Reading the Research: Buffering Against Stress

Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today's article struck me as a particularly interesting lead on improving human lives, particularly in these overly interesting times.

It is now the year 2021.  That means we survived the tire fire of a year that was 2020.  However, most of us didn't do so without being subjected to significantly more stress and upset than usual.  

We know from various animal studies that would be too inhumane to perform on humans, that elevated and prolonged stress is bad for us.  So, y'know, the kind of stress 2020 put on most of us.  

What these researchers basically said is, "what if we could keep the stress from causing some of those bad effects?"  They tested the idea on rats, because of course they did, and the results were promising.  Their hope is to stop depression and its effects, therefore, before it properly starts.  Which is valuable, though not immediately to current sufferers of depression.

I see something significantly more immediately valuable than that, though.  You see, even in a "normal year," minority groups in the US suffer massively increased stress from living in systems that are designed without them in mind... or in some cases, specifically designed to oppress them.  Autistic people are the obvious example here, but the same applies to racial and religious minorities.  

Such people have a higher rate of mental illness.  Not because of what they are, but because of the systems and people around them.  What if we could buffer ourselves against those stress effects?  Heck, what if we could have buffered ourselves against those stress effects before the pandemic hit?  

Assuming 2021 isn't an even bigger tire fire than its predecessor, those of us who are white, non-disabled, and middle class will get (eventually) to go back to our comfortable worlds.  Things will return to "normal."  But for those minorities, "normal" is not comfortable, safe, or fair.  

I don't for one moment believe this anti-stress-effects treatment would be a solution to the systemic ableism, racism, sexism, nationalism, and unrestrained greed that infects the US.  Obviously the systems themselves have to change, and majorly.  But for me, one small step would be enabling the people we need leading and advising us in those changes- the minorities themselves- to do so.  

It would mean better outcomes for those people... and because the systems would be more fair as a result, better outcomes for all of us.  And it would mean, if another pandemic happens in the near future, that all of us would do better while we waited it out.  

(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)