Government and Corporations have been leading to a lot of these health issues for decades, including diabetes and obesity in children, ADHD from being locked in a prison-like school environment, and more. Incidentally, diabetes and obesity are major factors for morbidity in coronavirus infections.

But also the for-profit industry finds it a lot more attractive to medicate kids downstream (eg prescribing Amphetamines for ADHD) and overdiagnose everything from Autism to ADHD to Gender Dysphoria. This is a band-aid approach, because it’s harder and less profitable to change society than it is to medicate everyone.

Hollywood definitely played a role in changing culture and people’s behaviors (including Westerns glamorizing gunfighters, PR campaigns getting women to smoke, product placements, etc)

But the industries actually start earlier than that. Merchandising selling stuff to kids. Broadcasting ideas — kids love to pick up on what their peers are watching, not their parents.

This PBS documentary goes intk detail:

https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-merchants-cool/

There are record levels of depression, sadness and suicidal ideation among teens, especially teen girls. Whether it’s Hip-Hop or Tik-Tok, the negative externalities from the centralized, for-profit industries disseminating youth culture pile up and our communities should at least request the CDC to investigate further:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-experiencing-record-...

They do this with adults too — one in five middle aged women is on antidepressants. And let’s not even get started on the opioid crisis. More people than ever are angry at “the other party” in many countries, it is not an accident.

But they don’t focus on culture and society and for-profit industries. They only focus on diffuse causes like a virus that’s going around, or “random infections”.

State and Federal governments collude with industry to keep us distracted. Whether it’s the fructose sugar they genetically engineer into the fruits, or the high-fructose corn syrup they put into everything, or water use, or the non-biodegradeable plastics, or the factory farms and overuse of antibiotics — in nearly every case the government sides with the corporations — eg governments in agricultural US states criminalizing the filming and exposing of animal cruelty, since their tax revenue comes from these corporations — or
enforcing patents for Monsanto and Big Pharma etc. etc. and letting the lobbyists write Medicare Part D to make sure Medicare won’t negotiate drug prices etc.

What they do is they always tell us that we can do something as individuals (recycle, diet and exercise, go vegan etc) or lead to polarized narratives like Women (feminism) vs Men (redpill) White vs Black, so we’d be too divided and blaming each other instead of demanding systemic reforms to impose a cost on our corporations getting away with the negative externalities:

https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362

I strongly believe that if we had a UBI in this country, funded by these pigovian taxes imposing costs, we’d have a population that organically would start to push industry towards healthier practices for everyone and the planet. Because the public would directly get the windfall of these tax revenues.