Where is the state of our mental health heading?

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.