We are all responsible for industrial scale child abuse

Our generation has betrayed our children and chosen our greed over their best interests. There is no ‘dealing with’ a childhood in crisis - we need to remove the cancer.

I want you to take this article seriously, even though it starts in a sauna.

On Saturday a mobile sauna arrived in town, set up looking down over Biggar Burn and into the countryside beyond and as a surprise, my partner booked me in. When I got home I floated around the house in a blissed out dwam for the afternoon.

But I had a different conversation the same weekend. A primary school teacher friend of mine was describing her week. It sounded like she was a crisis mental health worker. The scale of emotional, behavioural and psychological difficulties she is dealing with is sobering.

I struggle dto persuade her this didn't use to happen. But am I wrong? I wrack my brain to think if I can remember ever seeing a child having a full breakdown in school, a complete flaky (as we'd have called it). So I went digging...

Here's the short version. Even nearly ten years into devolution and the number of children who struggled to cope in a normal classroom looked like what you'd imagine, a small minority with particular issues (five per cent). By Christmas last year, children unable to cope with a normal school environment had reached nearly one in two. What was vanishingly uncommon in my day is now normal. Have a quick look at this. It should freak you out.

This isn't a 'better at identification' thing because pretty well every other statistic that might suggest that 'the kids are alright' has also nosedived over the same period. That period is basically 15 years. Note that the start of this crisis predates widespread internet or social media use. They have just accelerated it.

If a chemical had done this, or a foreign enemy, or it was because of radiation or something, we'd have announced a full on crisis by now. But it isn't a chemical, or an enemy, or radiation, it is the political obsession with economic growth and the resultant refusal to regulate commercial activity which is doing this. .

It is time to speak out and to break this down into its reality. Here is the reality – we know precisely, exactly what is harming our children, who is doing it, how it has the impact it does, why it does harm, what the outcomes are and (most depressingly of all) why we do this to them and why no-one does anything about it.

This is what no-one says; in pursuit of corporate profit (i.e. 'economic growth') we not only tolerate but actively celebrate the neurological engineering carried out on us and our children by global corporations. We celebrate that this changes the nature of our brain specifically to make us give our money away (i.e. corporate GDSP growth), even though we also know it has dreadful side effects.

There are three primary forms of engineering which have done this. Dietary engineering has replaced natural foods and diets with industrial products designed in a lab to generate addiction-related reward systems in our brains. We know this food is bad for us and we know it is bad for our neurology, but it is very, very profitable.

Then dopamine engineering comes next. This is the brain's prediction system and it 'rewards' us for being right because that helps us learn. This has been manipulated (again at an industrial scale) to give us pleasant reward signals for profit-making activities. If you play free games on your phone which have in-app purchases, you are having your dopamine system rewired to give all your money away.

Finally comes attention engineering. The dietary engineering is really hard to avoid but you can only manipulate someone's dopamine system if they're looking. So you need to make them look, which means that any neurological process which forces us to respond is ideal – fear and anger work best, but disgust, shock, hope, laughter, contempt or any other strong emotion will do.

The whole point of human society is to moderate these tendencies. We have built endless traditions around food because it is essential to life and so we have made it virtually sacred because it is an existential issue. We are losing that and it is being replaced with poor gut health which directly induces issues like depression and anxiety because your body is literally telling you something serious is wrong.

We have a world of social constructs to remind us that you can't just chase dopamine all the time. Dopamine isn't meant to be the goal of life, it is meant to direct us towards the real goals of life. Constantly needing that 'hit' is why you keep reaching for your phone for no reason and why we're all acting erratically.

And we learn risk awareness very early in life but then we learn emotional regulation through socialisation so we don't see risk in everything. Over stimulation of the attention systems in the brain is equivalent to dropping us in a field full of predators. Your brain is screaming 'there is something I ought to be looking at right now' and that is a fear system.

I could keep going like this. Most advertising is really targeting your shame functions and your social acceptance need – that woman with the amazing hair in the shampoo advert isn't there to tell you that you could look like that too, it's there to tell you that you don't look like that and should be ashamed.

No-one in corporate land is pretending anything other than that this is what they are doing. They all openly strategise how to make you more susceptible to whatever they're selling by manipulating the neurological functioning of your brain.

“This neurological engineering has done extensive damage to adults but it has utterly destroyed childhood”

The outcome in adults is that we're basically all basket cases now. One in five people in Glasgow is on some kind of drug for mental health and if you can't see the signs that we as a species are losing our ability for emotional regulation and the empathy which results, then please tell me where you are looking.

But – and this is my point – we're adults. I have mostly managed to opt out of all of this. I don't eat processed food (I love cooking and cook fresh every day), I don't do social media and I don't have any money so I can't really 'shop for no real reason' either. But I know I'm trapped too. I know this still spills out onto me. In the outside world, all over my internet browser, the bombardment of messaging is relentless.

Here's the point; we allow adults to fuck themselves up because that is their choice. Children are not in a position to opt out of any of this. They are given what adults give them. We let adults fuck themselves up with alcohol, tobacco and gambling – but not children. That dividing line has been eradicated.

Why? Because globally children under the age of 11 collectively have about £1.2 trillion of purchasing power (largely via parents) and so there is a whole world of corporate services to help big business track them and engineer their brains so they give their money away or pester their parents to do things their parents basically know they shouldn't.

This neurological engineering has done extensive damage to adults but it has utterly destroyed childhood. Children’s brains are forming - what we do to them now is permanent. Frankly I would hold hearings tomorrow tell anyone who has ever been involved in creating a commercial algorithm that targets children to come and confess and then anyone who didn't would be arrested for industrial scale child abuse.

But we won't, because you can be pretty sure that given the choice to support either 'economic growth' or children's welfare, politicians will claim it is a false choice – but then 100 per cent choose the corporation.

If you think I'm going to mention child mental health services here then you're wrong. That's like proposing an asprin to treat cancer. It's why I started with a sauna.

Because when I wrote 'blissed out dwam' what I want you to hear is 'reengineered my neurology to make me feel better'. Because I spent time with other people and relaxed and allowed myself time to just not worry about things, the outcome was the same as for meditation. It is literally almost the opposite of what the corporations are doing.

Slowing the brain down and not overstimulating it shrinks the amygdala (the fear centre of the brain), strengthens the prefrontal cortext (the part of the brain that manages emotional regulation), slows the default mode network (this is what causes our brain to run away from us and jump from stimulus to stimulus), and it stimulates alpha, theta and gamma brainwaves (which increase relaxation and improve cognitive function).

It is quite literally the reverse of what the corporate sector is trying to do to us. And the outcome is physical – when you feel stress physically it is because the nervous system literally and physically tightens round your muscles preparing for a fight or flight state. Corporations are seeking to extend that state for as long as possible because it reduces our cognitive function, the bit where our brain goes 'no, I don't need that thing'.

Remember the cancer/asprin analogy above? Well the neurological responses of dietary, dopamine and attention engineering are the cancer and nothing will fundamentally help until we get the cancer out. The means of doing that is by reversing the effects of the neurological engineering, and the way to do that is described by what happens if you have a lovely, relaxing sauna after a month of particularly healthy eating and exercise.

There are essential policy conclusions from this and unless we pay attention to them we are truly the worst generation of adults since we stopped shoving weans up lums. First we need to all but ban industrially-processed food and build a food strategy that somehow bears a relationship to the food our bodies have evolved to rely on.

Second we need to tackle the dopamine and attention assault we face through deconsumerisation. This does not mean austerity; it means that ever penny we spend on doing something pleasant rather than buying something pointless makes a difference. It actually creates higher economic growth as well.

And third, we need to see socialisation, participation in community activities and relaxation as core public policy goals. These are the only activities that will fundamentally repair the damage that has been done to our brains.

We need to do this for everyone, but I accept that in a free society adults need to be able to opt to be obese, mentally unstable and bankrupt – if that is what they want. But not children. We must pursue the impact of these evil corporations with the zeal we went after big tobacco when it targetted children.

We are the worst, the absolute worst. I'm part of it too. I'm part of this society. I have to accept that I have played my own role in what is industrial scale child abuse. And now I can't take my eyes of what it has done, so I refuse to continue to be a part of it. In the coming weeks and months I'll use the platform I have to flesh all of this out and hope that it forms some part of a society-wide fightback.

Literally for the sake of our children.