Excerpt: Aleph

Twelve years ago, when I was...young, I think, the world changed. Mental health became this...epedemic that threatened to overtake the resources we'd just clawed back saving the third world from the 'food crisis' whose solution was right under our noses. It became 'chemical imbalance, from the outside, in. We were overwhlemed by pollution, and people started becoming....uncontrolled.
Some tended towards blankness - the numb, uncaring zombie state that millions reported when prozac was introduced. That was pre Aleph state 1.
Aleph state 1 was late 2009 - the incidence of pollution related mental health problems were on the rise, the G8 group marked that one day, March 15th 2009 as the turning point - where humans had tipped over a brink we needed to claw back from.
Mental health centres took over community centres - mother and toddler groups had a member of mental wellness trained - on call - as a mandantory part of funding. Postnatal depression - breifly - became an automatic assumption when 70% of women joined mother and toddler groups. Nothing ever swung that back, but women stopped attending in many cases - all 'label', no support. There was just no way to offer more than people got already.

State 2, seventeen years later, was the catalyst point.. Long chain 13, arms 9 through 13 (check!) schizophrenia. Depression, schizotypal disorder. Abnormality became having no disease at all - it was the norm to begin treating people, once a week, at mental health reclamation centres. Soon it moved to monthly, as the influx of people became too much. Six monthly, then yearly, the government decided, at last, to commission a study into whether the resources flooding in, and trickling out, tears from the centres, deaths around holidays, could be better served. People would get thier meds weekly, but no exams, no support, no checks, unless they went to thier GP. The government commissioned three studies - three studies to support or refute the voracity of something that came up in the first, keystage study.

It was suggested - softly, of course - that people needed to live in certain states for certain lengths of time, to function optimally. It became a formula, that could be applied to people based on thier genetic make up, thier brain chemistry - thier 'wiring'.

And then, hello, stage 3. Stage 3 was lingering too - it took nearly nine years for them to sort everything out. Take the guesswork out of everything you were going to feel for the year and you could plan, based on your holidays, with contingency allowances - you could requisition them at the death, birth, or traumatic event in your circle of freinds and family - with ease - but that people could live, knowing they could 'feel' what they liked.

It was, I guess, a universal leveller.

Right up until people started 'dealing'.