Societal stress and intolerance.

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Post WTC society acted predictably, according to this study at the UC headed by Ralph Catalano, a professor of health policy and management at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

Apparently when society is under stress, whether by outside attack, internal strife and unrest, or economic hardship, ordinary perceived threats, whether imagined or real, become larger in scope, or more threatening to the concerned group psyche.

Forced admissions to mental health institutes increase manyfold, spontaneous abortions (miscarriages) of male foetuses increase, and GDP falls.

This group phenomenon has been studied for many generations in many countries, and some boffins postulate that there is some kind of mental connection between gestating mothers that triggers the mass miscarriage effect. Several studies also attest that those male foetuses that survive this apparent mass miscarriage, at times of societal stress, are not only normal healthy individuals, but unusually healthy and strong.

In particular, Catalano has identified the birth weights and *** ratios of babies born in the months following such widely felt traumatic events as a key marker of “communal bereavement”. And his latest research further illustrates other unexpected ways that catastrophe can register in the public domain.

But getting back to forced admissions to mental health care. How does a perceived threat from outside the country, or even from one's own leaders, affect decisions to send relatives/neighbours/colleagues off for mental assessment? Were they not ill before the perceived threat? Or now that more pressing matters are on the collective societal plate, are they somehow now someone else's problem?

In a report published in Psychiatric Service, Catalano and colleagues found that immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C., the number of people forced into mental health treatment in San Francisco rose sharply. After carefully parsing through several possible contributing factors, Catalano determined that this spike in “coerced treatment” was caused by a drop in the community’s willingness to tolerate antisocial behaviors.

Simply put, people with understandably frayed nerves became less willing to overlook what before the terrorist attacks had been behavior best avoided and forgotten.

An interesting phenomenon.

But then Catalano comes up with this gem.

Catalano explained that humans under stress exhibit something like what we’ve come to expect from cornered rats. “When people feel threatened, they express something called ‘frustration aggression’,” he said. “If you threaten them, they become aggressive.”

Well D'uh!!!! thanks mate.

Any thoughts on this?