Mental Illness and War: A Comparison

Being a person with mental illness that is also a contributing member of society, I wonder sometimes about the parity of treatment of mental illnesses such as mine against other money-driven things such as war.

Bibliometrics

What is that word and how can I use it to make sense of the difference between war and mental illness? Bibliometrics is a word from library science that means "the more that is published on a topic, the more important the topic is in terms of money and energy being used." The term bibliometrics was coined before the invention of the World Wide Web so it encompasses book and periodical publications only. The concept of bibliometrics can be stretched to encompass the Web as well to be able to make some basic observations on how mental illness stacks up to war, for example, in terms of money and effort being used by our society. I'll use my own new term "Webliometrics" for that concept. Let's see how mental illness and war compare.

I go to a very good Web site for news: Google News. I go there almost every day to check out what is happening in the new and emerging treatments for schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. You can get there by going to www.google.com and clicking on "news." Basically it is a news service that updates itself automatically from over 4,500 online news sources around the world. Google News has a nifty feature that tells you in the past 30 days how many stories match your search terms.

On November 1st, 2003, I did a search on "schizophrenia" and got 721 hits. "Not bad," I think to myself. What about depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder? "Mental illness" comes up with 2,530 hits. "Depression" as a psychiatric illness comes up 5,670 times. "Bipolar" comes up 617 times. "Obsessive compulsive disorder" comes up 153 times, and "borderline personality disorder" comes up 34 times. For everything dealing with mental illness that I searched, it came up with 9,725 stories.

Next, I do a search on war which retrieves 75,900 articles. So, compared to war, mental illness is not given anywhere as much energy or power by our society. There is about ten times more published on war; therefore, there is about ten times as much money and energy being used in the war effort.

If the U.S. put the kind of money and effort that is being put into the War on Terror into research for cures to mental illnesses, we would break scientific ground every week! The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) has made a statement about schizophrenia recently regarding the powerful genomic technologies we possess. NAMI national's executive director Richard C. Birkel stated that scientists may be able to find a cure for schizophrenia in ten years. That should give a lot of people a lot of hope. (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/031023/dcth070_1.html)

If the cure is in sight for schizophrenia, probably this holds true for most of the serious mental disorders. It's my opinion that it's not a matter of "if" we can find cures for serious mental illnesses with this technology. Rather, it's a question of when. The more effort and money that is thrown behind the search for cures, the faster these cures will come about! It's only a matter of time.

Maybe it doesn't make sense for America to throw money at mental problems because it is not worth it economically? Nonsense! Depression alone costs the U.S. economy $31 billion each year! (http://www.ajc.com/health/content/health/special/18depression.html)

If it takes ten years to find a cure for depression and the other mental disorders, that's well over $300 billion the U.S. is losing in productivity for these years. So, if the reason we are not more aggressively seeking cures for these mental diseases is not due to economics, then we must ask why. Is it because of stigma? Discrimination? Hatred? My personal belief is that it is the ignorance of mainstream society to the possibilities for cures for these diseases.

These diseases have existed so long that probably many people don't believe that cures may actually exist in the next few years. I'm just saying mental illness research should get more of the pie of money that is out there. I'm sure anybody afflicted with a mental illness or has a family member with a mental illness would have a similar sentiment.

Editor's Note: According to the site http://www.costofwar.com, the U.S. spent approximately $87 billion on the war so far. Congress has approved a total of $150 billion according to The New York Times. In contrast, the National Institute of Mental Health got $1.35 Billion for fiscal 2003. That is $150 billion for war vs. $1.35 billion for mental health research.