Frontal Fatigue

The Impact of Modern Life and Technology on Mental Illness

Mark D Rego, MD

If technology is making modern life easier, why are we suffering from more stress and mental illness?

In this trailblazing book, Dr. Mark Rego, who has practiced psychiatry in the community and taught at Yale for thirty years, explores why mental illness and stress are skyrocketing alongside technology that was ostensibly created to improve our world.

Using decades of experience and pioneering scientific research, Dr. Rego presents his innovative hypothesis of Frontal Fatigue, the background condition from which many of us now suffer. Frontal Fatigue exists when the unique pressures of modern life overwhelm the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brains that can make us susceptible to mental illness.

Frontal Fatigue examines

why mental illness is increasing in modern times,
how the demands of our technology-centric lives place countless people at risk for mental illness and lacking in basic psychological well-being,
solutions for finding stability and peace within the noise of modern life.

This astute perspective in the battle for our collective and individual peace of mind illustrates why mental illness is on the rise in these technologically advanced times and how we can act to adjust our lives in response.

Mark D Rego, MD, has practiced adult, adolescent, and geriatric psychiatry for thirty years. He spent twenty-five years in community practice specializing in treating patients who required medication and addressing the special needs of those in hospitals, nursing homes, and group homes. Since he began his practice in 1989, he has taught psychiatric trainees at Yale New Haven Hospital. From 2004 until 2010, he spent time in Ayacucho, Peru, working with local groups to build a mental health center and continued years after to help supply them with needed medicines.

Dr. Rego presently consults in small community clinics that treat the underserved. As he is now physically disabled and can no longer see patients, Dr. Rego spends his time studying psychiatry and philosophy and writing about the ways mental illness affects people’s lives. He lives with his wife in Milford, Connecticut.