Where is the state of our mental health heading?

The sadness

If you seek to escape from the company of a mentally disturbed person shortly after you come into contact with him, then he is being deemed by you to be worthless. As most of us react that way towards the mentally disturbed, they are being placed in a very vulnerable position. Those unfortunates can be as sad as you and I can be sad because their sense of self remains intact and does not deteriorate as their intelligence deteriorates.

I am the carer for an elderly lady who is severely mentally compromised. There is no logic in her thinking at all - but on frequent occasions tears will run down her cheeks. She is old and one might say that she has had her share of a normal life. While many thousands of elderly people are afflicted with dementia, many thousands of younger people are struggling to hold themselves together.

Whether it be in your relationships, in your work, in your finances or in your health, the source of all of your stress reduces to one thing - the feeling of being in an out-of-control situation. That is the demon which tortures all of us on occasions. But, if there seems to be no chance of having any control over your life whatsoever, you will disintegrate as a person. This we all know will lead to mental illness in an otherwise mentally healthy individual. Few of us take the extra step and deduce that if already mentally ill, then sustained involuntary therapy would likely intensify the illness.

The system

What is involuntary therapy? Can you be held down while some mind-altering drug be injected into you. The Mental Health Act allows this to be done.

I became interested in mental health when I was friends with a woman who had been a 'mental health service consumer'. She described herself as a "survivor". (It was in a recent OLO article by Peta Coxthat a reference was made to the word "survivor".) What had my friend survived?

She described a situation where a complaint of actual sexual, physical or property abuse can be off-handedly dismissed as coming from an irrational mind, where some inmates are so emotionally drained of feelings of self-worth that they do not complain regardless of the conditions, and where, due to treatment designed to subdue them, some are not even capable of complaining.

Society never was capable of dealing with mental illness. It was in New South Wales in the '80s that we finally formally accepted that institutions often compounded the problem. So we put many of the mentally ill out of the institutions and back into society without the necessary support structures.

The socio-economic trap which these typically poor and friendless people found themselves in significantly added to their mental problems.

The future

As something like one in 10 of us will at some time in our lives be mentally ill, is the attitude of the remaining nine out of 10 who are leading increasingly busy lives in the pursuit of what they define as happiness becoming hardened? Is society on a slippery slope? If not, then how else can we explain that children less than 12 months old are receiving anti-depressants?

Susan Greenfield believes that the hours a day spent playing computer games in which there is a scene change every second or two is lowering children's concentration span - that is, the activity is altering brain structure. There is a potential, then, that the thousands of young people currently being prescribed drugs to slow them down so that they do not disrupt family life or the classroom, might become hundreds of thousands. What kind of society will it be with numbers of this size on mind-altering medication?

Why has technology with the potential to destroy essential aspects of humanity itself been allowed into the country? It is due to the great god called the free market economy. If there is money to be made and jobs to be created, then the government feels that it has a duty to stand aside and let the force in. Where can this lead? How will a survival-of-the-fittest-culture be handling the misfit issue?.

It was through my survivor friend that I met Richard Gosden who had gained his PhD researching the incidence of diagnosed schizophrenia. It worried Gosden that a failure to pay homage to the dominant culture could become a recognized mental illness. The diagnosis of schizophrenia in this country (according to Gosden) is widening and looks like it is bringing more social 'misfits' into its net.

Alarmist? I don't know. It was through Gosden and my survivor friend that I became aware that there were two camps in psychiatry. There were the 'bleeding hearts' who were opposed to the dominance of the 'medical model' and those who claimed that they had to work in the 'real world'.

In managing the mentally ill, the medical model is gaining increasing momentum. It has a strong appeal in a survival-of-the-fittest-culture. This is the perception of the brain purely as a mechanism from which emerges the troubled mind. With this model in mind, the overwhelming tendency is to cut psychotherapy short and move onto the blunt instruments of drugs and even shock treatment.

Psychiatrists work in an environment of demanding families and governments which bring pressure on them to solve the family and societal problem quickly. The model is in the ascendency, not only because it is the scientifically correct perception, but also as we no longer have the time, the funds and the staff to provide counseling spread over months or even years. Co-existing with this attitudinal change is the development of a vast pharmaceutical industry to 'fix' our problems.

Where is all this heading? It will end up where we don't want it to be if we open the door to life-style changes which raise the risk of mental illness and choose to remain unaware of what is happening in the mental health services.