Ecological Psychiatry as a Division of Modern Medicine

Abstract

The extraordinary changeability and diversity of the modern person's living conditions and the technological intrusions into his daily functioning (perception, communication, elementary acts, and relationships with other people), coupled with the specific intellectual saturation of labor, often involving isolated stimulation (or, on the contrary, deprivation) of separate sensory systems all make great demands on a person's adaptability. Add to all this such habitual but by no means neutral factors as constant noise, vibrations, and electromagnetic fluctuations that impinge on somatic and psychic functioning. Artificial lighting, desynchronism, and an artificial atmospheric environment have become almost constant irritants in some professional activities; production is expanding, increasingly to polar or near-polar latitudes; high altitudes and the ocean depths are being actively exploited; and air space is being intensively utilized. Long-duration space flights with entirely artificial living conditions are becoming more frequent despite the weightlessness that is alien to the human body. Furthermore, a high price is being paid for industrialization in terms of soil pollution; pollution of water sources with heavy metals (mercury, lead, cadmium, etc.), fertilizers, and products of oil processing; accumulation in the atmosphere of car-