The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett Read Free Book Online

requiring anti-anxiety drugs in the water supply or mass psychotherapy, what is most exciting about the picture we present is that it shows that reducing inequality would increase the wellbeing and quality of life for all of us. Far from being inevitable and unstoppable, the sense of deterioration in social wellbeing and the quality of social relations in society is reversible. Understanding the effects of inequality means that we suddenly have a policy handle on the wellbeing of whole societies.
    The powerful mechanisms which make people sensitive to inequality cannot be understood in terms either of social structure or of individual psychology alone. Individual psychology and societal inequality relate to each other like lock and key. One reason why the effects of inequality have not been properly understood before is because of a failure to understand the relationship between them.
    THE RISE IN ANXIETY

    Given the unprecedented material comfort and physical convenience of modern societies, it might seem sensible to be sceptical of the way everyone talks of stress, as if life was barely survivable. However, Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, has put together impressive evidence that we really are much more anxious than we used to be. By reviewing the large number of studies of anxiety levels in the population carried out at different dates, she has documented very clear trends. She found 269 broadly comparable studies measuring anxiety levels in the USA at various times between 1952 and 1993. 11 Together the surveys covered over 52,000 individuals. What they showed was a continuous upward trend throughout this forty-year period. Her results for men and women are shown in Figure 3.1. Each dot in the graph shows the average level of anxiety found in a study recorded against the date it was undertaken. The rising trend across so many studies is unmistakable. Whether she looked at college students or at children, Twenge found the same pattern: the average college student at the end of the period was more anxious than 85 per cent of the population at the beginning of it and, even more staggering, by the late 1980s the average American child was more anxious than child psychiatric patients in the 1950s.

    Figure 3.1 Rise in anxiety levels among US college students 1952–93. Data from 269 samples covering 52,000 individuals. 15 (Reproduced with kind permission from Jean M. Twenge.)
    This evidence comes from the administration of standardized anxiety measures to samples of the population. It cannot be explained away by saying that people have become more aware of anxiety. The worsening trend also fits what we know has been happening in related conditions such as depression. Depression and anxiety are closely connected: people who suffer from one often suffer from the other, and psychiatrists sometimes treat the two conditions in similar ways. There are now large numbers of studies showing substantial increases in rates of depression in developed countries. Some studies have looked at change over the last half century or so by comparing the experience of one generation with another, while taking care to avoid pitfalls such as an increased awareness leading to more frequent reporting of depression. 12 Others have compared rates in studies which have followed up representative samples of the population born in different years. In Britain, for example, depression measured among people in their mid-20s was found to be twice as common in a study of 10,000 or so people born in 1970 as it had been in a similar study carried out earlier of people in their mid-20s born in 1958. 13
    Reviews of research conclude that people in many developed countries have experienced substantial rises in anxiety and depression. Among adolescents, these have been accompanied by increases in the frequency of behavioural problems, including crime, alcohol and drugs. 12 , 14 They ‘affected males and females, in all social classes and all