[My latest post on Challenging the Commonplace.]

The headline reads:
It's a new frontier for psychiatric illness; brain pacemakers that promise to act as antidepressants 
by changing how patients' nerve circuitry fires. 

"Only a few dozen patients with severe depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder so far have 
been treated in closely monitored studies. Still, the early results are promising." 

In reading this article, I was reminded of a science fiction novel I recently finished. Written by Greg 
Bear in 1997, Slant tells of a possible, not-too-distant future, in which people become so deeply 
immersed in the electronic information age that civilization reaches a crisis point. Inhabitants of 
this future world don't know a crisis is unfolding, since it involves the very technology which 
keeps them submissive to the erosion of their surroundings. Most experiences with other humans 
is achieved not in person but electronically, by jacking oneself into the 'net. Even sex is not 
immune.
 
Which technology is it that keeps people content and accepting the status quo?
 
It's "therapy" involving surgical adjustments to the brain. Such procedures are the norm in this 
future society, to the extent that the "non-therapied" are considered the raving lunatics - the 
pariahs, malcontents, marginalized - and "normals" are as rare as the dodo. In some cases, the 
therapy amounts to the ultimate, permanent happy pill: no condition can make the therapied 
unhappy, even jailing. 

A couple of days after finishing Slant, I found myself reading the above article in the news, about a 
surgical procedure to treat depression.

I am appalled but I am not surprised.

After all, isn't that where the mental health industry is leading us? Isn't 'mental illness' becoming 
mainstream and everyday life pathologized?

In present-day society, we have manmade sociocultural, socioeconomic, and physical 
environmental conditions which are causing people distress. But rather than treating these 
conditions, we treat (and blame) the human physiology which signals their negative effects on our 
wellbeing. We insist on adapting humans to their conditions, not the conditions to human need.

This illogical approach is part of governments' lifestyle and individual responsibility mantra. This 
mantra conveniently ignores the crucial role which the determinants of health play, those 
determinants being - you guessed it - sociocultural, socioeconomic, and physicial environmental 
conditions.

One can hardly be expected to adapt if one's lifestyle options have been reduced to zero. Even the 
power elite seem to have realized this. But rather than taking responsibility for allowing those life-
threatening conditions, even promoting them, they look to their own risk - that of losing power. 

Ergo, you are encouraged to make a few adjustments to your brain instead. This way you will feel 
hunky dory while the conditions necessary to sustain your life fall to ruin around you. 

Ocean
-- 
WISE Book - Policies of Exclusion, Poverty & Health: Stories from the front
Podcast Channel: http://bcseawalker.podbean.com/
Personal Blog: Challenging the Commonplace - and other irreverent activities
http://challengingthecommonplace.blogspot.com/

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