Fascinating piece at WaPo about studies of schizophrenia in third world countries. According to the study, people with strong family ties are more likely to overcome mental illness. Link. Excerpts:
[A remarkable three-decade-long study by the World Health Organization finds that] people with schizophrenia, a deadly illness characterized by hallucinations, disorganized thinking and social withdrawal, typically do far better in poorer nations such as India, Nigeria and Colombia than in Denmark, England and the United States.
The astounding result calls into question one of the central tenets of modern psychiatry: that a "brain disease" such as schizophrenia is best treated by hospitals, drugs and biomedical interventions.
European and U.S. psychiatrists were so shocked by the initial findings in the 1970s that they assumed something was wrong with the study. They repeated it. The second trial produced the same result. The best explanation, researchers concluded, is that the stronger family ties in poorer countries have a profound impact on recovery. . .
Most people with schizophrenia in India live with their families or other social networks -- in sharp contrast to the United States, where most patients are homeless, in group homes or on their own, in psychiatric facilities or in jail. Many Indian patients are given low-stress jobs by a culture that values social connectedness over productivity; patients in the United States are usually excluded from regular workplaces.
Indian families sit in on doctor-patient discussions because families are considered central to the problem and the solution. In America, doctor-patient conversations are confidential -- and psychiatrists primarily focus on brain chemistry.
If family ties help treat mental illness, is it far fetched to think that family ties could help prevent mental illness? And if that's the case, is it any surprise that mental illness seems to be increasing in the Western world at the same time that procreation is decreasing and an increasingly-mobile society deprives people of extended family connections?
Maybe those agrarians knew something: it's inherently unhealthy to be removed from one's roots. It has just taken us fifty years to begin to see it.
