[M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom,
a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in
intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and
sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry
will be far and away the most important medical specialty
in 2014.
Whilst psychiatry isn't yet the most important specialty in medicine, we are beginning to fall into boredom all too easily, most people can't go a few minutes without looking at their smartphones, most can't live in the moment – yesterday I watched the New Years Eve fireworks on the Thames in London, and the ground was lit up brighter with the screens of phones than the sky was with fireworks.
Here is a prediction: Over the next 50 years, mental health will become the primary affliction of humanity. The more discontinuity we have with the world we are evolved to inhabit, the less relevant we become to the world, the more mental health problems will loom in our lives. Suppressed by medications of all manor, perhaps. But an affliction nonetheless.
My prediction is that advances in neurology in the next 50 years will make our current understanding of mental health look like homeopathy. It is very difficult today to accurately diagnose people with mental diseases like ADD or depression when we don't understand how the brain works on that level of detail. My understanding is that it still depends largely on interview-style questions about what the person is feeling. Imagine what will happen when "How do you feel?" turns into "Please relax as I use this scanner/cap/whatever to observe how you feel," when mental diseases can be defined in precisely in terms of neurological functions (or malfunctions). If those kinds of advancements happen we'll be far more prepared to address boredom and other mental health problems.
Edit: Not to diminish what psychiatrists and doctors are doing today. They're doing the best they can with our current understanding and technology and probably helping a lot of people.
I don't know, it seems to me that such an "emotion scanner" is a long way off.
Today we still don't understand pain, the most basic neurological response, very much at all. Millions of people suffer from fibromyalgia, chronic pain whose exact cause is unknown. We don't even know if fibromyalgia is primarily of mental origin. If we can't measure pain and trace its origins, how are we ever going to get a quantifiable, actionable answer to "how do you feel"?
Maybe there will be a breakthrough that will solve these problems in one swoop -- sort of like the emergence of digital computing solved humanity's communications challenges almost as a convenient byproduct.
I am not convinced, but that is because I believe that genetics drive human behavior to a very high degree. Since we are genetically optimized for pre-history, but not living in pre-history, anything short of re-engineering our genes is just going to be a work around. Hence the discontinuity, and problems with mental health will expand as the distance from pre-history, in technological terms, increases.
I agree with you, except on the timescale. I'd say next 100 years. For your prediction to be right, we'd need a pretty good prototype of the 'brain cap/scanner' in about 20 years. I don't know if that's enough to be able to do this type of diagnosis, based of course on what we currently know.
