Medical research: If depression were cancer (2014)
On the question of whether &quot;mental illnesses&quot; are diseases or simply arise from behaviour (as discussed in comments below).<p>My personal theory is that they are neither. Most mental illnesses are actually social illnesses. That is: we&#x27;ve engineered a society that is hostile to a set of (perfectly healthy) behavioural phenotypes.<p>It&#x27;s already known that within different cultures and environments, those with certain &quot;mental illnesses&quot; fare better  or worse.<p>Nobody with cancer &quot;thrives&quot; depending on their cultural environment, but if you&#x27;re an engineer on the Autistic spectrum, you might. If you&#x27;re an artist with ADHD, you thrive. Even schizophrenics do well in some cultural environments.<p>Force someone who was born bipolar, or with attention deficit in a society that demands them to sit in an office (or classroom) for 8-10 hours a day, every day, at the same time, and focus on the same thing, and sure... they will become &quot;disordered&quot;. Just as most people would go crazy in the sort of fluid or even chaotic environment that those people would thrive in.<p>* * *<p>A Thought Experiment:<p>Imagine you were born into a world where the predominant behavioural phenotype is bipolar or ADHD: there are no set work hours, only goal posts. Teams work in frenzies of 24 - 36 sleepless hours, followed by a day or two off. Maybe one week there&#x27;s no work, but then for a month it&#x27;s crunch time. Some days you work nights, some days you work early in the morning. Everyone wears many hats, otherwise they&#x27;d become bored; and you&#x27;re expected to do the same.<p>To everyone, this is just the way things are. To you... your stress levels are through the roof, you can&#x27;t focus in such an environment, yet everyone is wondering what&#x27;s this guy&#x27;s problem? Why does he have such a hard time working in a fluid environment? Why does he need special treatment and be given evenly-distributed work at predictable hours?<p>Clearly there&#x27;s some sort of disorder going on here. So you read some pamphlets and you see a Doctor... maybe there <i>is</i> something wrong with you, you think. It&#x27;s so natural for everyone else, yet you can barely function in society. Luckily for you, there is &quot;help&quot;: the standard treatment for Rigid Thought Pattern Disorder is a 50mc dose of LSD every three days. Sure, it makes you not quite feel like yourself, but look at how much you&#x27;ve been improving since you started treatment! You no longer sleep regular hours like you used to, you&#x27;re no longer displaying Rigid Thought Patterns. Just give the treatment some time and you&#x27;ll get used to the side effects.<p>* * *<p>I have no science to back this up of course. Just something I think about sometimes at 3 in the morning while I&#x27;m having a particularly productive night...<p>(Yes it&#x27;s likely that this would be a rather inefficient world in many ways, so it makes sense for the predominant behavioural phenotype to be more predictable and stable. The point being, in both cases the non-neurotypical individual can have a positive impact if they&#x27;re not regarded as deficient, but if instead we see these differences in behaviour the same way we see differences in height, strength, or any other physical attribute.)