168 Mental Illness

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">People are no different now than they ever have been, but back-in-the-day, if someone was bipolar or subject to depression, their small community knew about it & would make allowances, and taking care of children or working in the fields was hardly affected by non-physical maladies. In fact, many famous figures in history probably owe their exceptional achievements to mild forms of autism: for example, Thomas Jefferson was thought to have Asperger's, and bipolar people have always been common. A cocaine high is probably the closest feeling to the mania a bipolar person experiences and look how much people are willing to pay to use it. Unfortunately, bipolars have commensurate debilitating depressive episodes which our modern society will not accept. Now-a-days, people are answering product support calls, running tech, or overseeing construction: the same amount of out-of-society's-norm behavior is not possible because it may impact something important.</p> <p>Society's constraints have become very stringent and this has caused the definition of “mental illness” to expand such that a larger portion is now diagnosed as “mentally ill.” 10% of the entire U.S. population is taking some kind of psych drug, and a quarter of all women 40-60 years old are prescribed anti-depressives. Additionally, people can gain control by claiming a mental debilitation: they get sympathy, concern & often monetary reward, the expectations placed on them are reduced & they are not held responsible for their actions, up to & including murder. Combine this with increased anonymity from public censor and the rewards of claiming mental illness outweigh the penalties. Plus, the pharmaceutical industry perceives mental illness as a goldmine: patients must take expensive drugs for life, usually at government expense, even though most drugs don't work for most people. Doctors recognize this trend: the current mental disorder manual had its adoption delayed for years because they thought its description of autism & other vague diagnosis were too broad. Obviously, mental illness is both subjective & relative.</p>