You are currently browsing the archive for the Sept/Oct 2007: Mental Health category.
It’s the great paradox of our time: poverty makes us more susceptible to mental illness, while affluence drives us to depression. Exploring these topics and many more, Briarpatch takes a fresh and fearless look at the state of our mental health in an age of growing inequality.
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By J. F. Conway
Briarpatch Magazine
September 2007
While the condition of a people is prosperous, and uninterrupted by violent and sudden changes, insanity never exceeds. But when the dispensations of Providence fail of their accustomed bounteousness, or man by trouble is afflicted beyond his nature, or by his own wilfulness o’erleaps the bounds which nature and reason defines; then insanity is engendered; and an increased number of lunatics indefinitely swells the catalogues of human calamities.
- G. M. Burrows , An inquiry into certain errors relative to insanity, 1820
What good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?
- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930
Back in the 19th century, the people charged with the care, treatment, and control of “lunatics,” as the mentally ill were often indelicately labeled in those days, began to notice repeating social patterns in the occurrence of the afflictions. They observed that the various mental illnesses were selectively, rather than randomly, distributed among the population, and that they tended to prey particularly on the lower classes. These were the first epidemiological studies of psychopathology, and they focused primarily on the social conditions associated with the prevalence of mental disorders.
By Peter Dodson
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2007
Illustration by Aimee van Drimmelen
Of all the notions by which our society abides, none influences our daily life more than the idea that “money buys happiness.” It is why Canadians spend an average of 8.9 hours a day working, up from 8.4 hours just 20 years ago. It is why we forfeited 32 million vacation days last year and have over $750 billion in debt. It is why we average 12 full days per year commuting to and from work. But if happiness is what we’re after, there’s a growing body of evidence that suggests we’re on a dead-end path. While our houses get bigger and our televisions become wider, flatter, more colourful and cheaper, greater numbers of us are becoming depressed.
By Stanford Sinclair
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2007
You do not know what wars
are going on down there
where the spirit meets the bone.
- Miller Williams
Illustration by TJ Vogan
I’ll never forget my first day at the Centre, the beginning of a nearly two-year period that would alter my life forever. They’re not all bad memories, but still, they stand as reminders of a traumatic childhood and a time of immense and difficult transition in my young life.
The Child Study Centre was a children’s mental health facility, equipped and designed for children with a variety of psychosocial and behavioural problems. The building itself sat on the grounds of the University of Ottawa, at 120 University Private. I was ten when I first went there. It was the summer after I had completed grade four. I was there because my adoptive family could no longer manage my disruptive and self-destructive behaviour.
By Tracey Mitchell
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2007
A review of:
Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President
By Justin A. Frank
Harper, 2004
The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis
By Paul Levy
Authorhouse, 2006
The Madness of King George
By Michael K. Smith & Matt Wuerker
Common Courage, 2003
“You’re crazy!” “That’s insane!” “This is a psychotically good muffin!” Indirect (and often unintentional) references to mental health and mental states have become a staple of contemporary colloquial English. These terms have also become part of the political discourse, used in both earnestly serious tones and in mocking ones, to describe political actors, most notably U.S. president George W. Bush.
