June 27, 2005
Families and schizophrenia
The Washington Post has a must-read article today, Social Network's Healing Power Is Borne Out in Poorer Nations, on how poor countries often do a better job than rich ones with patients with mental illness.
Why? Parents, husbands, wives, children work together to monitor a mentally ill person's behavior, adjusting their drugs, quietly arranging make-work jobs and keeping them part of a social milieu.
This immediately struck a huge chord with me -- it is a central theme of my first book, 
An Amateur's Guide to the Planet. The West's nuclear family, it seems, is quite good at freeing its members for individual achievement. The extended family, by contrast, serves as a far better safety net for the frail and vulnerable. It's a pattern that was obvious to me in my world travels, from Ireland to Africa, in so many places where the village idiot and the town drunk are considered harmless and are humored by all as they wander, unhospitalized, over country roads and into shops.
This article, by Shankar Vedantam, also jibes with a fascinating book by Martin Seligman entitled
Learned Optimism, which holds that far higher proportions of Western populations suffer from depression today than a century ago, when more people belonged to extended families, churches and community organizations -- all bulwarks against the difficulty of negotiating the modern world.
Bravo to Vedantam for spotlighting our overly technical reliance on the modern religions -- psychiatry, counseling and miracle drugs -- and showing how family healing and love are crucial too.
