On Healthy Living

Newsweek has a really excellent series of articles in its edition hitting newstands this week about health in families and how the health of one member often affects the health of other members. This article highlights disease and mental illness patterns that aren’t due to genetics: the 10-year-old who has ulcers because her parents are fighting, the fact that widowed spouses die at twice the normal rate within the first year after their spouse dies, while widows of people who take their own lives are 22 times more likely to kill themselves.

Some of these patterns, like spouses of people with asthma or high blood pressure having increased risk for those ailments, are due to environmental factors (everyone in the family eats the same bad food and doesn’t exercise, for example). But there’s certainly more going on than that.

The article states that when there’s a chronic illness in the family, all members need to be paid attention to and taken care of. Other siblings of a chronicly ill child may feel neglected or guilty, and the health and emotional needs of all might be subverted for the one who is in pain. Lots of interesting stuff to think about. There are many other good articles in this issue and I’m sure we’ll be talking about them as the week goes on.

Sarah White wrote this on April 18th, 2005 and filed it under Healthy Living, Women's Health, Mental Health, Men's Health |