Just In: We’re All Nuts!

“Some mental disorders aren’t merely common—they’re the norm”, or so a recent Science News article, “Rates of common mental disorders double up“, reports. Notice the orange bar in the graph (left) which shows a recent prospective study⁽¹⁾ of 1000 New Zealanders assessed for mental disorders eleven times between the ages of 3 and 32. I have little doubt that such a study done in American would surpass New Zealand’s 50% number. Something is bizarre about this data, in my view. First, why not read it to see what you think.

All right, my first thought was, how can it be that half the human population has a ‘common mental disorder’? Disorders are presumably non-normal events, unless your living at the edge of a black hole. Something this common can’t be non-normal, can it?

Although, that is not the real bone I have to pick with this report. The larger issue for me is that researchers are focusing on what is a symptom of our culture rather than underlying causes. Indeed, this is especially so if mental disorders are the norm now. Given that the norm now is a 50/50 chance of having a mental disorder, perhaps something more fundamental is taking place. I imagine this something, lying at the heart of our ‘normal’ culture, is something we may not wish to see.

I suspect that most mental disorders we see now are caused by an increasing sense of disconnection people feel. The remarkable popularity of Facebook, email, cell-phones, and as well as social outlets in general, comes out of our deep seated need to feel more connected than we do. Simply put, we have an social thirst that goes unquenched. I can’t imagine members of close knit tribal groups (the ‘norm’ long ago) being this socially ‘thirsty’. They had the true social security that a life-long bond of interdependent relationships provides. The unintended consequence of civilization is the lost of the close-knit tribal life style. The closest match to this type of connection now-a-days is the nuclear family. However, the civilization in which a family finds itself competes for each individual’s loyalty (loyalty being just another aspect of social connection). Civilization spawns a house divided.

I suppose many people will find this view untenable. After all, we’re taught that civilization is ‘progress’ and thus a boon to humanity. Certainly civilization has been a boon materially speaking. However, we want to have our cake and eat it too. The idea that trading ‘up’ from tribal life to civilization lead to mental disorders is hard to entertain if one values civilization and naively expects progress to be a ‘win win’. As I’ve noted before, the world we see tends to reflect what we expect to see, which is largely what we’ve been taught to see. That makes a researchers task difficult, especially any researcher in the ‘pseudo’ social sciences, where observations are easily colored by cultural expectations.

⁽¹⁾ Prospective study: A study in which the subjects are identified and then followed forward in time.