1 in 4 Americans Have PTSD-Like Symptoms From Financial Stress

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/36597-1-in-4-americans-have-ptsd-like-symptoms-from-financial-stress

If you’ve ever felt like financial stress was bringing you down—in a big way—you might be interested in the findings of a new study from Payoff, a financial wellness company. In an analysis of data from 2,011 survey respondents, researchers at Payoff discovered that 23% of respondents were experiencing symptoms commonly associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) related to their finances. Among Millennials, the number is 36%.

“It was not something I expected at all,” says Galen Buckwalter, Ph.D., chief science officer at Payoff. “But we kept seeing it emerge in sample after sample. There’s been a lot of research looking at the financial stressors out there, but from a psychological perspective, no one’s turned it around and looked at the actual symptoms people are experiencing.”

Among other things, survey respondents were worried about being homeless or were routinely late on payments. Others denied the severity of their debt or the reality of paying it off. People’s behaviors were irrational and motivated by denial and avoidance, leaving them less able to plan or manage their financial lives. “It was just this cluster of negative financial behaviors and fear,” Buckwalter says. “And when you look at the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, it lines up with what we were seeing—the denial, the avoidance, the hypervigilance, the nightmares. It was all there.”

The Payoff team labeled the condition Acute Financial Stress, or AFS, and they seem to have hit a nerve. “I’ve gotten 20 emails from people that I know, established professionals, telling me how they’ve been living with AFS,” Buckwalter says. “It is pretty staggering, frankly, that this percentage of America is experiencing a diagnosable mental health condition resulting from their finances.”

[glowing]

1. And it's just a coincidence suicide has increased

[Baobab]

19. Stress hormones are neurotoxic

this is a good argument to ditch WTO-GATS so we can have affordable health care someday.

How many more innocent lives have to be sacrificed for bad trade ideology?

[Katashi_itto]

2. I look forward forward to the new dem admin doubling this. Americanan exceptionalisn!

DWS supports predatory lenders. You should too. It's the democratic party we know and love!

[fasttense]

3. This is the same reason for the drop in pregnancies.

You have to have hope for the future to want to bring a child into the world.

[Helen Borg]

4. Add to that all other forms of stress...

[zentrum]

5. Feeling this way...

…..is part of the plan. It's called the shock doctrine.

It's incrementally getting people used to more and more austerity. Shrink the government and grow privatization of all services and basic rights. Privatize education. Privatize health. Privatize the postal service. Privatize water. Keep wages low and the masses are so exhausted and frightened that they become docile, used to accepting crumbs. It's how most of the third world lives. Revolution is rare, short lived and usually results in a vacuum into which rushes a worse oppression.

There needs to be consistent, relentless, organizing for a mass movement and few seem able to commit to that. Especially when the powers that be keep us divided against each other—such as creating fear of Immigrants, or along racial lines, or any "otherism" that does the job of dividing.

[Betty Karlson]

6. Hence the establishment opposition to Sanders: he would have given us respite. eom

[appalachiablue]

7. That's it exactly, well said. Constant stress and fear, the neoliberal shock doctrine.

[dreamnightwind]

8. Damn right, last paragraph especially

[zentrum]

15. That's why

……the whole "ideology of racism" was deliberately invented, in the first place. Before the Civil War. It wasn't just about slavery—which could be abolished, as it had been in other countries. It was also about the invention of this pernicious ideology. The wealthy white planation owners were really worried that the poor white sharecroppers would join with the runaway and freed slaves against the rich owners. So the one pecenenters got together and worked out this whole message of white supremacy to feed to the white dirt farmers, who did not themselves, own slaves.

So they convinced the poor whites that they were under threat too from this "inferior" group of people—and actually got them to form the Confederate Army and fight and die (!) to protect the Plantation way of life, which did poor whtes no good at all! The ideology was totally successful.

[dreamnightwind]

16. True. Even more so, though, Democrats and Republicans

Contrived fight to keep us distracted from the guys behind both parties filling their pockets. We have some differences, but nothing like the differences between the haves and the have-nots.

[raccoon]

18. Also the poor white Southerners were drafted--to protect a way of life that

did nothing for them.

[geardaddy]

9. K & R

bookmarking

Thanks for posting this!

[cantbeserious]

10. Thank You For Sharing

eom

[ReRe]

11. K&R

Yeah, and if they went back and scrunched their numbers, added a criteria or two, that number might jump to 3 in 4 Americans who suffer PTSD-like symptoms. TPTB are working for that perfect 4.0.

[Depaysement]

12. Of course

It's designed that way.

More stress, do more, work more for the masters, then just die. Life in the "hedge fund" society is nasty and brutish.

[zalinda]

13. And these are people who probably aren't poor. eom

[reformist2]

14. Things are getting worse. A status quo president who believes in working with corporations is not

what we want!

But I guess most Dems want a woman, so that card trumps everything else, I guess.

[dreamnightwind]

17. The other party has the trump card