Posted on 12/22/2025 4:58:03 AM PST by MtnClimber
America’s “deaths of despair” - fatalities from drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, and suicide - have climbed for more than two decades, reaching levels unseen in modern times.
The long-run trend is stark. After mid-century stability, the curve bends sharply upward after 2000, driven first by drugs and later joined by alcohol and suicide. The data, drawn from the Senate Joint Economic Committee’s “Long-Term Trends in Deaths of Despair” report shown below, are clear. The deeper question is why.
COVID made a bad situation worse. Lockdowns and restrictions stripped away social contact, church gatherings, family support, and purpose. Economic uncertainty due to rising inflation, erratic labor markets, and a government staggering under debt has pushed people further into anxiety.
During 2020 and 2021, overdoses and alcohol-related deaths surged, while depression and loneliness became near-universal.
But the pandemic was merely an accelerant. The roots reach much further down.
1. A lethal drug supply
America’s overdose crisis began with prescription opioids, evolved to heroin, and now centers on fentanyl -- cheap, potent, and deadly. This is less a behavioral shift than a supply-chain revolution. When the street dose becomes unpredictable, one relapse or tainted hit can mean death. The ubiquity of fentanyl reflects more than policy failure; it exposes how easily despair finds chemical refuge.
2. Alcohol’s quiet rise
While drugs dominate headlines, alcohol quietly exacts its own toll. Alcohol-induced deaths hit record levels during the pandemic. We glamorize drinking while ignoring that alcohol is one of our most addictive and accessible drugs, not only to adults but to teens as well. In hard times, it becomes self-prescribed anesthesia.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Also the rise of the far left caused many to have a total break from reality.
Democrats.
We have a ringside seat to The Collapse of Civilization. It is entering its final stages, and can’t be stopped. Lay in supplies and weapons; for, you’ll be needing those.
Democrats.
Bingo!
Nope. I disagree. It CAN be stopped. It WILL be stopped. The 4th great awakening has already started and God will save the western world like the 1st and 2nd great awakenings did.
“...Lockdowns and restrictions stripped away social contact, church gatherings, family support, and purpose...”
While at the same time, the Puppet Biden regime allowed gambling halls, massage parlors and burlesque whore houses to remain open. The scumbag rats did everything possible to destroy Christian society and morals. For all evil originates in the democrat party and the New York Homosexual Times. /spit
I hope you are right, but I am pretty sure you are not.
I’d like to see the data myself, but there are some steep ramps on that graph.
For the last seven years or so, I’ve been hearing about fentanyl. All the young folks I talk to know someone who has died from the stuff.
I wish we could go back to my vice cop days. Things were much quieter then.
What everyone says ....
But we also need to throw screen addiction, screentime, smartphones and social media into the mix.
A lot of people — especially young people — spend more hours in the PixelVerse than in the real world. Virtually everyone who deals with this professionally understands that we have created very powerful engines for causing mental illness.
While BigTech barrels ahead with an AI revolution that threatens to make humans obsolete for most productive purposes.
Science fiction has been speculating about this for many years. Near future dystopian fantasy is now being realized in real time. It ain’t pretty.
But the entertainment is pathetic, information (especially from "authorities" and "experts") is unreliable, if not outright propaganda, and a lot of medication is poison. Not really surprising that things are so bleak.
America is addicted to hate.
Pixelverse: Create and Explore Virtual Worlds
Pixelverse is a mini-app that lets you play and earn cryptocurrency by tapping your screen and leveling up your bots. Learn how to get started, how the game works, and what’s next for this revolutionary tap-to-earn game on Telegram.
via DuckDuckGo
My despair comes from hearing so many Riley Green and Lainey Wilson ads over the radio waves! Please make it stop. I “CAINT” take it anymore.
I’m afraid you’re right. The arc of history can not be stopped.
L
Doing ‘good’, such as admitting refugees and migrants, can have deadly consequences for the natives who are economically displaced.
“Johnathan Riley Green is an American country music singer and songwriter, signed to Nashville Harbor Records & Entertainment since 2019. He has released three albums: Different ‘Round Here in 2019, Ain’t My Last Rodeo in 2023, and Don’t Mind If I Do in 2024”
Wikipedia via DuckDuckGo
WIKI
Lainey Denay Wilson (born May 19, 1992) is an American country singer-songwriter.
Lainey Wilson was raised in Baskin, Louisiana, a town of 250 people. Her father, Brian, was a farmer while her mother, Michelle, was a schoolteacher.
At age nine, she attended a performance of the Grand Ole Opry and was drawn to the music. “I just remember looking up there, being like, ‘Man, I wanna do that’,” she recalled. Wilson’s father taught her a couple of chords and she was soon writing songs by her pre-teen years. In 2006, she released an extended play (EP) on Myspace titled Country Girls Rule. In high school, Wilson took a job impersonating Hannah Montana.
Wilson graduated from high school and moved to Nashville in August 2011. She first lived in a camper trailer outside of a recording studio in Nashville. The studio owner paid for Wilson’s water and electricity to help make ends meet. In 2021, Wilson said that her early years in Nashville were difficult: “It taught me that this thing was not going to be easy. It taught me perseverance.” For several years, Wilson played a variety of small shows and worked on her songwriting. In 2014, she released a self-titled album on the Cupit label. It was followed in 2016 by Tougher, on the Lone Chief label. The project garnered an audience and made the Billboard Top Country Albums chart. In 2018, she released her second EP, a self-titled collection that was self-released.
In 2018, Wilson signed a major-label recording contract with the BBR Music Group. Her first major-label release was her third EP Redneck Hollywood (2019). Her debut major label single was also released in 2019: “Dirty Looks”. Off the Record UK praised the EP, highlighting Wilson’s songwriting and the production from producer Jay Joyce. The publication said, “The EP is raw and real, pushing the country music genre wider than ever and bringing it back to the traditional while still reinventing it to its modern surroundings.
In August 2020, the BBR label issued Wilson’s next single to radio: “Things a Man Oughta Know”. The track gained heavy media attention from sites like YouTube, Apple Music, iHeart Radio, Spotify, and Pandora. By 2021, “Things a Man Oughta Know” became her breakout single, reaching number one on Billboard Country Airplay and number three on Hot Country Songs. It was included on her third studio album Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’ (2021).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lainey_Wilson
45 deaths per 100,000 represents 0.045% of the population; that is hardly a measure of a nation.
Good to know. The term was my own invention for the world inhabited by the terminally online. Many of us have been discussing for years the problems associated with smartphones and, especially, their impact on children. And before that, we were discussing tv addiction. But something has changed.
I moved into pure dystopian territory on this when I had my Road to Damascus moment, got ambushed by a movie that I discovered by accident, suddenly realized that I had a huge blindspot, and started reengaging with movies.
Among other things, I started logging my viewing on Letterboxd, which is very handy for myriad things. I also started reading reviews and comments on the movies that I liked. As I got familiar with that world, I started noticing distinct types among the Letterboxd crowd. Some are very good, and there’s a small group of people I follow because I’ve found we’re on the same wavelength. They often find good stuff I would never find on my own.
But there is a group of users, who seem to me to skew young, who (if their logged activity is true) are watching HUNDREDS of movies a year. That’s a lot even for a professional critic. That’s two or three movies a day. If they work on a screen and are addicted to their smartphones as well, they are basically staring at screens almost continuously from the time they wake up until the time they fall asleep. In some sense, they are no longer living in the real world.
And their comments skew in ways that are by now quite predictable AND, by the way, that dovetail quite nicely with the fantasy-drive hysteria that has infected politics on the left. It’s the same sort of thing we’ve all gotten used to seeing on DU and other such sites. This is mental illness. It is clearly addictive behavior. It leads people into nihilism, despair, and a furious reaction against anyone who intrudes into their narrow echo chambers and tries to offer a differing opinion.
Letterboxd is a wonderful resource, and a high movie count from professional critics is fine. But people whose lives have been consumed by an addition stand out like a sore thumb.
I’m still on the normie side of the line. I watch almost no linear tv except for some sporting events, and since I started exploring movies again in a selective way, I’ve averaged 1-2 movies a week. Which is more than I used to watch. I’ve only logged 15 movies so far this year, and that includes three that I watched at the Middleburg Film Festival, which pads my count. I don’t watch a movie in the first place unless I have an active interest in seeing it, which is why I like most of what I see and very few end up as complete misses. (They can still be interesting even if they don’t entirely hit the mark.) The addicts stand out pretty clearly. But bottom line, we have a problem here.
I had not realized that someone had picked up Pixelverse and used it for an app. I suppose I should check the dates of when I first used it in a post and see if I can sue for theft of intellectual property. When ChatGPT takes over for the lawyers, that won’t even cost me any time or money to do ....
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