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.

Let’s turn now to war, ever a pioneer in the field of ruining human brains. Like sex, war will be done remotely. Shoot ‘em up games have been getting more realistic and armies have begun using them as

recruitment tools

. Given that we’ll probably be living in a dystopian, war-ravaged planet, unmanned drones will be used to cut the bullshit and people will spend their evenings working off their National Service credits by gunning down enemy forces (or were they civilians? Whatever!) in a water war on a distant continent from the comfort of their livings rooms. If you thought TV was bad for your sense of empathy, try making yourself a candidate for the

Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal

while waiting for your pizza to arrive.

Drones will also be used to ensure that populations are kept super obedient. CCTV makes us paranoid by making us feel that the street we’re bowling down is full of threats. Multiply that paranoia by ten when you start to feel like

you

are the threat, as the night is punctuated by drones that can not only see you, but hear your

phone conversations

and shine

laser beams

at you and

shout at you

to stop if you do anything that looks a bit sus'.

It’s questionable that we’ll be able to do anything about this level of State prying. Anybody getting uppity about it is likely to fall prey to one of the many new toys the police will have access to, such as the Long Range Acoustic Device that produces a sound louder than a human’s pain threshold and could ruin your hearing forever if you dare to attend a

protest

. How's your sense of powerlessness?

Hopefully, we’ll have a little more control over our use of technology in our social lives. Sara Thomée, a psychologist at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden says that: “The risk comes when technology gets in the way of healthy behaviours like resting. We need to learn how to handle things. New technology puts a lot of responsibility on the individual to set boundaries.”

But tech companies are determined to ensure we’re never left without their devices. Think about how distracting it is to have your Blackberry’s red dot beeping at you and then imagine that red dot being beamed directly onto your eyeballs. The kind of people who probably aren’t worth talking to in the first place are already tuning out from real conversations so they can text and tweet. This tendency could grow to the point where some people view talking to people in real life as something done by overzealous purists, like listening to vinyl.

In a cruel twist, it may be that the very thing that makes us ill will also make us better. Fred Muench, a clinical psychologist and a Professor of Psychology at Columbia University, believes that the meaningless lifts we experience when people "Like" our status on Facebook or retweet us on Twitter could be used to manipulate us into behaving in ways we would not otherwise – “for instance, fostering exercise in non-exercisers through little rewards”. We will even use technological means to tackle problems like technology dependency, he reckons.

It will be gadgets, not humans, who tell us when we’re sick. “You will not be going to your doctor or therapist to diagnose the majority of health and mental health conditions in about ten to 15 years time – diagnosis will be based in our natural environments where it should have always been assessed,” says Fred.

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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