I think part of it is how isolated the us is. We don't really have walkable neighborhoods in most of the country, which means less spur of the moment decisions to gather at a social place and more isolation since so many people are commuting in single occupancy vehicles and doing drive throughs.
Combine that with wealth stratification, Hussle culture, and the complete lack of any real social safety net and if anything I'm surprised we're doing as well as we are.
I don't think it's a single issue by far, but if I had to peg one aspect as the worst offender, it's isolationism. There's strong correlation between drug use, depression, suicide, and lower life expectancy in places with power population density (Alaska, Noth Dakota, pretty much any small rustbelt or mountain or southern town)
When there's nothing to fill the emptiness, people turn to drugs and overeating just to feel something.
Isolation is a big one. The classic study people bring up is the “cocaine rat”.
The rat in isolation was drawn to the bottle with cocaine water. When the rat was in a cage with activites and other rats, lost the preference for the cocaine water.
Do you have a citation? A search for "cocaine rat study" mostly turned up references to the Rat Park experiment, which used morphine. A later study comparing heroin and cocaine found that social isolation increased overall usage of heroin (apparently because the isolated rats picked up the habit faster) but not cocaine, and that by the fifth week of the study usage rates were similar between isolated and non-isolated groups for both drugs [1].
So what if you remove the vat of cocaine water by just removing the vat instead of by permanently crippling the other "rats" with 40,000 life-long collateral penalties after a jail where they could easily have been killed inside of?
There has to be a basis for social unity. Family ties are the natural basis. Ethnic ties (which are defined more so by culture, though extended family ties still play a role) and religious belonging, all form this basis, this matrix. The US and countries like it are adoptive nations, oddballs in that they are not really rooted in ethnicity. Ethnic identity evaporates after a couple of generations, during which assimilation and intermarriage dilute the culture of origin. According to the triple melting pot theory, religious belonging becomes a stand-in for ethnic identity in "artificial" nations like the US (it was originally called "triple" because the three largest religious groups at the time in the US were Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, but this is incidental to the basic claim). With the atrophy of traditional religious affiliation in the US, you're seeing an identity crisis and the rise of various ideologies and subcultures as attempts to find a substitute.
Combine that with wealth stratification, Hussle culture, and the complete lack of any real social safety net and if anything I'm surprised we're doing as well as we are.
I don't think it's a single issue by far, but if I had to peg one aspect as the worst offender, it's isolationism. There's strong correlation between drug use, depression, suicide, and lower life expectancy in places with power population density (Alaska, Noth Dakota, pretty much any small rustbelt or mountain or southern town)
When there's nothing to fill the emptiness, people turn to drugs and overeating just to feel something.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2022472118
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States...