One of the boys in the documentary cracked under the strain. He went missing. The police found him and took him to a psychiatric facility. Others managed to adjust, and there were even some happy endings, but at what price, one could only wonder.
A few months ago, I found myself in conversation with someone I hadn't seen in years. I speculated that had I been born into an agrarian society - the kind with extended families - my bipolar probably never would have surfaced. Yes, I would have the same bipolar genes, only these genes would be interacting with a more benign environment.
Not that life on the farm in primitive conditions is easy, but I would have been spared from having to perpetually perform according to other people's expectations under tight deadlines in pressure cooker conditions in cramped and unhealthy environments.
In "The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present," well-known psychiatric researcher and advocate E Fuller Torrey MD makes a convincing case that the rise of severe mental illness - in epidemic proportions - coincided with the industrial revolution. In "Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness," author Joshua Shenk notes that the new opportunities afforded farm boys such as Lincoln came at the expense of the social support structures they had left behind.
When, as an ambitious young attorney, Lincoln's rising political star crashed to earth, so did - for the time being - his sanity.
So is mental illness an industrial disease? Is this why the Nigerians - materially impoverished as they may be - get off lightly?
A 2000 Gallup Poll found that 80 percent of US workers experienced stress on the job and nearly half said they needed help in coping with it. Twenty-five percent felt like screaming or shouting due to job stress, 14 percent felt like striking a co-worker, and 10 percent worried about a colleague becoming violent. Stress accounts for some $300 billion a year lost by US business in the form of absenteeism and other costs.
