Depression is sweeping the nations, if the U.N. is to be believed. A newly recognised type of bi-polar disorder has been added to the DSM-IV (Bi-Polar 2, where the manic episodes aren't so manic...). Crime is frequently pathogenic, leaving victims suffering dibilitating side-affects of PTSD. Schizophrenia, psychosis, anxiety disorders, OCD... Everyone is crazy. Apparently mental illness is the biggest cause of disability in the USA. I wouldn't be surprised if it's similar here.
By the way, I'm as crazy as the rest of you with my bouts of rage, depression and sleepless nights.
Or are we all just victims of a society so individualised, so pathologised, that we can't handle simple pressures of life without giving it a medical explanation? Do the mental health services (let alone the pharmaceutical industry!) fool their way into business by convincing us and themselves of their importance? The 'therapeutic state' as it is known...
Culture differences are there to be seen - some commentators simply could not believe that the local population were mentally stable after the tsunami struck...
"One mental health specialist, reporting live on radio from a Sri Lankan village, expressed his surprise that the children he encountered seemed keener to return to school than talk about their experiences. They were, he told the listeners, 'clearly in denial', and 'only later will they experience the full emotional horror of what has happened to them.' How he knew this was not stated." (from a BMJ book review)
Cultures are different. Our broken legs look the same, but our mental status cannot. Psychiatry is perhaps 90% in the mind, 10% the brain, and so our mental status is massively influenced by our upbringing, our affluence etc. Our ways of coping with trauma and stress are very different - evidence, some argue, that we in the West are dangerously medicalizing our society. We have lost the role of community, common goals, maybe even religion, in getting through the tough times that life always throws our way and in our recovery from traumatic events.
Of course, it should go without saying, that some people are in need of mental health care, and they should get it.
1 comment:
How true
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