Modern medicine and technology has undeniably made great advances for us–those lucky enough to enjoy its benefits. We now live longer and healthier lives, no longer needing to worry about many once-deadly diseases. We are able to screen ourselves and even our potential children for genetic illnesses. We are so optimistic about medicine that we’ve started to concentrate more on fixing and enhancing our exteriors, rather than insuring that our body works on the inside. However, one aspect of medicine that has remained at a relative plateau is psychiatry. With the advances of technology come more hectic lives and busier schedules, allowing less and less time for taking care of our own mental health. People are now more prone to breakdowns, and psychological disorders and diseases are as rampant as ever. How do we deal with affected individuals? Most of these afflictions have no known long-lasting cure. We put these patients into special institutions, away from society, so that they won’t disrupt the lives of the rest of us; we medicate their symptoms — turn them into virtual vegetables — claiming to calm their inner demons.

In many ways, the modernization of our culture has adversely affected those with mental health problems. Studies by the World Health Organization have found that in poorer, “third world” countries, the lack of our advanced medicine has been a blessing to people suffering from schizophrenia, a socially debilitating disease. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by an impaired perception of reality and significant social and occupational dysfunction. Those diagnosed with schizophrenia often experience hallucinations, disorganized thoughts, a lack of motivation, difficulty expressing and experiencing normal emotions, impaired psychological functions, and poverty of speech. Currently, apart from treating hallucinations and putting patients into psychiatric facilities, modern medicine in developed countries predicts limited chances of recovery. Basically, if you’re a schizophrenic in a developed country, if you’re lucky, you will likely live out the rest of your life in a psychiatric hospital, taking drugs to help you control hallucinations and possibly violent behavior.

According the “Social Network’s Healing Power is Borne Out in Poorer Nations,” a piece published in the Washington Post by Shankar Vedantam on June 27, 2005, the rate of recovery is much higher in poorer countries that lack psychiatric facilities and have very little, if any at all, medical intervention in the lives of schizophrenics. The article focused on schizophrenia in India, one of the countries where the World Health Organization ran a three-decade-long study that showed that schizophrenics fared better in these poorer countries, with significant rates of recovery, than in developed countries like England and the U.S. The difference in treatment in these poor countries is that for the most part, patients are encouraged to live normal lives. They spend very little time in hospitals, their care is by and the large provided by family members, and and doctors stop medications when the patients get better. Schizophrenics often have jobs, get married, and are in general more socially connected. According to the article, between half and two-thirds of the patients monitored in the WHO study became symptom-free, compared to only a third of the patients from rich countries.

The main point of the article was really the fact that it was the social connectedness that seems to be the reason the patients recover so much better in poor countries, where they often do not have benefits of modern medicine. Whereas in the U.S. a schizophrenic is prescribed drugs and a hospital stay, in India psychiatrists often recommend that families secretly pay employers to give patients fake jobs, so that patients have regular work hours, have the satisfaction of getting paid, and enjoy the social connections that are inherent in a work environment. It is the continuation of the patients’ networks that seems to be the key to the cure of schizophrenia.

While this article is only tangentially related to the material we covered in class, I thought it brought up an interesting aspect of the importance of social networks. Whereas we’ve been focusing on the strength of weak ties, and really the connectivity of weakly related individuals (auctions, buyers and sellers, the Internet), this article brings to light the importance of strong ties and a person’s social network in their health, a topic we haven’t really considered. While weak ties are a better way to spread information faster in a network, strong ties and just the continual existence of a network is linked to overcoming a debilitating psychiatric disorder like schizophrenia! Something interesting to consider is whether our culture is becoming too focused on a networks of weak ties, Internet-based relationships and connections where ties are formed by clicking on the “Add friend” button, where individuals very much still remain separate nodes. What are we losing by loosening the value of strong tie networks, where families are still a very central theme? Is our focus on the spread of information entirely beneficial and socially optimal?