The Stress of It All is Becoming Dangerous

by Bill Seebeck

It seems that not a day goes by during these most difficult financial times when we don't hear a story about people "losing it".  Just this week, a young man apparently took his life.  He was the acting chief financial officer of Freddie Mac whose stated mission is to help stabilize residential mortgage markets in the United States.  The Treasury Department took over the company last September.  He was only 41.

That story was followed up by another in which it was reported that a lawyer mother ordered her two daughters out of the car because they were yelling too much and wouldn't quiet down. I checked up on the mother and found that she is a skilled senior attorney whose specialty is law that governs banking and other lending institutions with particular emphasis on the very issues being faced by, we the people, and our Treasury Department.

No matter what else was going on in the lives of these two individuals, I recognized in them, one of the real threats to the health and welfare of the American people.

STRESS.

Every day, in addition to whatever we've had to previously bear, we are now faced with losing our jobs, keeping our homes, feeding ourselves and our children not to mention the loss of dreams of retirement, college education and just a plain better life.  This folks results in stress and it has a profound impact on us.

According to a 1996 article in Psychology Today, "When stresses become routine, the constant biochemical pounding takes its toll on the body; the system starts to wear out at an accelerated rate. By responding to the stress of everyday life with the same surge of biochemicals released during major threats, the body is slowly killing itself. The biochemical onslaught chips away at the immune system, opening the way to cancer, infection, and disease. Hormones unleashed by stress eat at the digestive tract and lungs, promoting ulcers and asthma. Or they may weaken the heart, leading to strokes and heart disease." "Chronic stress is like slow poison," [Jean] King [Ph.D. of the University of Massachusetts Medical School] observes. "It is a fact of modern life that even people who are not sensitized to stress are adversely affected by everything that can go wrong in the day."

This is another reason why I have been so worried about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.   I am not concerned about the professionalism of our armed forces but I am concerned about the constant stress that four or five years of combat, four, five, six 12 and 15 month deployments have had on our service people and their families.  And don't think that bravado will overcome it, it will not.  Examine the increasing suicide rate among the military and you will find that we have a problem that can't be swept under a rug.

Watch the way people drive these days, listen to the concerns we share with one another, we as a nation are worried and stressed. Our institutions have failed us and our social contract has been broken.  Now we can fix it, but there must be more relief given directly to the people in order that the stress of it all doesn't endanger us in ways we have never yet experienced as a society.

What do you think?