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Over 70% of Russians live under stress - research
More than 70% of Russians live under "protracted psychological, emotional and social stress," said the Demography and Human Ecology Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This "increases the danger of abnormal mass-scale destructive reactions and outbursts among the population," the Center said in an annual report released in Moscow. Nearly twice as many psychiatric patients, excluding drug addicts and people suffering from alcohol-caused psychoses, were registered by Russian mental outpatient clinics in 2002 as in 1992, the report said.
I'm always put off by "studies" like this. The definition of "stress" varies from person to person, and from day to day with the person. The stuff I don't notice on Monday may drive me nutz on Tuesday, and Herb, the guy down the street might not notice a thing under similar circumstances, while Dagwood, the guy up the street, might snap and slaughter his lovely blond wife and their two children and their houseful of dogs. There's stress involved in making a living and paying your bills every month, because your wife and kiddies depend on you, and some people kill themselves because they can't keep up. There's stress involved in sitting behind sandbags in cold red mud or hot brown sand while Communists or Islamists drop mortars on you. There's stress involved in driving to work in the morning and having a 16-year-old with the IQ of a Brussels sprout driving $35,000 worth of car weave in front of you and almost kill you both.
I'd rather have my life, complete with the occasional 16-year-old, than Ivan's life, having to put up with unsettled ecomomic and political systems, corruption, and occasional exploding Chechens. Ivan would probably rather have his life than that of the poor guy in Bangla, living in the most corrupt country in the world, surrounded by malevolent mullahs and incompetent commies. |
Posted by: Mark Espinola 2004-09-19 |
