Almost half of adults will suffer from a mental health
condition at some stage in their life and more than a third of GP surgery
consultations are due to mental problems. One in four people have been
diagnosed with some type of mental health problem - most commonly depression.
In addition, 18 per cent said they had suffered from such illness, but never
been diagnosed. The UK now has the seventh highest prescribing rate for
antidepressants in the Western world, separate figures show, with around four
million Britons taking them each year - twice as many as a decade ago. Yet the Medical
Research Council (MRC) spends just three per cent of its research budget
funding studies into mental illness, most of which goes towards genetics or
neuroscience.
Mental illness mostly caused by life events not genetics,
argue psychologists. Mental illness is largely caused by social crises such as
unemployment or childhood abuse and too much money is spent researching genetic
and biological factors, psychologists have warned. Over the past decade funding
bodies like the MRC have spent hundreds of millions on determining the biology
of mental illness. But while there has been some success in uncovering genes
which make people more susceptible to various disorders, specialists say that
the true causes of depression and anxiety are from life events and environment,
and research should be directed towards understanding the everyday triggers.
Peter Kinderman, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the
University of Liverpool, explained: "Of course every single action, every
emotion I've ever had involves the brain, so to have a piece of scientific
research telling us that the brain is involved in responding emotionally to
events doesn't really advance our understanding very much. And yet it detracts
from the fact that when unemployment rates go up in a particular locality you
get a measurable number of suicides. It detracts from the idea that trauma in
childhood is a very very powerful predictor of serious problems like
experiencing psychotic events in adult life, so of course the brain is involved
and of course genes are involved, but not very much, and an excessive focus on
those issues takes us away from these very important social factors"
Prof Richard Bentall, also of Liverpool University added:
"It's a tragedy actually. The UK Medical Research Council is one of the
biggest funders of medical research in the UK but if you look at the things
that they fund, by far the majority are things like brain scanners or gene
sequencing machines, almost none of it is going towards understanding
psychological mechanisms or social circumstances by which these problems
develop. It is impossible to get funding to look at these kind of things."
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