<story><title>Life expectancy in the U.S. is declining for middle-aged people of all groups</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/health/life-expectancy-rate-usa.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mfer</author><text>&amp;gt; And while suicides, drug overdoses and alcoholism were the main causes&lt;p&gt;It looks like there is increasing mental health issues that aren&amp;#x27;t being addressed. This seems to get blown past too quickly.&lt;p&gt;We tend to look at the medical side of things and the way the healthcare system works. But, somethings have changed that caused the mental heath of many to go down. Will changing the US to single payer or medicare for all change the mental health problems? Given the research I&amp;#x27;ve read it&amp;#x27;s highly unlikely.&lt;p&gt;Can we please put more time into understanding and addressing the increasing mental health problems? This is important for forums like this because studies have repeatedly found we have a hand in it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dota_fanatic</author><text>Don&amp;#x27;t you think these things are directly related?&lt;p&gt;A friend of mine had some minor mental health issues going into their 20s. Lack of meaningful opportunity paired with obscenely expensive and inaccessible healthcare helped drive those to become major health issues, including drug addiction, due to intoxicating themselves to &amp;quot;help&amp;quot; distract from their grim reality.&lt;p&gt;Absolutely I think it would have been different had they had access to general preventative healthcare from the start so they could get routine dental, physical, etc. Would they be cured of their mental health problems? Probably not. Would the effects have been less destructive? Yeah, I would bet on it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Life expectancy in the U.S. is declining for middle-aged people of all groups</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/health/life-expectancy-rate-usa.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mfer</author><text>&amp;gt; And while suicides, drug overdoses and alcoholism were the main causes&lt;p&gt;It looks like there is increasing mental health issues that aren&amp;#x27;t being addressed. This seems to get blown past too quickly.&lt;p&gt;We tend to look at the medical side of things and the way the healthcare system works. But, somethings have changed that caused the mental heath of many to go down. Will changing the US to single payer or medicare for all change the mental health problems? Given the research I&amp;#x27;ve read it&amp;#x27;s highly unlikely.&lt;p&gt;Can we please put more time into understanding and addressing the increasing mental health problems? This is important for forums like this because studies have repeatedly found we have a hand in it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Retric</author><text>Stress and mental heath are strongly linked.  So, the current system with it’s high costs and uncertainty is actively making things worse.&lt;p&gt;On it’s own it might not make a huge change, but in aggregate this is a significant effect.</text></comment>