I recently watched two videos offering differing ideas about the causes of psychosis. One was a TED talk by Thomas R. lnsel, M.D. director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The other was a BBC Horizon documentary, Why Did I Go Mad? Insel. Why did I go Mad? One is an interesting glimpse into psychosis via three people who hear voices and hallucinate. The other is a mystifyingly popular conjuring trick suggesting psychosis is a brain disease that we can discover before it even manifests and all but eradicate hopefully like Leukaemia. Let's start with the magical thinking trick. What Insel starts with is the common psychiatric approach to talking about madness. He talks about biological illnesses that have nothing in common with psychiatric conditions. It's what they do. He begins by listing a series of biological conditions; heart disease, leukaemia, etc. of which science has rather wonderfully cut the morbidity rates. "Early detect
There's a mental health crisis among our young people. And it has nothing to do with mobile phones or video games*. * Though it probably does. Not only is there a worsening crisis in the mental health of our fresh faced recent arrivals but to make matters worse, accessing support services is getting harder. Literally no one could predict this outcome from cutting taxes and public spending. So, there have been numerous articles recently decrying the appalling lack of provision of mental health care, specifically for young people, and highlighting the fact that either there are far more young people experiencing mental illness or that health services have magically got better at spotting it and thus more are being diagnosed. More are certainly taking medication. Two recent BBC pieces found anti-depressant prescriptions for under 12 year olds has risen by 27% over the last three years (to be fair it's a small number so any increase might look more severe) and a gen