when both Conservative state and federal governments were in power.

Men at risk

Conversely, the lowest rates occurred when state and federal governments were both Labour.

Middle aged and older people were most at risk.

When the Conservatives ruled both state and federal governments, men were 17% more likely to commit suicide than when Labour was in power. Women were 40% more likely to kill themselves.

Suicide rates were higher under post-war than pre-war Conservative governments.

John Major
The rate dipped under moderate John Major
The authors argue that Conservative rule traditionally implies a less interventionist and more market-orientated policy than Labour rule.

This may make people feel more detached from society, they added.

The researchers concede that ideological distinctions between Conservative and Labour politicians have become more blurred over the past 20 years.

But they say public perceptions that their policies differ may still remain intact.

Lead researcher Professor Richard Taylor, of the University of Sydney, told BBC News Online: "We think that it may be because material conditions in lower socio-economic groups may be relatively better under labour because of government programmes, and there may be a perception of greater hope by these groups under labour.

"There is a strong relationship between socio-economic status and suicide."

The research is published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

British situation

In one of a series of accompanying editorials, Dr Mary Shaw and colleagues from the University of Bristol say the same patterns were evident in England and Wales between 1901 and 2000. ...

... Overall, they say, the figures suggest that 35,000 people would not have died had the Conservatives not been in power, equivalent to one suicide for every day of the 20th century or two for every day that the Conservatives ruled.

The UK Conservative Party refused to comment on the research. ...

Naturally, this following, (in accordance with the long-standing and now very widely applied industrial victim blame strategy for avoiding accurate attribution, compensation and regulation,) is being freely attributed to 'faulty life-style choices' among the poors, with the myriad factors ranging from vastly increased stress and inability to afford less toxic products - including foods and beverages - and homes in less polluted areas and the relative lack of social status/respect and of control over one's own life shown to proportionately reduce health and life expectancy in the Whitehall? studies (read them years earlier; they were quite famous, so anyone reading likely has heard of them) all ignored... even though, right next door in Canada, with similar smoking and fast-food consumption rates but less inequality and a previous history (prior to NAFTA 'harmonization') of better citizen protections against industrial pollution and unsafe foods, pharma meds and other potentially toxic products/exposures, such effects among the poorest were reversed over much of that period, up until the later 1990s even, apparently, in areas of heavier traffic and automotive and industrial pollution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/health/disparity-in-life-spans-of-the-...

Disparity in Life Spans of the Rich and the Poor Is Growing

By SABRINA TAVERNISEFEB. 12, 2016

Experts have long known that rich people generally live longer than poor people. But a growing body of data shows a more disturbing pattern: Despite big advances in medicine, technology and education, the longevity gap between high-income and low-income Americans has been widening sharply.

The poor are losing ground not only in income, but also in years of life, the most basic measure of well-being. In the early 1970s, a 60-year-old man in the top half of the earnings ladder could expect to live 1.2 years longer than a man of the same age in the bottom half, according to an analysis by the Social Security Administration. Fast-forward to 2001, and he could expect to live 5.8 years longer than his poorer counterpart.

New research released on Friday contains even more jarring numbers. Looking at the extreme ends of the income spectrum, economists at the Brookings Institution found that for men born in 1920, there was a six-year difference in life expectancy between the top 10 percent of earners and the bottom 10 percent. For men born in 1950, that difference had more than doubled, to 14 years.

For women, the gap grew to 13 years, from 4.7 years.

“There has been this huge spreading out,” said Gary Burtless, one of the authors of the study. ...

... Limited access to health care accounts for surprisingly few premature deaths in America, researchers have found. So it is an open question whether President Obama’s health care law — which has sharply reduced the number of Americans without health insurance since 2014 — will help ease the disparity.

At the heart of the disparity, said Elizabeth H. Bradley, a professor of public health at Yale, are economic and social inequities, “and those are things that high-tech medicine cannot fix.” ...

... Poor health outcomes for low-income Americans have dragged the United States down to some of the lowest rankings of life expectancy among rich countries. The Social Security Administration found, for example, that life expectancy for the wealthiest American men at age 60 was just below the rates in Iceland and Japan, two countries where people live the longest. Americans in the bottom quarter of the wage scale, however, ranked much further down — one notch above Poland and the Czech Republic.

“It’s embarrassing,” Professor Bradley said. ...

... Many researchers believe the gap in life spans from lower- to upper-income Americans started widening about 40 years ago, when income inequality began to grow. Earlier in the 20th century, trends in life spans were of declining disparities, some experts say, because improvements in public health, such as the invention of the polio vaccine and improved sanitation, benefited rich and poor alike. ...

... The experience of other countries suggests that disparities do not necessarily get worse in contemporary times. Consider Canada, where men in the poorest urban neighborhoods experienced the biggest declines in mortality from heart disease from 1971 to 1996, according to a 2002 study. Over all, the gap in life expectancy at birth between income groups declined in Canada during that period. And a study comparing cancer survival rates found that low-income residents of Toronto had greater survival rates than their counterparts in Detroit. There was no difference for middle- and high-income residents in the two cities.

“There are large swaths of the population that are not enjoying the pretty impressive gains the rest of us are having in life spans,” said Christopher J. L. Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle. “Not everybody is sharing in the same prosperity and progress.”