The advantages and effects of cyber systems on mental disorders

Author

Robert Hickman, http://twitter.com/robehickman

Article

Even in its infancy, cybernetic technology has had a profound impact on the physically disabled. Artificial limbs can replace those lost to accident or combat. Cochlear implants allow deaf people to hear again. Even a device as basic as the Wheelchair can make a large improvement to someones quality of life.

However up to this point the impact of cybernetics for those with mental disabilities has gone under the radar.

Computers and the internet serve as an extension to the mental self. People are no longer limited by there own mental capacity. This is having a profound impact on the meaning of mental disabilities. Conditions which used to be disabling are now easy to work around.

Take dyslexia for example, a difference which effects a persons reading, spelling and mental math capability. These attributes used to be essential, so a deficiency created impairment. But with the addition of technology, they can be negated. No longer causing significant difficulty.

The ready availability of calculators eliminates the need for mental math. Text to speech, along with the increased prevalence of multimedia content, reduces the need for reading. And while they are far from perfect, spell checkers allow dyslexics to write autonomously.

For some conditions, the changes go beyond negation, negative traits actually become advantages. Certain manifestations of autism display this phenomenon.

People with high functioning autism often have obsessive personalities, think logically and have good, if narrow, long term memories. These differences lend themselves towards the maintenance and programming of the worlds computer infrastructure.

The disadvantages that still remain, such as degraded social skills, are relatively easy to work around. On line communication, being largely text based, eliminates the non verbals that autistics struggle to proses. The existence of searchable second selves greatly eases the discovery of people with similar interests. These help with overcoming issues of social anxiety.

Fundamentally a disability is nothing more than a point of view. Werther or not a difference is advantages or disabling depends on the nature of the world. This will change over time. At the very least, technology has created a world in which the negative aspects of many disabilities are quite easy to work around.