Re: "The Invisible Plague" - Torrey

Dave Bird wrote:
> 
> In article<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Squiggles
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >One of the books I am reading by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey is entitled as
> >above (it is not my favourite of his books), but it raises an
> >interesting proposition: that depression has increased proportionately
> >to the population in the past 100 years or so world-wide.
> 
>  This statement is ambiguous, but I assume you mean something like:
> "when the national population was 160,000 000 then 1.5% of us had at
>  least one episode of major depression but now it is 320,000 000 then,
>  say, 3.0% of us do." (If you meant it increased to stay 1.5% of
>  population as population grew, this would be supremely uninteresting).


>From the "Introduction" of the book:

  "Insanity is an invisible plague. There are not body counts with which
one can compare the present with the past.  In most countries, there
are remarkably few statistics that can be used to assess insanity
s prevalence over time.  Professional textbooks assume that insanity has
always been present in approximately the same numbers as now...."

The hypothesis that insanity is an epidemic now is first
proposed and then attempted to be proven.  That is my impression.

Chapter 14; p. 314:

  "The foregoing analysis of insanity rates in England, Ireland, Canada,
and the Unites States suggests that the prevalence of insanity, as
a rate per population, increased at least sevenfold between the
mid-eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries; in Ireland and
the United States, the increase appears to have been even greater.
If this increase was real, we have argued, then we are now in the midst
of an epidemic of insanity, an epidemic so insidious......."

To me, this sounds like a tautology.

As for the causes of the purported increase in insanity, 
various causes [interesting in themselves as they are 
compared with prior cultural habits] are discussed:

Diet - wheat glutten, potatoes with glycoalkaloid, may
have contributed to schizophrenia;

Alcohol - increase and its consequences;

Toxins - ogranophosphate in insecticides, latex allergies,
etc. [ i would by sympathetic to pollutants, myself ];

Medical care - better obstetrical care actually allowed
weaker [and presumably mentally ill at birth] children
to survive where they would not have before;

Infectious agents - syphillis, polio, pet cat theory;

Dr. Torrey presents these causes as possible industrialization
effects on mental health.  I think his strongest argument
here [which is really Cooper's Sartorius', and Warner's],
is that more people simply survived and therefore more
types of ill people survived.


> >I think he is still nursing the virus hypothesis to explain it, but I
> >have doubts about both:   the virus, and the increase; There are no
> >stats to support the counter-example that depression was not as well
> >recorded/observed/or admitted in past yrs., possibly due to shame, fear,
> >etc.
> 
>
> 
>  It is supremely difficult to deal with passing time, as past eras
>  are not conveniently around to be travelled to so that we know we
>  are applying our measures evenly.  INITIALLY I would discount passing
>  time altogether, and try to see if the same phenomenon did exist
>  in a uniform underlying way across various social conditions
>  but vary in proportion to certain provoking factors.


Yes, I think Dr. Torrey is aware of this.  And that is why
it is a hypothesis -- certainly some causes must have had 
a greater contribution to mental illness than before.  For
example alcohol use did rise late in culture, and medical
improvement did allow more people with illnesses to survive
birth.  But as for the endogenous causes  -- that is really
a mystery still.


> 
>  *If* there is a tissue pathology which manifests mainly as distortions
>  of social behaviour, then it is going to look different in different
>  contexts much more than, say, influenza does.  The superficial
>  expression of it might change;  the way even the same changes are
>  interpreted in different social contexts may change; and there
>  may be differences in reporting level due to differences in shame
>  or frankness attached to it (as of course applies also to AIDS).
>  Finally there may be a matter of "too trivial to record": that in
>  some contexts anyone manifesting major depression would die of
>  starvation or disease, and be recorded as the victim of such.
> 

What do you mean by tissue pathology?


>  I don't even propose to go into the whole ramifications of the
>  problem at the moment. The idea that "it does not simply vary
>  with the various social conditions as provoking factors, but
>  there is also something e.g. a spreading virus which is
>  independently increasing with time" is an extraordinary
>  proposition which requires proof before acceptance.
> 

I think that Dr. Torrey may be giving it as cultural example - 
after cats have been kept as pets only recently; animals
were historically viewed as soulless before Descartes,
and used for labour.


>  I am inclined to think the idea is untrue.


Yeah, some parts may be true.  The books itself is
very well-researched and covers a lot of interesting
cultural trends and historical events.  At the end
of the day, we still don't know the causes - either
a new model is needed or scientific tools as we have
then today just haven't hit the mark YET.

Squiggles