No Zoloft for This: Kaos Malaise and Public Health

As the public sphere has become unrecognizably dystopian, the toll on human health includes a range of symptoms it may take more than pharmacology to cure.

We’re all aware of the small, daily health effects of the drastic changes to our political landscape wrought by the collision of democracy and the reality-distorting innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Revulsion or outrage when observing certain world leaders in their depleted habitats; whiplashing disbelief at headlines we never thought we’d see outside a spinning-paper segue in a disaster movie; repetitive strain injury from high-frequency mute-button usage.

The symptoms produced by witnessing the previously unthinkable daily to-do list of the New World Order assortment of cartoon villains, sinister non-state actors, political rogues, and geopolitical bullies I like to call KAOS in homage to the comedic genius of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry is beginning to read like the hair-raising side-effects disclaimer on a prescription drug commercial—nausea, vomiting, headaches, dysentery, dengue fever, vertigo, medieval anxiety boils. In other words, 99 problems but a four-hour erection ain’t one.

But what are the wider public health implications? How are we, as a society, manifesting the physical and mental toll of the transformation of the world as we know it by interests whose contempt for humanity is expressed in a daily cavalcade of tactical toxicity and diversionary bullshit designed to camouflage change?

For one answer, we can turn to Sir Michael Marmot who, if you’re into that sort of thing, is the Sir Paul McCartney of epidemiological and public health experts. Marmot, former president of the World Medical Association, told BBC recently in response to declines in western life expectancy: “If life expectancy has stopped increasing, it means something’s wrong with society.” Marmot, also an expert on health inequality, cited worsening economic inequality—a largely political determinant of health—as the major culprit. Dr. Dainius Pūras, United Nations special rapporteur on the right to health, recently reported inequality as a major contributor to mental illness.

In Canada, life expectancy has stopped rising for the first time in four decades based on an average skewed by the opioid crisis, according to Statistics Canada. Not a plague or a meteorite but an overdose epidemic produced by the corrupt flooding of the market by fentanyl from China, the corrupt peddling of opioids by pharmaceutical companies and the corrupt over-prescribing of opioids by doctors.

(While you may believe—if you subscribe to Malthusian herd culling as an efficient solution to climate change, food security, employment automation, and other 21st century policy challenges—that there could be an upside to this phenomenon, it’s worth noting that if modern ingenuity can make Donald Trump president of the United States, it can surely formulate policy alternatives to manufactured chaos and pharmaceutical genocide).

In Britain, life expectancy has registered its biggest drop on record, for reasons unspecified. Meanwhile, Brexititis—also produced by man-made corruption in the form of a hijacked referendum result being shamelessly misrepresented to produce a democracy degrading, chaos-generating outcome—has become a psychosocial affliction requiring support groups and creative visualization coping mechanisms.

Or, as former head of MI-6 Sir John Sawers told BBC Radio last week, “We are going through a political nervous breakdown here in the U.K.” Sawers cited Boris Johnson and Brexit as elements of this man-made fiasco, further distancing the intelligence establishment from both the looming disaster and its likely perpetrator after last week’s leak that key intelligence was kept from Johnson when he was foreign minister.

So many of these ailments involve covertly executed, fatefully undetected corruption, engineered narratives, industrialized lying and other tactics that were once the smaller-scale purview of intelligence agencies. Perhaps Sir John can suggest ways in which his former colleagues can help reverse what seems to be a cancer on the democracy they once went to such epic lengths to preserve.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine and a columnist for The Hill Times. She was Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, a writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP in New York and UPI in Washington.