US life expectancy drops in 2017 due to drug #overdoses, #suicides - CNN
▻https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/29/health/life-expectancy-2017-cdc/index.html
Dr. Robert Redfield, CDC director, called the trend tragic and troubling. “Life expectancy gives us a snapshot of the Nation’s overall health and these sobering statistics are a wakeup call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable,” he wrote in a statement.
American Life Expectancy Continues to Fall: Rise in Suicides, Overdose Deaths the Big Culprit | naked capitalism
▻https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/11/american-life-expectancy-continues-fall-rise-suicides-overdose-deat
While this assessment is technically correct, it is too superficial in seeing the rising rate of what Angus Deaton and Ann Case called “deaths of despair” as a health problem, rather than symptoms of much deeper societal ills. Americans take antidepressants at a higher rate than any country in the world. The average job tenure is a mere 4.4 years. In my youth, if you changed jobs in less than seven or eight years, you were seen as an opportunist or probably poor performer. The near impossibility of getting a new job if you are over 40 and the fact that outside hot fields, young people can also find it hard to get work commensurate with their education and experience, means that those who do have jobs can be and are exploited by their employers. Amazon is the most visible symbol of that, working warehouse workers at a deadly pace, and regularly reducing even white collar males regularly to tears.