My Brain is Broke

Poor Steven Fry. Watching a TV show the other night, I learned he suffers from manic depression. To combat it he hit the drink and cocaine during his heyday of the 80s/90s. So all through Blackadder and that, he was boozing and snorting coke rather heavily. Strewth. I guess that's the thing; Fry is such a brilliant entertainer that you never would tell unless you knew him closely. It really does come as a surprise to know he was doing drugs. (As opposed to dirty pathetic wastes of space like Amy Vodkahouse, where it comes as no surprise at all.)

It also highlights that we really are in the Dark Ages concerning mental health. Whereas regular medicine classifies and treats diseases according to their root causes -- pathogens, tumours, burst plumbing, whatever -- psychiatry still classifies according to symptoms. So someone who is depressed suffers from "depression". Someone who is manic/depressive is "bi-polar". Someone who hears voices suffers from "schizophrenia", which is simply the definition of "hearing voices." Drawing an analogy with regular medicine, that's like saying a patient suffers from "lumpy neck", whether they have throat cancer or the mumps. And so logically mental illnesses are treated by covering their symptoms; like with depression, by taking drugs which block or enhance certain neurotransmitters. That's like trying to fix a broken leg by stuffing the patient with morphine, to cover the pain.

The Dark Ages, I tells ya. It's like taking someone who has a heart condition, and dealing with it by jamming a knitting-needle into their chest and jiggling it around. (Oh wait, they actually did that with the brain -- it was called a lobotomy.)

I swear, we really have a long way to go with mental health. One day they will reach the extraordinary conclusion that "depression", for example, is actually a single symptom of many different maladies; and it's not even that far of a cognitive leap, as we can already identify certain agents that cause depression. And so forth with the other psychiatric disorders.

Yeah well, in the meantime that doesn't stop them in the old USA, kingdom of the push-button quick-fix, from diagnosing every man and his dog with an "illness", and prescribing a cocktail of pills to deal with it. Especially with kids, and that's a bloody worry. The trouble with f***ing with developing minds and brains, aside from the obvious, is that when you tell a kid there is someone drastically wrong with him, he starts to believe it. Then it becomes a vicious cycle as he begins to consciously or subconsciously reinforce his parents' worries and health care workers' diagnosis, and display ever-worsening symptoms. And so it goes. But that's ok, there's more pills where the last lot came from.

(And then, we here in the backward colonies follow in the footsteps of the mighty USA, as with all things.)

Of course the parents are relieved that the pills have taken away their child's "troubling behaviours", and who can blame them. But one has to wonder where the line gets drawn between something pathological and the child just behaving like a regular little sh*t. I mean let's face it, parenting, like most things in life, is not meant to be easy. If it was easy it would be... well not parenting, anyway. See, God arranged it all this way, so when parents see their kids grow up and start families of their own they can take dim pleasure in seeing their grandkids behave like brats. "Just like when you were that age!" they chortle to their haggard offspring.

Anyway, granted some kids have genuine medical disorders, which benefit from proper treatment. But there is a trend these days to automatically label every child who does not quite conform to the bell curve with a disorder -- ADHD, depression, bi-polar, mild schizophrenia, Asperger's. That last one cracks me up no end: taking a child who is an intelligent and slightly odd loner, and "diagnosing" them with a "disease".

And so it goes. How long before they start diagnosing overweight kids, and let's face it they are in the majority nowadays, as all having some kind of mental condition, such as "depression", which compels them to stuff their faces. And then prescribing pills to fix it. Oh wait, they're doing that now. Rather than seeing that maybe their depression is a result of their overweight condition, and then doing something earth-shatteringly radical about it, such as improving the kids' diet and getting them off the couch. Shock bloody horror.

But these days it's a medicated upbringing society prefers. And so we're raising a generation of pasty, terrified, pill-popping hypochondriacs. The statement, "It's not my fault, there's something wrong with me!" will become the mantra of everyone, bleated as an excuse as they go about their daily lives screwing up and being lazy, rather than the apology of the legitimately sick. Good for the pharma industry, bad for our civilisation.

Now I gotta go take a couple of ibuprofen with scotch in it...