by Eric Zuesse, The Duran:
On 21 May 2020, the Commonwealth Fund headlined “Mental Health Conditions and Substance Use: Comparing U.S. Needs and Treatment Capacity with Those in Other High-Income Countries”, reported the relevant figures for each of 11 high-income countries, and sub-headlined:
“Self-reported emotional distress rates are highest in Canada and the U.S.”
“The U.S. has the highest suicide rate among 11 high-income countries, and the rate has increased every year since 2000.”
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Whereas in 1980, Switzerland had the highest suicide-rate, and it was far higher than any other advanced country except Sweden; those two countries’ rates had declined steeper than 50% by 2016, and America’s, which had been normal until 2005, has risen since then, so that it now is the highest in all of the 11 countries studied.
“The U.S. has one of highest death rates from substance use disorders.” Second only to Germany.
Furthermore: The U.N.’s “World Drug Report 2023” included this information:
p. 9: “PREVALENCE OF PEOPLE WHO INJECT DRUGS BY SEX, 2021”
U.S. was the second-worst of the 18 countries: (in order from the worst) Haiti, U.S., Mexico, Mauritius, Romania, Malta, Montenegro, France, Portugal, Uruguay, Kazakhstan [big drop-off here], Kenya, Greece, Tajikistan, Togo, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Slovenia.
Whereas America is the highest per-capita income on that list, Haiti is the lowest per-capita income in the Western hemisphere, because it was a slave colony of the French aristocracy, which became taken over by the U.S. aristocracy, which now controls it and immiserates its residents like France had done.
On 2 June 2024, the NPR “Freakonomics Radio show” headlined “The Opioid Tragedy — How We Got Here”, and interviewed many experts, some of whom were also victims of this American problem, which one called “horrifying.” Both the podcast and its transcript are presented there. It made clear that in America the approaches to dealing with this problem are ad-hoc, not systematic, and that consequently, it keeps getting worse and worse. (America’s Government is much more concerned to add, to its empire, additional nations, such as Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran, than to care at all about how the people are doing in any of its existing colonies. And, as for its own residents: all it wants for them is to be fooled to think that the problem is the opposite political Party instead of both, which are controlled by its billionaires — who are the actual problem.)
Whereas in Haiti, the high usage of ‘recreational’ drugs results from the miserable conditions in a slave colonial economy, the populace in its colonial master, the U.S., aren’t doing much better, as reflected in so many of them resorting to drugs to deal with their misery. Only America’s rich have the means to deal with it privately, and some of the super-rich are deriving enormous personal fortunes from it.
According to America’s CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) “there were an estimated 107,543 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 2023.”
“International Overdose Awareness Day” provides comparable figures, from 2021, for Australia (2,231), New Zealand (345) Canada (7,525), China (49,000), England (4,907), Scotland (1.051), Northern Ireland (154), Serbia (57), and Ukraine (565).
The 2022 academic article “Drug control and human rights in the Russian Federation” reported that in 2020, there were 7,366 drug overdose deaths in Russia.
Suicide-rates and drug-overdose deaths are the most extreme behavioral indicators of a nation’s real misery-index. Drug-overdose deaths are sometimes suicides but are always indicators of societal failure and of individual desperation, because even if the overdose wasn’t a suicide, the individual was trapped in despair, and the surrounding society and Government had catastrophically failed that person and indicated that whatever the problems were that had produced that death, the Government didn’t really care about those problems. America is an extreme case because it is the most ‘free-market’ of all of the advanced economies and therefore the most-inclined to hold the individual to blame for the failure and not itself — not the Government, and the society — to blame for it, no matter how much it actually is to blame for it (as is documented in “The Opioid Tragedy — How We Got Here”).
As regards suicides, look at Wikipedia’s “List of countries by suicide rate”. It shows that, out of the 183 countries ranked there, with the worst being the first (which is somehow ranked there as #2 with “World” showing there as having a suicide rate of only 9 per hundred thousand residents, as being listed there as being the first, even though the actual worst, the ‘#2’ Lesotho, has a suicide rate of 87 per hundred thousand), the 31st ranked one, “United States,” is listed as being “32” — among the world’s worst 17% of all nations. Russia performs even worse than America — #12 (actually the 11th-worst). But none of America’s ‘allies’ (colonies) — except Ukraine (#20, actually the 19th), and South Korea (the 12th-worst) — performs even worse than America does. China is ranked ‘#123’ (actually #122), Iran #140, Venezuela #178, and Syria #177. So, those four countries that are on the U.S. aristocracy’s target-list for take-over, have much better (lower) suicide-rates than America itself does.
