Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature, A decade for psychiatric disorders, Nature 463, 9 (7 January 2010) | doi:10.1038/463009a; Published online 6 January 2010
What will the next 10 year bring? Nature’s editorial takes a look at the stigma that still surrounds mental illness and ponders the challenges ahead in the next decade.
There are many ways in which the understanding and treatment of conditions such as schizophrenia are ripe for a revolution.
A media circus surrounded President Bill Clinton’s visit to a New York medical centre in 2004 for a quadruple heart bypass. Yet barely a whisper was heard about other high-profile individuals’ visits there for the treatment of psychiatric disorders.
In Britain, the public donates £500 million (US$800 million) each year to charities for cancer research. For mental-health research, the figure is a few million, and most of that is for work on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, rather than for earlier-onset conditions that can undermine people’s entire lives, such as depressive disorders.
It is time for such disparities to be addressed in a more coherent and aggressive way than in the past. The stigma of psychiatric disorders is misplaced, their burdens on society are significantly greater than more publicized diseases in developed and developing nations alike, and biomedical science is poised to make significant strides. The timescales are daunting and the challenges great — human neurons are less accessible than tumour cells, separating genetic and environmental influences is tough, and the diagnosis of the conditions is highly problematic. There is much to be done, and a decade is the timescale over which enhanced commitment is required.
The problem of stigma persists. In some countries, progress in this regard has been made with depression: a few high-profile and brave sufferers in some Western countries have stood up and identified themselves. By contrast, schizophrenia, when covered by the media at all, is mostly associated with murders carried out by a tiny minority of sufferers who have an acute form of the condition.
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Nature 463, 9 (7 January 2010) | doi:10.1038/463009a; Published online 6 January 2010
