You know. I don't know all the technical terms. Prescriptions could be for oxycontin and other opioids. Fentanyl may be different but if so it is different in degree not kind. But the point is that these deaths of despair start or many times start when a doctor prescribes some sort of opioid unneccessarily.
I'd never heard of "deaths of despair" before and I've been in this realm for a while now. Where I thought you were headed in your first post and where you are in this post are different. As I read it, "deaths of despair" are the result of a death basically not at the hand of someone else, medical condition or "accident" (a deer runs in front of your car). It would include drug overdose, alcoholism. suicide, etc......
That's really, really, really broad... In that instance a kid who just wants to smoke a joint and get high and it's laced with fentanyl dies would be considered a death of despair....
I'm talking about people who have no intention of dying and whatever they choose to use is laced with fentanyl, or the next generation, tranq. Granted a lot of people are prescribed an opiate for pain, they get hooked, seek stronger drugs to get a high, but they don't choose fentanyl and they don't choose to die.
Most addicts are misdiagnosed as having some other mental condition such as bi-polar, depression, etc. When in reality if you take away the drugs, the secondary condition vanishes. My guess is that's true of despair as well. You take away the drugs and the despair/depression disappears. Once my son was off drugs and clean, he was back to being the happy go lucky kid that he was before.
It sounds like a group of psychologists sat in a room and came up with a catchy phrase called "deaths of despair" and didn't do the legwork to find out what is going on underneath that. I'm sure they got a federal grant to come up with it.
So, a few things for those of us with lived experience. Sometimes kids get hooked and they die because of wrong choices. There are bad people out there lacing drugs with fentanyl to increase their profits and it kills their customers. And as Jesus said, "the poor will always be with us" and so will the depressed and those in despair will always be with us. You're never going to get rid of depression and despair, so fix the drug epidemic that's killing them.
