American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life
Jennifer Lunden
HarperCollins
The central question of American Breakdown, Portland author Jennifer Lunden’s revelatory memoir, gets bandied about during a support group meeting for people suffering from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), a condition that causes severe headaches and other debilitating symptoms when one is exposed to industrial chemicals commonly used in household products.
“You know, sometimes I wonder if we have it all mixed up,” a participant remarked. “We think we’re the sick ones, but maybe our bodies are smart. Maybe our bodies are warning us of a real danger.”
“That’s right,” another group member added. “We’re all canaries in a coal mine. These chemicals aren’t good for anybody.”
By the end of Lunden’s deeply personal and deeply researched book, this question has been thoroughly and resoundingly answered. MCS and another, often related condition, the misleadingly named Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), which Lunden also suffered, are not freakishly rare sicknesses striking an unlucky few. They’re the predictable result of life in the United States, a sick society that poisons itself and refuses to take the cure.
Why? Because the pursuit of public health and well-being for all (a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness, as our bewigged, ale-swigging, tobacco-buzzed forefathers put it) is at odds with the pursuit of profit (a.k.a. capitalism). The consequences of our national sickness are as serious as cancer — and, nearly two millions times a year, are diagnosed as new cancers — but rather than address the root causes of chronic illness, which are systemic, those in power pin the problem on the afflicted individual and trivialize their suffering, lest the recognition that it’s real spark substantive change that threatens their wealth, authority, beliefs or quarterly earnings.
The experience of those suffering from CFS and MCS illustrates this tendency to blame the victim and illuminates what’s at stake. People with these life-crushing conditions have been told for over a century that they’re just lazy or crazy, depressed or overly sensitive, even by medical professionals. Or, as Lunden points out, especially by Western doctors trained to view the body as a machine that’s somehow separate from one’s mind, environment and society; and, in her case, particularly by doctors in the U.S.’ broken system who are compelled to compromise patients’ health for financial considerations.
As research continues to prove these sicknesses are real and affecting increasing numbers of people, this country faces the uncomfortable choice of either dismissing their suffering as the cost of doing business as usual or fundamentally changing the way we do business, such that we reconsider whether business interests actually align with our personal interest in living a healthy life. Spoiler alert: they usually don’t.
In one of the book’s many inspiring passages, Lunden describes efforts around the world to radically shift the goals of governments from product production to happiness production. Examples include the Canadian Index of Wellbeing, the United Nations’ annual World Happiness Report, and New Zealand’s 2019 budget, the first national spending plan of a major country that “explicitly prioritizes well-being.”
Lunden grew up in Canada. I wouldn’t say she was raised there, as one of the contributing factors to her health problems in adulthood was trauma caused by her clinically depressed mother’s abandonment of the family when she was a kid, so she largely raised herself. And when CFS first laid her low in 1989, the year she moved to Portland, she tapped into her hard-earned reserves of self-confidence and bootstrapping independence to try to overcome it. For years that followed, she failed, miserably.
CFS is misnamed. Lunden quotes a specialist who says it should really be called Chronic Devastation Syndrome, both because its impact on the body is systemic and cripplingly complex (symptoms also include chronic pain, headaches, depression, anxiety, and digestive and cognitive problems) and because those afflicted with it also suffer the collapse of their personal and professional lives.
Lunden masterfully weaves three main threads through American Breakdown. There’s the story of her personal struggle with CFS and MCS; that of Alice James, the sister of renowned 19th century figures Henry and William James, who suffered similar afflictions (then called neurasthenia); and Lunden’s decades-long quest to understand the causes of these sicknesses and find a cure that worked for her.
The author’s account of her efforts to get medical treatment in the early 1990s will be depressingly familiar to readers today. Then, as now (despite years of Obamacare), it’s simply impossible to find and afford a doctor capable of fixing health problems more complicated than a broken bone or a case of the clap. Many of the barriers are practical — including a shortage of primary care physicians and lack of affordable health insurance — but others are deeply ingrained in the practice of modern medicine.
“While the Cartesian approach to medicine [the separation of body, mind and environment mentioned above] is responsible for extraordinary advances in treating infectious disease and trauma to bones and organs, it has been less effective at preventing and treating chronic illness, which is responsible for 90 percent of healthcare expenditures in the United States,” Lunden writes.
Stymied by hospitals and doctors unable to diagnose, much less address, her illness, Lunden tried every alternative treatment she could find, from dietary changes and supplements to a light box and even faith healing. Almost nothing helped. “I did it all, but it was never enough,” she writes. “Because enough wasn’t possible. I was always overwhelmed, always broke, always stressed. At first I blamed myself. But then I looked around at everyone else and I began to think it wasn’t me that was the problem.”
“There’s a tremendous amount of pressure on people to calm their own stress with self-care,” she adds later in the same chapter. “But what if the best way to fix a stress problem is to fix the actual source of the problem? At what point is the self-care imperative a form of propaganda meant to keep us focused on our individual shortcomings rather than on the failings of our country?”
Through her research into Alice James’ life, Lunden uncovered some of the primary causes of the sickness they both endured. Among them is industrialization and the theretofore unprecedented level of stress it caused workers — pressures that have changed only superficially ever since, and that have been increased, rather than lessened, by technology, despite its promise of a better tomorrow. Stress suppresses the immune system and negatively impacts related biological and psychological processes in ways we’re just beginning to understand. Lunden brilliantly synopsizes the latest research and explains how the dull roar of low-level stress experienced by almost every American every waking minute fucks with our instinctual fight-or-flight responses and contributes to many chronic health problems, including CFS.
Toxic chemicals in furniture, furnishings and household items, which also began to appear in Alice’s day, are another source that Lunden explores in fascinating detail. Her account of deaths and illnesses caused by arsenic in 19th century wallpaper — and efforts by business leaders and governments to paper over the deadly problem — is mind-blowing, as is her retelling of the “sick building” controversy a century later, which involved the Environmental Protection Agency’s own staff and offices. The EPA dismissed the complaints of its own experts, despite having just published a large-scale study which found that “even in the smoggiest areas of the country, indoor air pollution accounted for somewhere between 75 and 98 percent of total exposure to airborne toxicants, causing more cancer than smokestack emissions, water pollution, or toxic waste dumps,” Lunden reports.
These days, consumer products containing toxic chemical compounds are everywhere, and they’re sickening people nationwide. “In the United States, an astonishing 35 percent of people experience health issues when exposed to fragranced products like perfumes and lotions, air fresheners, cleaning supplies, and laundry products,” Lunden wrote. She then cites a study that found over two-thirds of Americans “are unaware that fragranced products typically emit hazardous chemicals, and that 60 percent would not continue to use a fragranced product if they knew it contained toxicants.”
American Breakdown is a tremendous achievement — both for its author and for our collective understanding of what illnesses like CFS and MCS are telling us about our way of life. There are solutions, and Lunden herself ultimately achieves some relief, but the first step is knowing what ails us. This must-read book has answers.
