THERE'S an actual clinical diagnosis for what Bermuda's been suffering from for the last decade or so. The grab-bag of symptoms has become all too familiar. Wild spikes in violence, criminality and drug and alcohol dependency. Corresponding declines in educational standards, well-paying career opportunities and the availability of decent, affordable housing. The rapid unravelling of traditional community and family and ongoing social and environmental degradation.

All of these manifestations of community degeneration fall under a single diagnostic umbrella. It's called "Gillette's Syndrome", a malady that takes its name from a once pastoral ranching community in Wyoming, a community that discovered it was sitting atop a lake of oil and seemingly limitless quantities of coal in the early 1960s.

Within a decade the population had quadrupled as oilmen and coal developers moved in to exploit what lay beneath Gillette.

There was increasingly fierce competition for the town's limited goods and services. Schools bulged with students while the educations they received deteriorated. Lean-to shacks and housing trailers suddenly began to appear adjacent to the neat rows of ranch-style homes which had undergone hyper-inflationary price increases almost overnight. The cost of living became abnormally high. The surge of newcomers pushed many of Gillette's natives to the outermost margins of their community. Social disintegration and environmental degeneration became rampant.

Dustbowl-era poverty began to exist side-by-side with arriviste opulence. People lived in tents in 35 degrees-below-zero winters, camped out just a few hundred yards from oilmen's ostenatious pleasure palaces that were featured in the pages of Architectural Digest. Surges in violent crime and spousal abuse competed for space in the newspaper with a succession of reports on record-profit earnings being announced by the oil companies and mining concerns.

And as the natural and man-made amenities of Gillette became corrupted, so too did the local politics. Gillette's City Hall became an echo chamber where the demands of the oil and coal industries drowned out anything the locals had to say.

All of these factors combined to make what the psychologist Eldean V. Kohrs termed "The Gillette Syndrome" and for many years the city was a textbook case-study for psychiatrists, sociologists and journalists in the social contagions which are spread by unrestrained greed.

It's a term that came to describe the downside of a boomtown economy: the stressful and disorienting social impacts visited on a community undergoing runaway economic growth.

And it doesn't matter at all if a community's boom is of the gold-rush, oil-gush or off-shore financial services variety. The consequences are always the same.

While Bermuda's political leadership has attempted to keep the people's attention focused on Colonial era injustices, to allow the past to supplant the present and completely eclipse any thoughts about the future, they have simultaneously encouraged the island's recolonisation. This time by those in the corporate vanguard of globalisation. They have been invited in pell-mell and allowed to overwhelm Bermuda. There's been no attempt on Government's part to take a gradualist approach to growing Bermuda's off-shore financial sector - no attempt to limit the damage and disruption likely to be caused by a non-stop flood of new companies and associated service industries by limiting the numbers to those the island could have reasonably been expected to absorb.

Such an approach would not have amounted to protectionism in the traditional, economic sense of "protecting" exisiting businesses and "living wages" within Bermuda by restricting economic development.

It would have been protectionism in a much broader sense - the sense that applied during the Tourism Industry's zenith, when limits were sensibly set on the numbers of high-toned visitors Bermuda could cater to without sacrificing the very amenities that made the island such an appealing resort destination in the first place.

This open-door policy encouraged by the Government has led to a non-stop stampede of corporate newcomers, many of the gilt-edged variety, many more - particularly in recent years - of the most rapaciously carpetbagging and tax-dodging variety. Recently The New York Times archly remarked that Bermuda had become such a popular off-shore domicile not simply because a servile local Government rubber-stamped its every regulatory whim into law but because local policymakers had become an adjunct of their businesses rather than anything remotely resembling a check or a balance to them.

And therein lies the rub.

For we are not the innocent victims of untrammeled, rocket-propelled capitalism. The new colonisers are not corporate cuckoos that forcibly deposited themselves into our nest only to undergo phenomenal growth spurts which forced so many Bermudians to the corners of our fragile home.

Our leadership became mesmerised by the lure of what seemed to be an endless gusher of money. We invited our corporate colonisers here. We facilitated them. We accomodated their every wish.

And as a result Bermuda, to borrow something Shakespeare said of the island in a completely different context, has suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange. Something very rich. And very strange, indeed.

With the world's economic vital signs likely to remain erratic for the foreseeable future, this spoilt little island-boomtown is going to have to adapt - and adapt very quickly indeed - to a period of contraction that will prove just as disruptive in its own way as the now-completed period of unrestricted and unregulated growth.

Government, which in recent years engaged in not just deficit-spending but what amounts to budgetless spending, is now mortgaged to the hilt. Only fresh infusions of borrowed money - borrowed at usurious rates of interest given ongoing credit shortages - will keep Bermuda functioning.

Nary a thought was seemingly given to the possibility that all of this off-shore fairy gold which magically started appearing in Bermuda a few years ago might turn back into straw.

Nary a thought was given to diverting even a tiny portion of this money into major civic projects - recreation centres, pension cheques actually worth the effort of cashing and genuinely upgraded medical facilities, for instance.

Nary a thought was given to a crash-programme of affordable housing (the funds earmarked for that were stolen, you might recall).

There was no attempt on Government's part to point out, sotto voce, to our corporate guests they could help off-set the all-too predictable consequences of an uncontrolled boomtown growth spurt by investing some of the money they saved thanks to the island's generous tax regimen in the very infrastructure they were beginning to overwhelm.

No, the politicians simply got while the getting was good. And Bermudians got nothing but an increasingly enfeebled and corrupt leadership that cheerily passed the collection plate to the big money boys for "campaign" funds and contributions guaranteeing political "access". But not, of course, for anything having to do with the public welfare. As far as the politicians and their cronies were concerned, Bermuda became the lottery-winner's Vision of A Gold-Plated & All Mod-Cons Paradise. For the average Bermudian it became Paradise Irretrievably Lost.

Perhaps, as Bermuda and its one-crop economy retrenches and rebuilds, in the coming months and years, saner heads not entirely preoccupied with mercenary self-interest will finally prevail.

Gillette finally corralled the runaway growth that was trampling its community in the '60s and '70s. Today it boasts wonderful recreational and cultural facilities, and for a mid-size American city that is 500 miles off the nearest beaten track, an exceptional public library. While the big companies still enjoy an economic hegemony an absolute monarch might envy, the oil and coal barons recognised it was in their long-term interests as well as the city's to begin investing money in infrastructure and human capital. Working with a new slate of untarnished municipal officials they began to blueprint for the future some 20 years ago. Today, while the term "Gillette Syndrome" can be applied to many locales (including here), it does not actually apply to Gillette itself. Right now this condition could more fairly be called "Bermuda Syndrome" - Tim Hodgson