Neoliberalism is creating loneliness. That’s what’s wrenching society apart | George Monbiot

What greater indictment of a system could there be than an epidemic of mental illness? Yet plagues of anxiety, stress, depression, social phobia, eating disorders, self-harm and loneliness now strike people down all over the world. The latest, catastrophic figures for children’s mental health in England reflect a global crisis.

There are plenty of secondary reasons for this distress, but it seems to me that the underlying cause is everywhere the same: human beings, the ultrasocial mammals, whose brains are wired to respond to other people, are being peeled apart. Economic and technological change play a major role, but so does ideology. Though our wellbeing is inextricably linked to the lives of others, everywhere we are told that we will prosper through competitive self-interest and extreme individualism.

In Britain, men who have spent their entire lives in quadrangles – at school, at college, at the bar, in parliament – instruct us to stand on our own two feet. The education system becomes more brutally competitive by the year. Employment is a fight to the near-death with a multitude of other desperate people chasing ever fewer jobs. The modern overseers of the poor ascribe individual blame to economic circumstance. Endless competitions on television feed impossible aspirations as real opportunities contract.

Consumerism fills the social void. But far from curing the disease of isolation, it intensifies social comparison to the point at which, having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves. Social media brings us together and drives us apart, allowing us precisely to quantify our social standing, and to see that other people have more friends and followers than we do.

As Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett has brilliantly documented, girls and young women routinely alter the photos they post to make themselves look smoother and slimmer. Some phones, using their “beauty” settings, do it for you without asking; now you can become your own thinspiration. Welcome to the post-Hobbesian dystopia: a war of everyone against themselves.

Social media brings us together and drives us apart, allowing us precisely to quantify our social standing

Is it any wonder, in these lonely inner worlds, in which touching has been replaced by retouching, that young women are drowning in mental distress? A recent survey in England suggests that one in four women between 16 and 24 have harmed themselves, and one in eight now suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Anxiety, depression, phobias or obsessive compulsive disorder affect 26% of women in this age group. This is what a public health crisis looks like.

If social rupture is not treated as seriously as broken limbs, it is because we cannot see it. But neuroscientists can. A series of fascinating papers suggest that social pain and physical pain are processed by the same neural circuits. This might explain why, in many languages, it is hard to describe the impact of breaking social bonds without the words we use to denote physical pain and injury. In both humans and other social mammals, social contact reduces physical pain. This is why we hug our children when they hurt themselves: affection is a powerful analgesic. Opioids relieve both physical agony and the distress of separation. Perhaps this explains the link between social isolation and drug addiction.

Experiments summarised in the journal Physiology & Behaviour last month suggest that, given a choice of physical pain or isolation, social mammals will choose the former. Capuchin monkeys starved of both food and contact for 22 hours will rejoin their companions before eating. Children who experience emotional neglect, according to some findings, suffer worse mental health consequences than children suffering both emotional neglect and physical abuse: hideous as it is, violence involves attention and contact. Self-harm is often used as an attempt to alleviate distress: another indication that physical pain is not as bad as emotional pain. As the prison system knows only too well, one of the most effective forms of torture is solitary confinement.

It is not hard to see what the evolutionary reasons for social pain might be. Survival among social mammals is greatly enhanced when they are strongly bonded with the rest of the pack. It is the isolated and marginalised animals that are most likely to be picked off by predators, or to starve. Just as physical pain protects us from physical injury, emotional pain protects us from social injury. It drives us to reconnect. But many people find this almost impossible.

It’s unsurprising that social isolation is strongly associated with depression, suicide, anxiety, insomnia, fear and the perception of threat. It’s more surprising to discover the range of physical illnesses it causes or exacerbates. Dementia, high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, lowered resistance to viruses, even accidents are more common among chronically lonely people. Loneliness has a comparable impact on physical health to smoking 15 cigarettes a day: it appears to raise the risk of early death by 26%. This is partly because it enhances production of the stress hormone cortisol, which suppresses the immune system.

Studies in both animals and humans suggest a reason for comfort eating: isolation reduces impulse control, leading to obesity. As those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are the most likely to suffer from loneliness, might this provide one of the explanations for the strong link between low economic status and obesity?

Anyone can see that something far more important than most of the issues we fret about has gone wrong. So why are we engaging in this world-eating, self-consuming frenzy of environmental destruction and social dislocation, if all it produces is unbearable pain? Should this question not burn the lips of everyone in public life?

There are some wonderful charities doing what they can to fight this tide, some of which I am going to be working with as part of my loneliness project. But for every person they reach, several others are swept past.

This does not require a policy response. It requires something much bigger: the reappraisal of an entire worldview. Of all the fantasies human beings entertain, the idea that we can go it alone is the most absurd and perhaps the most dangerous. We stand together or we fall apart.

Neoliberalism is creating loneliness. That’s what’s wrenching society apart | George Monbiot

Healthcare is not a solution, no matter what neoliberalism has taught us | Humphrey McQueen

“We are all socialists now”, explained Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, William Harcourt, in 1894. He was remarking that his liberal opponents have been united in favour of municipal reservoirs. Must socialists these days intone, “We are all neo-liberals now”? Not that we support promoting off the waterworks rather, 120 many years following Harcourt, we have been forced to defend the (figurative) water provide against people who would.

Opponents of neoliberalism have absorbed several of its presumptions. The most pervasive is to repeat the lie that sell-offs are privatisations. To say personal and not corporate is to do the function of our enemy’s spin physicians. The word private helps make the counting-house sound neighbourly. Similar mischiefs movement from parroting reform rather of denouncing de-types.

Health is the latest and most prominent de-kind, even though education, employment, housing and transport are also topic to comparable inequities. Unequal outcomes from people 5 pillars of each day lifestyle compound each and every other, possibly nowhere far more so than for psychological sickness.

Our well-being is the outcome of their interaction, not just a physical situation of an individual. As the socialist epidemiologist Fiona Stanley puts it, the actual brain drain commences just before birth. Consequently, provisions for equitable care have to be created on “social” equality. Each and every policy should encounter this test: is it likely to increase social equality across the generations?

From that beginning point, I have usually been vital of Medicare (and its ancestor, Medibank) as a curative model funded in component by a flat-rate tax. My objection has never been to a universal technique but to the fact that Medicare has never ever been one particular. Nothing at all right here has come within coo-ee of Britain’s nationwide overall health support.

I appreciate the positive aspects of Medicare. Without having it, in the United Blunders for illustration, I would be either dead or homeless. As it was, from 2001 I was at least $ 5,000 out of pocket for treatment method-related expenses above five many years of diagnosis and adhere to-up, not such as reduction of earnings.

The surgeon warned that I would in no way once again be ready to bend it like Beckham but that the reduction of a thigh muscle was a small price to shell out for getting alive. So was the $ 5,000. Nevertheless, its outlay was a reminder of how far Medicare has often been from universal coverage. Not everyone has the money or friendships to meet vital extras.

In spite of these prolonged-standing complaints about Medicare, I caught myself frothing against a co-payment for GP visits. That surprise sent me back to the source of my objections, Richard Titmuss’ 1962 tome, Cash flow Distribution and Social Adjust. He showed why universal services delivery is the only route towards better social equality, because in a single technique of healthcare the wealthy and powerful have a existence-and-death curiosity in generating it work.

So what is our activity? We want to fight our way out of the corner into which neoliberalism has backed us, and insist on universal programs funded by steeply progressive tax-costs on capital more than on profits, on house as properly as on revenue.

The Coalition’s proposed $ seven co-payment is regressive. But the flat-rate Medicare tax, even though it calls for those on typical weekly earnings to spend a greater lump sum than someone on the minimal wage, isn’t much much better. one% on $ 35,000 of taxable cash flow collects $ 350 on $ 70,000, it is twice as much at $ 700. That doubling is not progressive.

A progressive charge would run like this: 1% stays at $ 350 out of $ 35,000 but 2% on $ 70,000 would be $ one,400. Alternatively of the increased revenue earner paying out only twice as considerably in total, she would contribute 4 instances as considerably. However, increased earners are much more most likely to lessen the taxable element of their income by deductions and dodges – they have to be abolished.

Medibank and Medicare taught us to wear this kind of flat-fee impost – the GST, the flood levy, and the national disability insurance coverage scheme. Now we have the deficit tax. My only objection to the last is that it is not everlasting and not steep ample. In an perfect globe, Westpac’s Gail Kelly and her mates would be on a marginal charge of 90%.

In a even more concession to neoliberalism, we’re all encouraged to advocate equality of chance when the call must be for equality of outcomes. It is one particular point for each Australian to have the identical charge of accessibility to heart surgery. It is an additional to get the same top quality of care at Bourke as in the Jesus Hilton (aka St Vincent’s Personal).

Also few defenders of Medicare recall the local community health program (CHP) from the 1970s. The first CHP was set up in 1964, in Footscray, Melbourne, by the Australian meat market workers union. Its purpose was to supply remedy to injured meat workers and research the brings about of industrial accidents.

The trade union clinic and research centre, as it was referred to as, became the model for related services for girls and Indigenous Australians which nonetheless exist these days. Campaigners for the extension of Medicare need to put an even higher effort into rejuvenating CHP centres, to make them our universal provider. They need to be the heart, brain and lungs of wellness in each and every neighborhood and at each and every workplace.

But this kind of a point looks hard these days, if not extremely hard. It truly is not that neoliberalism is a vicious idea in the twisted minds of evil men and women, whether or not John Howard and Tony Abbott, or Julia Gillard and Bill Shorten. Neoliberalism expresses the necessity that capital has to expand by commodifying each and every factor of our lives.

To stop the spread of that illness it is important to reassert the vision that Titmuss celebrated in his 1970 masterpiece, The Present Romantic relationship. He contrasted volunteer Uk blood donors with the US victims of a free market place in plasma and noticed that wellness care has practically none of the characteristics of a consumer good.

Nevertheless, Australia’s commonwealth serum laboratories were privatised in 1994, below Paul Keating, who produced Medicare a important plank of his “social wage”. How long will it be prior to the efficiency of supplying blood is completely de-formed by market place signals? If we go on settling for Medicare, for the third best, we shall end up with a futures marketplace in blood.

Titmuss was appropriate: healthcare is not a merchandise. Unlike when we buy footwear, as patients we have little thought of what remedies we will need. Lastly, we are not in a position to return them, least of all from the grave.

Healthcare is not a solution, no matter what neoliberalism has taught us | Humphrey McQueen