How much anti-social behaviour in the UK is due to undiagnosed mental illness ?

For the past decade, i've occasionally pondered the rise of anti-social behaviour in the UK. Why have so many of my fellow British become so casually aggressive, violent and anti-social in so many ways? My wife made a point last week that has stayed with me. As a north American , she's much more in tune with the 'therapy culture' , something the British have never been comfortable with. Her point was that perhaps Britain is seeing a near epidemic of undiagnosed mental illness ( to varying degrees of course). Look at the amount of Brits who 'self-medicate' with drugs and drink, and suddenly this point gains plausibility. The now infamous video of a middle aged woman throwing a cat in a trash can for no apparent reason ( See BBC news UK ) really drove the point home to me . The woman was later identified, and a 'mob' cornered her at her house. But she didn't need a mob and retribution. In North America the first point that would have occurred to people is : ' My God - the poor woman is clearly ill . She needs help, she needs a shrink !' Perhaps that cultural difference in the reaction is itself a clue to why the UK sees so much more of this behaviour than somewhere like Canada.
A less extreme example ( since perhaps the cat woman was obviously nuts ) was the woman who urinated on a war memorial, performed a sex act there, then fled court. My reaction was ' regular saturday night in UK' , my Canadian wife's, quite seriously : ' What the hell is wrong with that woman , is she nuts ?'. At first, I laughed, then I thought : ' Maybe you've got a point. Maybe she is kinda nuts. And that's the real issue here.'

How far should cultural relativity go ?

Have NGO's compromised human rights too much in their respect for traditions and cultural relativity ? Have human rights been tainted in the eyes of the developing world because of their strong association with a sometimes unpopular West, and especially United States ? When W Bush preaches 'freedom and democracy' does it become discredited in the eyes of developing nations who have less robust traditions in this arena ?

On a related note, do NGO's tiptoe around local corruption because they have bigger battles with the IMF and World Bank ? And in doing so, do they miss the real front-line battle ? When Jeffrey Sachs dismisses the impact of local corruption on development, is he legitimately re-focusing the debate, or missing the real issue ?

In other words, on both counts, are development issues hamstrung by politics ? Should development be led by economists, or rather technicians and scientists who do not fall prey to these pitfalls ?

Why is Haiti so poor ?

Of course there is no one single answer to this, and history and politics play their part. But aerial photographs that contrast Haiti and it's neighbour the Dominican Republic are striking. Simply put, Haiti cut down all of it's trees ! The result is soil erosion and vulnerability to flooding. The recent earthquake was a blow to what was already the world's most challenged nation. Is the crucial importance of reforestation and natural soil fertility being overlooked in development efforts ? How many NGO's really focus on the ability of a nation to feed itself by protecting it's own environment ?

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