In many cases within the U.S. population - and this could certainly be the case in many parts of the developed world - personal sickness deals double damage.
There is a separate issue when people contract serious illnesses in this country, an issue which stands apart from the physical problems that arise.
In these many cases, when people get sick, instead of seeking help and community support, they withdraw and isolate themselves.
Now there are both external and internal(ized) reasons for this, which tend to reinforce each other. People are well-aware that their health care services are tenuous and rigged, and that they probably lack the resources they need to get help without going into debt, or endangering one point of their cash flow.
Having an intermittent, insufficient, and uncertain income tends to engender an overall feeling of insecurity. One may have a thousand dollars in the bank, but every purchase feels as if one is chipping off a part of oneself, that one may need later.
This internalized feeling of insecurity is cultivated in all sorts of ways, and it expresses itself in just as many ways too, which we could take all day tracing and analyzing. But more simply one is induced to fall into despair, and becomes stressed about constant money problems and health issues, exacerbating those health issues.
One of the ways in which accumulated trauma expresses itself is in social isolation and the severing of links and contact. The modern individual is brought up with an artificial conception of self-sufficiency, and that to lean on others is disgraceful. One's body should be pristine and supple, and not exhibiting abnormal signs of contagion and "discharge", as it were. Physical disabilities and other discrepencies are regularly disrespected and worse in this culture.
An elderly member of the family may become sick, and the family, upon worrying about social services, expenses, or social judgments, begins hiding this fact, and all sorts of distortions arise, which compromises community trust.
All sorts of individuals become sick, and similarly, cut themselves off from the communities that can restore their strength. And through this regular occurrence, a culture arises that celebrates this "self-sufficiency" and self deprivation, as a function of the individual ego's need to assert its own conditions as just.
And so one major component of the healing process - the spread of information, and the consequent administration of resources - is suppressed and even destroyed.
More generally, there is something in our social fabric that produces a sort of positive feedback when it is damaged, in which trauma begets more trauma. This is the opposite of a normal healing process in which wounds heal, which of course does still exist in certain aspects, but as per usual here I'm focusing on the problem.
