Restless Leg Syndrome or "my culture is making me ill..."

If you currently, or have ever, or have even thought that maybe you do, suffer from RLS, or Restless Leg Syndrome, I am sorry. I do not believe you.

This topic has been simmering in the back of my mind for many years now, and a weekend of listening to The Corrections (by Jonathan Franzen) while driving to and from a snowy camping trip in Vermont, away from the insanity of modern society, spurred me to voice my thoughts, at least in a preliminary way.

Particularly, my thinking has been focused on the distinction between diseases (or "syndromes," "infections," or whichever other piece of medical nomenclature) and simple states of existence. On the surface, this seems to be an intuitively simple question, but I actually find it to be very problematic.

There is an obvious biological answer: a "disease" (et. al) is a state which puts your physical existence into some kind of detriment or danger. AIDS is clearly a disease, because there is a not-at-all unclear connection between having AIDS and risk of death. This seems fairly unproblematic.

A definition such as this just doesn't work for "mental illness" however. There is no clear way in which not being able to pay attention in class, or having a leg that itches too much (maybe getting out and doing a bit of physical activity might be a good "prescription" for this "disease") poses any danger to our physical well-being.

Well, then what's the problem? The problem is a psychological and social one, and not biological. These conditions do not endanger or damage the physical lives of people, but their social/mental lives. These conditions disrupt the act of being or becoming a healthy and productive member of society. "Healthy" and "productive," however, are clearly not universal or easily definable terms, however. Rather, they are very specific to certain cultures and certain times.

I think the fact that ideas of health will depend highly, if not completely, on culture, is an inevitable, and not necessarily bad, fact. What seems insane to me, however, is the fact that in our culture, we have a very small subset of our population (our medical institutions) defining what it means to be "healthy" for the rest of us, and then selling us drugs to conform to these "normal" mental habits. When a child is prescribed Ritalin because he can't sit still in the classroom, no longer does this mean that he doesn't like math, but rather that he has a disease (ADD) that prevents him from the reaching the normal state of being able to strap yourself down in a chair and silently filter information into your mind. This disease has to be treated, and so culture actually steps in to not just affect an individual's personality through typical, external, cultural influence, but now through the biological and medical process of directly affecting mental states. Remind anyone of lobotomy? (also, note the shift of responsbility, and therefore autonomy, away from the individual). Now it certainly seems like certain mental states are more conducive to individuals leading productive lives within the given contemporary social constraints given to them, but it seems to me that these alternative (perhaps to be generalized as "creative") mentals states are actually very important and very influential in society as a whole, and may be necessary as we enter a period in human history where change is accelerating (TED seems to be a good example). I'm reminded of the portfolio (or diversification) effect in ecology (drawn from the finance realm) where diverse ecosystems tend to be the most stable over long periods because they are able to weather a wider variety of inevitable environmental changes.

I know I sound like a conspiracy theorist, and I apologize, but the undeniable truth of this thang just keeps on popping up in my face. See John Stewart for a much more insightful, and much lighter, treatment.