The Myth of Normal 51

infectious diseases such as pneumonia and influenza, and for such life-habitrelated conditions as cirrhosis of the liver and lung disease. Tellingly, the degree of protection offered by married status was five times as great for men as for women, a finding that speaks to the relative roles of the genders in this culture, with profound implications for health—a topic I will circle back to in chapter 23. Interestingly, “unhappily married persons are worse off in wellbeing than unmarried persons.”[7] In other studies, perfectly healthy married couples’ stress hormone levels were elevated in those exhibiting higher degrees of hostility during conflict, and their immune functioning was diminished. The results were the same for newlyweds as for septuagenarians.[8] Given their vulnerability and dependence, children’s physiology is especially susceptible to the emotional states of their caregivers. Young kids’ stress hormone levels, for example, are heavily influenced by the emotional atmosphere in the home, whether outright conflict or bristling tension.[9] Asthma is a well-studied example: the inflammation of the child’s lungs is directly affected by the mother’s or father’s emotions.[10] In the words of a recent review: “It has been consistently shown that parents in an unfavorable mental health state such as ‘depression,’ ‘anxiety,’ ‘stress,’ or ‘chronic irritation’ may predict a poorer status for the child’s asthma.”[11] Racism is another risk factor for asthma. In a large cohort of Black American women, experiences of racial discrimination were associated with the adult onset of the disease.[12] And that raises an inescapable question we should all ponder: Is the inflammation and airway constriction of these women a case of individual pathology or the manifestation of a social malaise? The more we learn, the more we realize that our health is a complex consequence of “all our relations,” and not just the ones close at hand (family, friends, intimate others, etc.). Leading U.S. stress researchers Teresa Seeman and Bruce McEwen noted in 1996 that human biology “seem[s] to be highly sensitive” also to factors like one’s social status relative to others, and even how stable or precarious the social order happens to be at a given time. [13] In a British study, unemployed people had higher markers of