Since I have been seeing fewer patients I have had more time to read and hang around and talk to people. Now, as before, I am reminded that I am a weird guy, as I do not read much about which celebrity is getting married again, or which teenage star has turned naughty, or even the in-depth coverage of which fanatical group is running wild, raping and killing, and calling it something else-- although I am kind of fascinated at how easily a person's mind can justify anything.
Mostly, I have been learning more about how we humans operate. Since the start of the new millennium there has been so much progress in so many sciences, due to all the developments in new technologies. I am constantly reading about new findings about how our brains work, and new genetic-environmental-behavior relationships, and new behavioral tendencies that we still carry that are the result of a million years of evolution.
We can now see that the effects of brain injury spread like pebbles in a pool, sending out waves to far shores. A soldier comes back from one of our endless wars and is violent and depressed around his family. How much is this due to his being inside a tank when an IED blew-up and his brain got rattled? And this may have happened to him five times.
Then his family is frightened, his kids are upset, the community doesn't know what to do and the VA, like Forsythia says about other mental health clinics, is far away.
And the kid doesn't have to be a soldier. He could be a high school football player. He could have an alcoholic parent who smacks him around. He could have gown up with diet of lots of fats and sugars. He could have grown up next to a toxic waste dump or an oil refinery, or even a coal-fired power plant.
We are getting very clear evidence about how strong these effects can be. But again, doing anything with this knowledge will be expensive. It will be expensive to the people who are least affected by these factors. That's why change is still off in the distance.
If "Personal Responsibility" means that I've gone mine and I'm keeping it, but you're fee to go find yours, then things will get worse before they get better. But if it means that we are all responsible for the family, the community and the world we live in, then we have the knowledge and the technology to make marvelous lives for almost all of us.
It's not impossible.
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