"The modern 9-to-5 treadmill way of life is often the cause, rather than any "disease" in the traditional sense of the word. Your brain is responding correctly to external stimuli."
Definitely true. Has anyone written a book about this yet? I know there are books that tangentially touch on it, like bowling alone, but I wonder if there is enough research to do the subject justice.
The problem cannot be solved by returning to the past: going back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle would doom 95+% of everyone currently living to starvation. But before a problem can be solved, people have to admit that it exists.
Start by reading about the mental effects of sleep deprivation - a problem mostly unknown to pre-agricultural humans. This topic is a hotbed of research, yet the one cure which is certain to work - creating opportunities for people to live lives ungoverned by clocks if they so choose - is of course not on the table.
"Lights Out" is a badly-written, breathless, and confusing book on the conflict between our evolutionary capabilities and post/industrial environment, from living conditions to diet. It's absolutely awful...but well-sourced, and broad in scope. I hate recommending it but if you can make it through the cringeworthy tabloid prose the second half of the book contains a decent academic bibliography.
Edit: two writers, one academic and one popular. bad combo.
I realize that a lot of people on Hacker News might consider this to be pseudoscience territory, but what about something like The Biology of Love by Arthur Janov?
His theory is that the primary cause of mental illness is intrauterine trauma, which negatively affects the structure of the emotional brain at a very crucial developmental stage. This trauma is undiagnosed and untreated in the newborn infant, and persists into adulthood, where it results in depression, addiction, panic attacks, etc.
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EDIT: asciilifeform, do you have some kind of axe to grind?
Anyways, here's a few links to scientific studies that support the relationship between intrauterine trauma and mental illness:
Relationship of maternal and perinatal conditions to eventual adolescent suicide
If we're going to go there, personally I prefer the possession-by-demons theory. It is equally plausible and substantiated.
Edit:
I don't deny the possibility that prenatal trauma could screw you up in any given way. Attributing all mental illness to it is ludicrous. It is the same situation as with vitamin deficiency - the arrow of causation points in only one direction. There are many ways to break something complicated.
Definitely true. Has anyone written a book about this yet? I know there are books that tangentially touch on it, like bowling alone, but I wonder if there is enough research to do the subject justice.