Tag: Health

Deaths of Despair

I’ve co-authored a paper for Journal of Medical Humanities on the deaths of despair crisis. You can read it here:

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09795-0

It’s an honor to have worked with Daniel George, Peter Stirling, Megan Wright, and Cindy Cain on this piece. In it, I suggest despair is rooted in what I call the Five A’s – anomie, alienation, atomization, anxiety, and absurdity. To deal with the problem at its roots, we need to deal directly with these deeper causes, both alone and in combination.

If you don’t have access to the article, try this link: https://rdcu.be/c9XET. If you have trouble getting access and you want to read it, you’re very welcome to email me about this at bmstudebaker@gmail.com.

The Quarantine is Failing because Our Institutions Weren’t Built For It

All around us, the quarantine is beginning to die. In the United States, the Southern states are slowly abandoning it and many Midwestern states are planning to follow. But it’s not just Republicans. The European states are bailing too. If you ask Democrats why states are beginning to defect, they will tell you it comes down to greed and stupidity. They’ll tell you the rich Republicans are greedy and the poor Republicans are stupid. But this policy was never a good fit for either the American or European political systems. To work, it needed a lot of economic support from regional authorities, and it never got that support.

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On Healthcare, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris Think You’re Stupid

Politicians are really good at fooling voters. Voters have jobs and kids and lives to lead. They are too busy to look very closely at things politicians say and do, and increasingly journalists are every bit as overtaxed and unable to do the job in their stead. We saw this during the Democratic debates. The moderators asked the candidates to raise their hands if they supported Medicare-For-All, and most of the candidates obliged. But several of the hand-raisers routinely deploy a rhetorical sleight of hand I call the “Many Paths” trick. It works like this:

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