Misguided Austerity Could Literally Hurt Our Brains and Our Future

[earcandle]

Source: Fire Dog Lake

With Congressional Republicans almost giddy about cutting programs designed to help struggling people and even President Obama proudly showing what a “super serious person” he can be by cutting home heating assistance for poor people, it’s important to reflect on what the latest research says about the long-term damage the extreme stress of poverty and joblessness can cause. From Seed Magazine:

Gould’s insight was that understanding how stress damages the brain could illuminate the general mechanisms—especially neurogenesis—by which the brain is affected by its environ-mental conditions. For the last several years, she and her post-doc, Mirescu, have been depriving newborn rats of their mother for either 15 minutes or three hours a day. For an infant rat, there is nothing more stressful. Earlier studies had shown that even after these rats become adults, the effects of their developmental deprivation linger: They never learn how to deal with stress. “Normal rats can turn off their glucocorticoid system relatively quickly,” Mirescu says. “They can recover from the stress response. But these deprived rats can’t do that. It’s as if they are missing the ‘off’ switch.”

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Our president is going to stress out the poor more than they are with his budget cuts. This is cruel.
Is he trying to get us to move our butts into the street, just to see if we would dare?

Are we that easy to dismantle? Throw our values into the toilet while they do doublespeak?