AMERICAN psychiatry is facing a quandary: Despite a vast investment in basic neuroscience research and its rich intellectual promise, we have little to show for it on the treatment front.
.. The brain is notoriously hard to study and won’t give up its secrets easily. In contrast, psychotherapy research can yield relatively quick and powerful results. Given the critically important value — and popularity — of therapy, psychotherapy research deserves a much larger share of research dollars than it currently receives.
Economist: Mental Health
By the 19th century Geel had developed a system of foster care for the mentally ill in which patients, or guests as they are referred to, are adopted by families. It continues to this day. When at the turn of the 20th century the Belgian government threatened its existence with a decree that the insane should live in institutions, the whole town designated itself as an asylum.
.. In a town of just 35,000 souls, about 270 families have people living with them who would otherwise be kept in an institution. Foster families are told nothing about the psychiatric history of their new companions. “For a time, being a foster family was prestigious, a bit like owning a Mercedes-Benz,” Mr Lodewyckx explains. Host families are paid about €20 a day, but their main motives are tradition and altruism.
.. Surveys by the World Health Organisation (WHO) show that spending on mental-health services increases sharply once GDP per person reaches around $20,000—the same level at which people start buying insurance, yogurt and other middle-class indulgences.
.. Since the 19th century, people have been arguing that mental illness is a price to be paid for progress. In “Civilisation and its Discontents”, Sigmund Freud popularised the notion that neurosis increased in tandem with profit. Before Freud, an American neurologist, George Beard, had noted that a nervous disorder he labelled neurasthenia (and others nicknamed “Americanitis”) was on the rise. He put it down to the speeding up of modern life, facilitated by the telegraph, the railway and the press.
Neurasthenia disappeared from the psychiatrist’s lexicon in 20th-century America but enjoyed a long afterlife in China; Chairman Mao himself was said to suffer from the condition.
.. The OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, reckons that the direct and indirect costs of mental illness already exceed 4% of GDP in some places.
.. The use of psychiatric medication itself sometimes seems like an epidemic in the rich world, but it can go down as well as up. In the late 1990s France was the world leader in malaise, with about 30% of its citizens taking psychiatric drugs, but since then the numbers have come down.
.. (By 2030, Mental Illness will cost more than heart disease.)
Our Drone War Burnout
As many as 180 people, from military lawyers and commanders to private contractors from Raytheon andNorthrop Grumman, are required to maintain each patrol of three to four Predator or Reaper drones around the clock.
.. Working up to 12 hours a day, sometimes six days a week, analysts watch their targets up close for months on end. They often witness their subjects’ final moments. In follow-up surveillance, they may even view their funerals.
“Watching targets go about their daily lives may inspire empathy,” said Julie Carpenter, a research fellow at California Polytechnic State University who has studied human-technology interactions in the military.
.. “We can say we see children and we think you shouldn’t do it. But it isn’t up to us,” one former analyst, who asked to remain anonymous, told me. “We are completely outranked, and at the very bottom of the food chain.”
Smoking: Cheapest Treatment for Anxiety
“One of the reasons we have not yet banned nicotine outright in this country,” a brilliant social theorist declared several years ago, “is that it is the cheapest treatment for anxiety that we have, in the sense that majority of the people suffering from the mental issues that are somewhat soothed by nicotine will pay for the drug without any kind of government or employer subsidy, and if we actually got rid of cigarettes the true cost of treating everyone who doesn’t even know that they’re smoking to be less sad would maybe break the country.”