For a while I have been thinking about the reasons why health (and, political) problems increasingly become framed in a biological and chemical context. The creepy articles about ‘resiliance’ and the treatment of depression by drugs both initiated this internal search. I think a particularly important catalyst, is of course the capacity to uncover these ‘causes’ through genetic analysis, blood samples and large scale studies under the scientific method. These alone however cannot explain the exploding industry surrounding psycotropic drugs, cancer medication, mental health, genetic tendancies for alcoholism or other addictions, and neonatal screening.
My problem in developing a theory to explain this arose when I kept searching for solutions that focused on the types of inputs and rationale for finding problems, when in fact the issue was in the rationale of solutions. Transitions in the framing of health problems link to economic and technological developments somewhat out of the hands of individual people. Cost benefit analysis drives the processes that develop this framework. My experience in the general age of human development we share is stratified by a diffuse sense of dislocation and separation from other people. I feel drawn out and fragmented by the multiple spaces I live in, separated and isolated by technologies that gratify a particular form of individualism that physically hides other people, and drawn apart by social norms privileging interactions on a model picked up on television. I feel all of these things drawing me forth toward something that can be called depression, attention deficits, irritable bowel syndrome, or any number of other ills and abnormalities. The cost of treating these causes cannot be charged to any one bill or person, and if they could, overwhelm those at fault. The benefits can only be measured in the accumulation of small joys, too small or poorly suited to ever show up as assets to ‘society.’ The costs then benefits those offering solutions that adapt to the situations at the root. These solutions also offer new opportunities for profit that produce willing problem solvers looking to capitalize.
Equally dangerous perhaps is the gradual adoption of what we now know as the disease for the norm. A new psychology of pleasure based around the technologies of disaffection poses a danger with equal magnitude. Of course, why not melancholy and individualism? Why not divide ourselves from our selves? Any of these could be adopted as the norm, making pathologies out of love and diseases out of humanity.
Duncan
