I don’t want to dwell too long on this, but here is a quote which brought this back to the forefront of my mind. From “Tranforming Depression”, by Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman:
The Health Enhancement Research Organization (HERO) conducted a three year health-risk and medical-cost study with 46,000 people from 22 companies and governmental organizations (Goetzel et al 1998). The study showed that people who reported persistent depression had 70 percent greater medical costs than those who reported not being depressed.
After depression, uncontrolled stress resulted in the second greatest medical costs. Almost 20 percent of the people reported that their stress felt uncontrollable. Their annual medical expenses were 46 percent higher than those of people who were not stressed. Stress was also found to be a significant predictor of cardiovascular disease in women, which is the number one killer of women. Stress contributed to 79 percent of cardiovascular disease costs–more than smoking or obesity.
Overall, people who were both depressed and stressed had medical expenses 147 percent higher than others. This figure is radically higher than the health hazards we hear about more often, such as lack of exercise, smoking, and high blood pressure. In comparison, the increase in medical costs for those health hazards was minor. A sedentary lifestyle resulted in a 10% increase in health care costs; smoking cost 14% more than nonsmoking; and high blood pressure cost 12% more. The cost of depression and stress was more than ten times greater than each of these other factors.
Granny Bloomberg and Michelle “I know better than you” Obama should be focusing on decreasing stress, and increasing happiness. They would both best serve these goals by shutting the hell up and leaving us the hell alone forever. Alas, this is not likely to happen any time soon. Bloomberg is out of office, but he is rich, and he is an asshole, so we will keep hearing from him; and we are stuck with Michelle until early 2017, or until people grow balls in Congress and impeach Obama (House) and remove him from office (Senate) for any of half a dozen offenses which in another era would have meant instant removal from office.