Shit Life Syndrome

Shit Life Syndrome (SLS) is a phrase used by physicians in English speaking nations to describe the detrimental effect that a variety of poverty or abuse-induced disorders can have on patients.

It were US doctors that coined the phrase. Poor working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and neglect, amid wider affluence. They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job security. They are trapped in poor neighbourhoods where the prospect of owning a home is a distant dream. There is little social housing, scant income support and contingent access to healthcare. Finding meaning in such a life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources. Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very different and unattainable world presents itself. Knowing that you are valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and alcohol. You will eat junk food and watch your ill-treated body grow to being obese. It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side effects, that is the killer.

In 2017, Sarah O’Connor’s wrote an article for the Financial Times titled ‘Left behind: can anyone save the towns the economy forgot?’ See here. She observed the Shit Life Syndrome in the English coastal town of Blackpool. It even won the 2018 Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils. O’Connor wrote: "Blackpool exports healthy skilled people and imports the unskilled, the unemployed, and the unwell. As people overlooked by the modern economy wash up in a place that has also been left behind, the result is a quietly unfolding health crisis."

She observed: “More than a tenth of the town’s working-age inhabitants live on state benefits paid to those deemed too sick to work. Antidepressant prescription rates are among the highest in the country. Life expectancy, already the lowest in England, has recently started to fall. Doctors in places such as this have a private diagnosis for what ails some of their patients: ‘Shit Life Syndrome’ … People with SLS really do have mental or physical health problems, doctors say. But they believe the causes are a tangled mix of economic, social, and emotional problems that they — with 10- to 15-minute slots per patient — feel powerless to fix. The relationship between economics and health is blurry, complex and politically fraught. But it is too important to ignore. Life expectancy, already the lowest in England, has recently started to fall.'