Prescription rates for antidepressants, despite doubts about their efficacy and potential side-effects, have driven commentators and the media towards headlines like ‘Prozac nation’.   It would not be surprising in the current fiscal confusion, with unemployment rising and ever shrinking opportunities for ‘retail therapy’, for GP’s to see yet further increases in patients seeking more than a little light relief.

Modern health practitioners advise against the stiff-upper-lip bottling-up of anxiety.  Some would suggest fresh air and a brisk country walk would be  better than pill-popping.  The activity remedy seems unlikely to catch on during bad weather and the current outbreak of the ‘winter vomiting bug’.

During an economic depression there is similar doubt about the efficacy of the fiscal and monetary pills that might be prescribed to restore vitality.  Bankers and economists would also prescribe activity.  With the money-go-round at a standstill there’s trouble at mill with idle hands tempted to invent increasingly hair-brain schemes.  As the saying goes, ‘When the tide goes out you can see who has been swimming naked’.

We may feel for those who have lost their funds and seen their property values collapse but there is also a dilemma for those who still have funds to place, who still need to seek safe havens, who still need to search for relative growth, to limit the losses and, hopefully, catch the tide when eventually it turns.

So where might we find these safe havens?   Ask the experts, those who have studied the impacts of past depressions, and two sectors stand out for their resilience in stormy times.

The first is Healthcare – not least because, as my Aunt, a nurse, said when excusing her absence from the family feast, ‘Patients don’t stop getting ill because it’s Christmas.’  Even more than the demand arising from demographic changes, the pace of healthcare evolution is driven by increasingly sophisticated technological innovation.

A second safer sector is Telecoms.  A crisis generates more, not less, communications and, although their business customers deliver about 80% of Telco profits, a very high proportion of the annual spend (and an even higher proportion of the margins) is linked to fixed costs that take a long time to reflect a downturn in overall business activity.

At the same time, Keynesian-committed governments reach for the public purse and seek out large-scale projects  to keep those idle hands occupied and crack on with infrastructure schemes that, in ‘normal’ times, would have been regarded by any efficient market hypothesist as ‘none of the government’s business’.

So it is not perhaps surprising that these may be relatively good times to bring forward investment plans that would otherwise struggle for air-time – and even better if those plans provide us with locally beneficial (and exportable) legacies when easier times return.  If we drive the new agenda (creating new opportunities, gainful employment and societal development) we need not cry quite so many tears for the clearance sales of last-generation brands well past their prime.

Looking to the future it is obvious that new types of localised and modern Telecoms access utilities modelled on those in Sweden and the Netherlands would make particularly sensible and timely investments – not least for the future generation of local economic growth and community cohesion and also for the transformation of healthcare services ahead of the explosion of new remote monitoring technologies that are travelling under the umbrella of Connected Health.

Something like that might seem to be happening in Northern Ireland where their government’s commitment to a large-scale remote patient monitoring programme has been complemented by globally-backed private investments in the new European Connected Health Campus and Next Generation fixed and mobile Access utility networks that will kick-start the long haul of bringing  the UK up towards the standards set elsewhere in Europe.

But what perhaps is most remarkable is that these plans were put in place well before the current economic crisis – before the pills needed to be prescribed.  In the way of these things, these forward-looking plans could only perhaps have been possible in the margins of the UK.

The first thing a doctor will tell a depressed patient is that they are not alone in their suffering.  As the fiscal fiasco and resultant economic depression shows, ‘normal’ mainstream thinking is just as vulnerable.  We should celebrate the deviants for being on the edge of reason and for taking centre stage in these unreasonable times.

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The European Connected Health Campus is a Community Interest Company based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. 

Next Generation Access describes locally managed 'Carrier Neutral' fibre to the home (FTTH) utilities that promote competitive multi-player service innovation.