Tens of millions of Americans are suffering pain. But chronic pain is not just a result of car accidents and workplace injuries but is also linked to troubled childhoods, loneliness, job insecurity and a hundred other pressures on working families.
America’s increasing chronic pain doesn’t come primarily from obesity or workplace injuries but may have something to do with the financial and social stresses in working-class America. When jobs are lost, pain increases. One international study found that a 3 percent increase in the unemployment rate is associated with a 1 percent increase in the number of people reporting pain.
Other studies have found that economic insecurity is associated with more pain. So are discrimination and unhappiness. Pain can lead to depression, causing further pain. “Loneliness strongly predicts the development of pain,” another study found. In effect, chronic pain is tightly woven into the bundle of diseases of despair, and causation probably runs in several directions.
