McGill News reviews the new book Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness, and discusses its themes with co-author McGill Canada Research Chair in Philosophy and Psychiatry Ian Gold. The book, reports McGill News, explores how expanding public surveillance may be reinforcing or even creating new forms of paranoic disorders about being watched and tracked. “We live in a culture with cameras in public places, where governments sometimes spy on their citizens, and someone could reveal your secrets on Facebook,” Gold tells McGill News. “People who are predisposed to certain kinds of mental illness are very sensitive to fears of being watched and manipulated by others. So our culture could be pushing these people over the edge.”
The co-authors “hope that their book will help to restore some balance to psychiatry,” reports McGill News, “which they feel strongly emphasizes biological causes for mental illness, while neglecting the role played by social influences.”
“We would never say that cancer is a biological illness, so it doesn’t matter whether or not you smoke. But, in psychiatry, certainly in the case of severe mental illness, the causal role of the environment is considered very secondary,” Gold says. “Schizophrenia is often characterized as a break with reality. But these people are, in fact, very sensitive to the ideas in the environment. Unsurprisingly, when the possibility of real threats emerge in the culture, it will be latched onto by people with schizophrenia or other psychotic illnesses.”
“Where are the hidden cameras?” How culture affects mental illness (McGill News, August 11, 2014)
