What Mental Illnesses Will the Future Give Us?

Technology is often blamed for allowing particular kinds of mental illness to flourish – think “internet addiction” becoming a bona fide thing last year, or tune into any talk radio station late at night. As such, it seems only sensible to try to imagine what the technology of tomorrow will do to our minds. Will the future turn us into a race of emotionally impenetrable cyborgs, a bunch of hypersensitive, reclusive narcissists, or a schizophrenic mixture of both?

To look into the future, you don’t need a crystal ball. You need porn and war, the two things in which the future – in the shape of new technological advances – tends to arrive first. I’m a lover, not a fighter (or, at least, a wanker and a coward), so I’m going to begin with porn.

The people who make it have long speculated about using motion sensor technology, hooked up to fleshlights and corresponding smut vids, to offer people the chance to be completely immersed in their own wank fantasies. The laptops and tablets we’re using as surrogate bedtime buddies today will be replaced by head-mounted displays which will turn our entire field of vision into an interactive computer screen.

Porn tube sites have already been blamed for messing up our IRL sex drives, the sheer perverted deluge of what you can find online spoiling our libidos and turning us into depraved fuck-snobs. The future looks like lying in bed with wires coming out of you, eyes hooked up to a bunch of screens, fucking a robot. What’s that going to do to your sanity?

Not a great deal of good, you’d imagine: a more potent recipe for a mass outbreak of depersonalization disorder, autism and paraphilia diagnoses has surely never been devised by anyone whose primary aim isn’t to destroy people.

A future crazy person.

If the companies behind new technology are to be believed, its effects are straightforwardly wonderful. And why wouldn’t you believe those companies? The only thing they have to skew their perspective is money, rather than a reasoned analysis of the benefits and risks. Minor risks like becoming a species so pathetic we won’t know where to find food if our phone battery dies.

It seems that humanity has become pretty adept at outsmarting itself, cleverly inventing things that cause our brains to freak out. As Charlotte Fantelli, founder of Uncovered, a magazine dealing with mental health issues, told me: “The rise in the use of technology and the rise in mental illness is no coincidence – the two have gone hand in hand. People’s social skills and sense of community have diminished rapidly.”

This might sound like bullshit, but science backs Charlotte up. In 2006, research from Cornell University in New York linked high levels of autism to the amount of TV children watch. The argument goes that the parts of the brain that process visual information are unusual in autistic children and that kids watching TV will concentrate on the screen rather than their sibling eating bogies next to them.

By 2010, Iowa State University was blaming high-paced modern TV edits and video games for giving kids shorter attention spans and even ADHD, naming it the “MTV effect”. (Really, MTV, in 2010?)

Also likely to make you want to sit in a darkened room listening to Prurient, according to research in 2012 from the University Gothenburg, is the constant use of computers and phones, which can increase stress and make you restless too. Apparently if we’re constantly checking to see if anyone retweets our bon mots we’re more likely to neglect the other things that are important if you want to qualify as a fully functioning person, like eating or sleeping.

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For example, your phone will listen to the tone of your voice and be able to tell your psychiatrist if you’re feeling depressed because you’ve been talking in a dull monotone for three days straight. This is basically the mental health version of the diagnostic toilet bowl, which mines your every turd for data about your physical wellbeing. So, we’re all going to be living in our own personal Channel 4 health programme.

Which sounds disconcertingly like something out of Huxley’s imagination to me. When I suggest this to Fred, he – not very reassuringly – replies that, “technology is inherently Orwellian – Google has more data on your behaviour than your therapist. However, you can always opt out.” This is certainly the case, as I don’t have a therapist.

Unless we all opt out, it looks like the technologies of the future will make more of us mentally ill, while at the same time getting better at diagnosing and healing us. Kind of like someone punching you in the mouth and then offering you a bandage. So that’s alright, then.

Sara reckons that opting out may indeed look like the most attractive option for many: “We still have the biological system that we had many thousands of years ago, so we still need to do certain things to be healthy. If we’re always in a virtual world, I’m sure there are going to be cults where people go out into the woods and smell the trees so they can be in the real world.”

Personally, I hope we can gain a little more control over the technologies that we use, rather than either getting madly addicted to them or going cold-turkey. The choice between existing within the parameters of a benign technocracy that cures you with the same poison it uses to makes you ill, or picking berries with a primitivist cult in the woods, is making me feel kinda blue.

Follow Simon on Twitter @SimonChilds13

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