Avant Garde Psychiatry

I see my early life as divided into distinct stages: the first decade was a time of innocence and wonderment, the second decade a grand rehearsal for adulthood. Young adulthood had not begun until I turned 20. That order of my early life seems quaint today. In our 21^st century Western society, we have a “cultural growth spurt”: innocence gives way at 6, adulthood rehearsal occurs in preteens, which turns into “adulthood” in middle and late teenage years. Consequently, many arrive at their actual young adulthood jaded, wizened and bored. While young people experience maturity at an accelerated pace, our instincts cannot be pushed to match the rapid social and cultural changes. Thus, the juxtaposition of contemporary experience and ancient instincts is more a collision course than a harmonious shared journey. This interplay between nature and nurture is made even more discordant by the breakneck, exponential progress of modern technology. This is a very recent phenomenon. In the past 10,000 years, from early agricultural society until 300 years ago, every member of a generation could expect to live life analogous to the previous generation or the future one. Every generation was identical in all aspects of daily life: The velocity of travel, life expectancy, the total dependency on the elements; all have barely progressed throughout the millennia. Humans lived in moving frames of a “perceptual here and now”, invariably bound by the limits of their senses. The elders were seen as a possessing trove of information by experience, something that the “Google generation” finds...read more