America's crisis of despair and the fading "American Dream"

America's crisis of despair and the fading "American Dream"

Feb 13, 2023 - 06:19
May 22, 2023 - 12:19
America's crisis of despair and the fading "American Dream"

 

A recent Gallup survey says that in 2020, only 36% of Americans aged 18–24 felt proud to be Americans, while 35% will not. Furthermore, the results of a study conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School were published in December 2021, indicating that 52% of respondents felt that American democracy was "at peril" or "failed," while just 7% of young Americans held the view that their nation's political system is a "healthy democracy."

Fifty-one percent of the young people who responded said they had felt "gloomy, unhappy, and hopeless" at least a few times in the previous two weeks. Twenty-five percent of those surveyed admitted to having suicidal thoughts, and the same percentage blamed the current financial plight for their mental health problems. Due to decades of social evolution, particularly the prevalence of alcohol consumption, drug use, and suicide mortality, life expectancy in the United States has dramatically declined. In the meantime, there has been a sharp surge in despair deaths, including drug overdoses and other lethal factors. Between February 2021 and February 2022, nearly 110,000 Americans will have died from drug overdoses.

The United States has a far higher rate of drug abuse than the rest of the globe combined; although the disorder is widespread worldwide, 12 percent of all drug users live in the United States. Drug overdoses have a deleterious impact on the American workforce, according to research published in "Science." The annual rise in overdose fatalities in the United States over the past 38 years is exponential, reaching 9%. Among the primary causes of death in the United States, drug overdoses kill eight times as many people as firearms and nearly three times as many as automobile accidents. According to US officials, drug abuse is the most significant cause of unnatural fatalities in the United States. More than 140,000 Americans lose their lives yearly due to alcohol addiction, which tragically contributes to an average 26-year decrease in life expectancy. At the same time, excessive drinking cost the US economy $249 billion in 2010.

By: F. Najafi