The human mind is a mysterious and fascinating place. It’s filled with your thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams and memories. There are 86,400 seconds in a twenty-four hour day, and the human mind has a different thought every 1.2 seconds. That’s about 72,000 thoughts a day; 504,000 thoughts a week; and a grand total of 26, 280,000 thoughts a year. The point is your brain is a busy, busy place.
It’s no wonder why neurologists, psychologists, and all sorts of other doctors and scientists are so transfixed on the brain. There are so many unanswered questions. One doctor stated at a college seminar, “Psychology, at large, is practically in the leech stage compared to most modern medicine.”
Mental illnesses are hard to deal with, whether you are a victim of one or have a close friend or family member suffering. They vary from depression to autism to schizophrenia, and all of them have different degrees and cases. No two people have brains that are exactly alike.
The current prevalence estimate is that about twenty percent of the U.S. population is affected by mental illness during a given year. The surveys predict that during a one year period, about twenty to twenty-three percent of the adult population -around forty-four million people- have diagnosable depression.
These statistics are rapidly increasing and theories on why are mainly based off of the economy. On October 29, 1929, the United States stock market crashed, leading to ten long devastating years you know as The Great Depression. In 1931, just two years into it, 20,000 people committed suicide from depression. In recent years, starting around 2004, our stock market began to drop yet again. Much like The Great Depression, suicides caused from stress went up by thirty percent.
Pharmaceutical companies saw the pattern and basically pounced on the opportunity. The average pharmaceutical company makes anywhere between forty to ninety million dollars in gross profit a year on antidepressants alone. Most of these are drugs that doctors aren’t even quite sure what exactly are in them or why they help you. A calculated 2,000 people die each day in the U.S. from using their antidepressant by their doctor’s orders.
It’s not entirely the doctor’s fault though. We just simply do not understand the functions of the human brain, let alone the malfunctions. It is going to take years of hard work and clinical studies to figure out how the brain works, and ultimately to fix one that isn’t working quite right. Thousands of doctors and scientists are working hard on this study, and maybe someday there will be answers to the millions of questions about the human brain.Hannah Wiltshire
