If mental illness was a real illness these results would be frightening. It would be like seeing several times the prevalence of heart disease in the Uk as there was in Nigeria.
Instead these and other pieces of evidnece are often forgotten in favour of using the evidence for medication and psychiatry working on the individual.
This I would call sociopathology except the word is already in use. Poorly. I mean a cause of illness in society. Perhaps aetiosociopathology might bewhat I mean.
We are, after all, products of our conditioning. What if there was some problem with all of our conditioning?
Here's what I mean in an example but probably explained badly.
Way back in the day when Kraeplin and Freud ruled the roost there was an epidemic of hysteria in the US and UK. And yet today there is no epidemic of conversion disorders or disorders related to sex which would be what hysteria is now called.
What happened? How was this healed?
Doctors used to bring their female patients to climax before the vibrator was invented as a medical treatment. So was it this?
Or was it the women's sexual liberation movement? Prudish Victorian society was replaced with more liberal and affirmative sexual mores.
Or was it acceptance of the symptoms of what used to be pathologised as hysteria? When people are hysterical now they're not called ill. They're just called hysterical. This is unlike unhappiness which is often named using the medicalisation.
This is a really heavy point which clever people could write a lot more about. The last paragraph about medicalisation of the human condition might be a phd or a book or something. Hopefully written by someone who can communicate better than I.
But do you get where I'm coming from? Do you get me?
Just think about the title.
Go on. You can finish this one off yourself.
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