It is a truth not universally acknowledged that much poor health is a direct and predictable result of the actions (or inactions) of governments.
This might arise because of governments failing to address major public health threats (whether climate change or the marketing and sale of disease-inducing products) or because of government actions that have consequences for peoples’ health and wellbeing.
Perhaps researchers will properly document the adverse health impacts of the Centrelink debacle, in which a litany of “inhuman errors” has caused many thousands of people distress and anxiety.
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Dr Matt Fisher writes below in a timely Croakey #LongRead that chronic stress is a profoundly important threat to health and wellbeing that is often under-recognised and poorly understood.
In this light, the Centrelink debacle can be seen as just one small element of a much larger pattern that is creating the perfect conditions for chronic stress and associated health and social problems, according to Fisher, a Research Fellow at the Southgate Institute for Health, Society & Equity at Flinders University in Adelaide.
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Literature on the social determinants of health identifies chronic stress as a key pathway by which social factors get ‘under the skin’ to affect physical or mental health. The health effects of exposure to stressors associated with socioeconomic disadvantage contribute to health inequalities.
Evidence from research in epidemiology and public health, social psychology, cognitive and affective neuroscience, and stress supports these related hypotheses. From a public health perspective, the importance of chronic stress as a mediator of social effects on health and health inequalities could hardly be overstated.
Thus, it is good to see that evidence on the impacts of chronic stress on health is also used to reinforce arguments for public policy action on the social determinants of health, and is sometimes recognised in health policies.
However, it is here, on the question of understanding and communicating the political and policy significance of the stress-health relationship, that the public health community has a problem.
The current approach in public health advocacy, which subsumes the issue of chronic stress within arguments for action on social determinants of health, fails to capture and communicate a much wider significance for public policy and politics.