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Soon after Trump’s inauguration, it was easy to predict that the stress epidemic would get much worse, and it’s become even worse than that prediction. The horrible tragedy in El Paso is just the most recent manifestation of where an administration that nurtures racial resentment could lead.
It was also clear that this stress explosion would have a major negative effect on health. One of the strongest contributors to the increasingly evident negative health trends is our elevated stress levels, which have grown steadily but are now having major impacts, including reduced longevity in some sectors of the population. And this doesn’t even reckon with the lifelong impact on infants and children for whom the stress “gets under the skin,” provoking health problems many decades into the future.
Among the leading causes of America’s growing stress epidemic over the past four decades or more, which is evident in physiological indicators as well as self-report surveys, are growing inequality, reduced investment in human development (including the social safety net), and an emphasis on private market solutions rather than a strong social fabric built on our collective understanding of who we are as a society.
These are the engines that have been driving the stress epidemic. In all three areas, the Trump administration has aggressively made each of them far worse. To what end? Paul Krugman analyzes the trade-offs the Republican Party has eagerly adopted in accepting or even endorsing white racial resentment to secure power for the purpose of enhancing tax cuts for the wealthy, conservative judges who will lend a helping hand in corporate deregulation and voter suppression, and reducing or even eliminating the social safety net, from health care to kids’ school lunches.
Economic and social inequalities are growing rapidly as a result, and human development investment is going down equally quickly. It isn’t hard to connect the dots regarding who benefits. But the rest of the nation shows clear signs that the stress epidemic is exploding, with devastating consequences to its long term health.
The increased inequality and decreased social investment in human development are much easier to measure than the shredding of the social fabric that is now unambiguously clear. The GOP’s Southern strategy of 50 years ago, using dog whistles and “states’ rights,” seems almost quaint by comparison.
But today’s GOP is “enjoying” the fruits of that strategy in the apotheosis of Trump’s white nationalism. The intentional use of family separations as a policy to limit amnesty seekers (meeting the criteria for state-sponsored torture) and at the same time to seek electoral advantage by further dividing the body politic is yet another way that stress levels ramp up dangerously – not only for those who are directly and indirectly targeted, but for many others who are appalled at our country holding babies and toddlers in cages without basic care, physically or emotionally.
This shredding of the social fabric – in these and many other examples, especially the inaction on gun control policy that is terrifying school children, with over three quarters reporting gun violence as a significant source of stress – creates a pervasive level of national stress that will be impossible to overcome so long as the provocations go on.
After that, the task will still be extremely difficult. But drawing on the lessons from individual resilience in the face of stress, we can begin to reweave the social fabric. Rejecting and confronting messages of divisiveness and exclusion, and seeking common opportunities for social action, are essential first steps that already show promise.
But it is hard to overstate the task ahead, so avoiding feelings of helplessness in the short term is essential, even or especially when the tragedies continue to mount.
