Is there a higher percentage of people with mental illnesses in the US than in other countries?
Are we (Americans) somehow more succeptible to mental illnesses, conditions and disorders? Or are we just more likely to slap a label on every quirk and prescribe a pill for anything considered abnormal?
Another thing…
Do other countries have the nearly constant bombardment of medication advertisments on tv, in magazines and everywhere else?
If there are any other threads on this subject please point them out to me. I wasn’t able to find anything by searching.
The numbers seem to indicate that highly industrialized societies show higher numbers in disorders like depression, particularly the more affluent the society gets. Of course, there are a number of causes for that; we’re more likely to have downtime to examine our feelings, there are more professionals to diagnose and treat, etc.
Whether that equates to a trend of more mental disease in the U.S., I don’t know. I do know that many abnormalities are cultural. ADHD is almost universally an American disorder, while southeast Asia has a disorder called “koro” which is basically a fear that the penis will retract into the body, killing the sufferer.
*Again, all this comes from my Abnormal Psychology text from Psych4304. Cite is:
Seligman, Walker & Rosenham Abnormal Psychology 4th edition, Norton, 2001
What makes you ask the question? What are you seeing that might indicate this was so?
No. In Australia, and I believe in NZ and the UK at least, it is illegal to advertise prescription medication. Big Pharma, via the US “free trade” push, are trying to change this in Australia at least.
Do you have a source that indicates that more Americans are diagnosed with mental illness than citizens in other countries?
If so, there could be other reasons than the two you have suggested. For example, maybe Americans are, for some reason, more likely to seek help for mental illness than the people in Finland where the suicide rate is more than twice as high.
I don’t know if there is a reliable way to measure and compare mental illness from one culture and country to another. Even the definitions for some of the illnesses differ.
According to the World Health Organization, approximately 873,000 people die by suicide worldwide every year. That is just staggering to imagine.
Yes, in the UK it’s illegal to advertise prescription medication toward the general population, although it is permitted to advertise in the medical press. OTC drugs can be advertised anywhere, although there are restrictions on the claims that can be made. There are ways around this though. Pfizer ‘sponsored’ a support group and a lovely ad campaign featuring soccer-great Pele, publicising the plight of men suffering from erectile dysfunction. I doubt they would have done that if they didn’t have a certain blue pill to peddle. Pharma also provides a lot of funding for disease/syndrome/affliction awareness/advocacy/support groups.
I also have my suspicions that Roche may have been behind the recent controversy over the off-licence prescription of Herceptin in early-stage breast cancer. It’s no suprise to me that the pioneer of the campaign, who first spoke out about her plight just happened to be hired shortly after as a spokesperson for Roche.
The DSM started of in 1952 with 60 different disorders. Now the DSM has 374 different disoders. 314 mental disorders apparently have been found in 54 years. Think about that one for a while.
DSM- Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Historically the incidence and prevalence of Schizophrenia was twice as high in the USA and USSR as in European countries and Australia, New Zealand etc. In each case the diagnosis was affected by ‘soft’ diagnostic indicators. In the USSR much low level political/social dissent was seen as diagnostic of schizophrenia. In the USA there was a similar tendency to diagnose borderline antisocial behaviour as schizophrenia. Neither were seen as diagnostic in Europe (and Aus and NZ).
Diagnosis of Mental Illness generally is extremely unrepeatable and dependent on the world view, background and education of the diagnoser.
I would assume the latter. But since there’s no clinical method for identifying psychiatrically misdiagnosed people (i.e., the only diagnostic tool is the observation of behavior as interpreted by the doctor), there’s no way to test for this.
It has also been noted that the psychiatric diagnoses with which people in the UK are labeled are distributed differently than those in the US.
I was going to mention this. Some people might consider mild depression a mental illness while others might consider only incidents requiring hospitalization to be true mental illness. If the former is true, I’d say that based on the amount of medication prescribed in the U.S., we probably top the list.
