Polemos

psychopathic corporate and governmental leaders for example. Most of us however are more or less functional while those of us who are simply incapable of cognitively functioning as a productive cog in the wheels of commerce are increasingly being detained at her majesty’s pleasure in our neo modern psychiatric asylums, also sometimes called gaols.

But then perhaps that’s always been the way for those incapable of functioning in a society and its free markets when cut off from family support. At the moment in Australia the family is still the primary safety net for mental illness, supported by invalid pensions and emergency hospital care in the overloaded public mental health industry. Apparently about 1 in 100 of us suffer schizophrenic breakdown which is on the extreme end of mental disturbance, the diagnosis grades from there into ’schizophrenogenic’ manic depression and less extreme forms of bipolar disorder through to the mainstream depression epidemic that is now treated in youth and the workforce with the widespread use of anti-depressants. So with schizophrenia, on the extreme end of mental dysfunction, we have perhaps 200 000 people who are severely incapacitated and in need of care. Of those who don’t commit suicide (4 in 10 attempt it, 3 in 20 succeed) but still fall through the family support safety net they either end up on the streets, in locked hospital wards, in prison, or if they are very lucky and functional enough they might end up in increasingly underfunded halfway houses. And that’s just for the extreme end of the mental health scale.

Before the medical profession took on mental dysfunction as a medical problem in the 1800’s the problem was solved by imprisonment for the vagrancy and petty crime that accompany homelessness. Severe cases went to asylum prisons which eventually developed into the mental health hospitals we have today. It seems that the US is trending back towards the earlier historical model of imprisonment and I guess that’s inevitable once government social funding gives way to free market economics. With the advent of peak oil if social equity declines along with energy equity then the least productive of us will be the first to suffer and schizophrenic sufferers generally have a very poor prognosis. But then with energy decline so do old people, injured and sick workers, and I guess the children of the poor as well if you want to press the point.

Generally, at the moment at least, a schizophrenic diagnosis here in Australia still guarantees an invalid pension, and Centrelink staff seem to be reticent to even interview them for review. However, it remains that without family support, emergency hospital care, pension and the medication provided by the PBS many sufferers simply die young. And who said life wasn’t meant to be easy?

As a nation we’ve already done the least we can for these people, and with energy decline imminent I’m sure there’s so much less we can do.