Mental health gaining such traction lately

Great Debates
1

What has changed on this planet in the past year that Mental Health has become such a hot topic.
Many organisations have mental health first aiders. They are just people with 2 days training who act as MHFA and all they can do is signpost where you should go to seek help. Almost every public body and private organisation makes a big deal about mental health.

So whats the dope on this. Why is worrying about receiving a postal delivery suddenly a mental health issue. Why is inability to cope with daily lifes problems a mental health issue.

Has the world literally gone mad?

2

No idea what you’re going on about in the rest of your post, but “Depression and anxiety have a significant economic impact; the estimated cost to the global economy is US$ 1 trillion per year in lost productivity.”
https://www.who.int/mental_health/in_the_workplace/en/

3

I gather the OP’s issue is (and I admit I’m only guessing here) that mental health issues might be going from being dramatically under-diagnosed to being possibly over-diagnosed… maybe?

So just wear a big button on your shirt that says SANE and the postal workers or whoever will probably leave you alone.

4

Ted Bundy was a volunteer at a suicide hotline.

5

I agree. I also think there has been a blurring of the line between what are expected emotional responses, as opposed to treatable pathologies.

IMO&E, some significant portion of Americans welcome a “diagnosis” to explain their unfavorable circumstances/experiences. There is an increasing perception (justified or not) that people are “fragile” and significantly/permanently affected by all manner of “stresses.”

There also is SOME aspect of some elements of the for profit medical community wishing to aggressively diagnose/treat.

Basically, I think people are (as a whole) tougher and capable of recovering from stress than many groups portray. I think life is challenging even for the most stable/capable people. And I think the pursuit of “happiness” is a PR lie which creates more discomfort than ease. But, if a pill or talking to someone makes you feel better, more power to you.

Finally, this current administration is quite stressful for a good portion of Americans. And the past decade or 2 of change and war have been stressful for people experiencing economic displacement, or fearing cultural/societal changes from what they were used to. Changes to the status quo may be needed and welcome by most, but to people invested in the old system, the stresses they experience are real.

6

Lionel Shriver, a 2nd wave feminist, has argued this ‘mental health traction’ is the result of the continued subdividing going on in intersectional and identity politics circles. When people embrace their own fragility, focus primarily on disadvantages against real or imagined oppressors as their main source of strength, there will be an ever-growing number of tribes proclaiming powerlessness. Not only is it a dismal and adversarial way of going through life, there’s no incentive or reason to embrace the self or find inner strength.

7

Whatever you are noticing about general trends and “mental health first aiders”, I haven’t noticed at all. As far as I know, worrying about receiving a postal delivery is not necessarily a mental health issue. Inability to cope with daily life is (anxiety). I would have said the same thing in 2018.

~Max

8

There are many causes:

  1. The pharmaceutical industry profits by medicalizing everything. If someone is shy, the industry doesn’t get any money from his shyness. But convince the same person that he has “social phobia” and you can sell him Prozac or Zoloft. There’s a strong profit motive behind redefining personality traits as mental illnesses.

  2. Mental health is now the preferred way to deal with problems that were formerly handled in other ways. How does a 5th-grade teacher deal with a kid of throws temper tantrums or otherwise disrupts the class? A few generations ago, the teacher would literally beat the kid. That approach is no longer allowed, so a new approach was needed. Today a kid exhibiting the same behaviors gets taken to the school’s mental health professional, starting a process that leads to a diagnosis of ADHD or something like that and putting the kid on drugs. (The pharmaceutical industry profits from this as well, of course.)

Similarly, a few generations ago it was an accepted fact of life that some kids were smart and others were less smart, which was also known as being stupid. Nowadays it’s completely unacceptable for parents, teachers, or basically anyone else to ever say that any child is stupid. Hence certain diagnoses also serve the purpose of euphemistically classifying not-so-smart kids.

  1. The current system gives individuals motivation to describe their life and problems in terms of mental health problems. If a college student is simple having difficulty completing a paper/science lab/whatever, there is no mechanism for involving the college administration and preventing the student from getting a bad grade or failing the class. If the same college student rephrases the problem by claiming that the paper/lab/whatever is causing stress, or is traumatizing, or contributes to anxiety, then there’s grounds for involving the administration and having the paper/lab/whatever delayed or cancelled or otherwise modified to ensure a good grade.
9

Maybe in your corner of the world, but not in mine. In my experience it is frowned upon but not completely unacceptable to say one kid isn’t as smart as other kids. In school, the nature versus nurture debate is presented as having a consensus somewhere in between the two extremes: both nature and nurture affect human behavior, or rather that the two are so intertwined that it doesn’t really make sense to distinguish between them at all.

What is completely unacceptable is to tell a child that they are a lost cause, that they can’t or shouldn’t be a better person than they were yesterday.

~Max

10

Very good post, ITR. What I personally find so frustrating is that factors such as you describe receive insufficient attention in the media. To admit that such factors predominate in some cases IN NO WAY questions the very existence of diagnosable and possibly disabling mental and emotional impairments in others. But I have seen very little discussion/study attempting to parse out the percentages. To the contrary, there seems to be considerable social (and industrial) pressure against suggesting that the factors you describe influence any significant portion of individuals claiming mental/emotional distress.

11

Good to hear, because it’s really not a bad album.

12

I disagree with virtually all of this. Getting a child diagnosed, let alone getting that diagnosis accepted at school is extremely difficult. Even when you have clinical diagnoses, the pattern is inertia, grudging acceptance with bargaining down to a lesser diagnosis, and then, if you’re lucky or persistent, some sort of attempt to meet the needs of that student. From that point, it’s the rule rather than the exception that the school will not meet the requirements of the 504 or IEP that they have agreed to.
The system as pertains to children is extremely broken.
For adults, the only change I have noticed are calls to accept that mental illness exists and that people who seek help for mental health issues should not be stigmatized. I believe that attempts to foist this onto the pharmaceutical industry are attempts to stigmatize a real concern by dismissing actual diagnoses as being made primarily for the benefit of drug companies rather than individuals.

13

I agree wholeheartedly with IRT, having had some run-ins with that sort of thing. Another factor I see is people getting diagnosed with mental problems solely to get on the government’s dole as “permanently disabled” and not have to work. I was diagnosed with “situational depression” told to stay in the same situation and take drugs, and get on disability.

Fortunately, I had much too much self-price to go that route, and took a temporary part-time holiday job as a store cashier. That was over six years ago, and I’m now permanent full time.

14

More than a smigden of it has to do with the epidemic of “shooter” events – events where someone (or a small handful of people) with gun(s) kill and terrorize people apparently for the sheer hell of it.

The 2nd Amendment / gun rights people, justifiably worried that their political opponents the gun control people will seize on these as reasons to push their agenda (and they, too, are of course justified in so doing), try to deflect attention to the alleged psychiatric condition of the people perpetrating the violence. i, e., “Hey everybody, the problem isn’t the availability of lethal firearms, the problem is that these batshit crazy psychos aren’t being locked up, we need more shrinks!”

Also in the background is the plain fact that if you can ascribe people’s unhappiness, lack of fitting in, tendency to be disruptive in some fashion, etc, to some kind of wiring problem in their brain, that erases any possible POLITICAL understanding. It means they aren’t unhappy because they are an oppressed minority or a misunderstood marginalized identity, nope they’re unhappy because they HAVE DEPRESSION. Or it means they aren’t squirmy and rebellious because the classroom is an oppressive coercive environment geared to churn out obedient order-obeying robots for the system, oh no, not at all, they’re like that because they have ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER. And they should be taking pills which will make them less [del]disturbed[/del] disturbing.
Finally there’s the economic factors. Instead of blaming homelessness on the lack of cheap ways to be safely indoors, we can blame it all on deinstitutionalization. The smelly people you are stepping over aren’t casualties of a competitive and oligarchical distribution of resources, there’s something wrong WITH THEM. I mean, must be, cuz who would want to live like that unless they were sick in the head?

15

I should clarify that my “concerns” in this area are not solely w/ people seeking disability benefits or other “special treatment.” Instead, I’m appalled at the frequency with which people/media discuss such things as anxiety and depression - in all of their forms - as though they are ALL unavoidable and treatable pathologies. (YES - I readily acknowledge that such things as disabling anxiety and depression exist.) What I perceive is a blending of the moods with the pathologies, as well as what are considered appropriate/acceptable responses to both.

Life is hard. Any number of complicated social/business/health interactions can cause stress - no matter what your wealth, intelligence, social supports… But I believe people have considerable agency as to the extent to which they allow themselves to get involved in, prepare for, and respond to such stressors. There impresses me as a trend more in the direction of “someone ought to take care of me” and “it isn’t my fault”, from, “Damn, that sucked/I fucked up. Now what do I have to do to make things better? And, in the meantime, I have to continue meeting my minimal obligations.”

Just one example. High school and college kids have ALWAYS faced various stresses. Their bodies and minds are changing, they are constantly exposed to new information/situations/experiences. There are countless opportunities for self doubt and insecurity. Job/life futures have always been uncertain. But more and more recently I’m hearing of social (and other) anxiety among young adults discussed as a pathology that ought to be treated and accommodated. I think that trend/tendency tends to infantilize people, and excuse them from responsibility.

And you always used to hear of the “cop” phenomena - where if 1 cop was involved in a shooting, EVERY cop felt they had been threatened. Now, it seems as tho people seek out ways to suggest they were personally involved/affected anytime something bad happens. “Jeez! I’m terrified. I visitied the twin towers once.” Or “My neighbor’s friend knew someone who worked there.” Or, “I work in a high rise in another city.” Or, “I saw it on TV.”

Depression is another one. The APA recently removed “bereavement” as a diagnosis. Sure, it is hoped that you will be depressed when a loved one - or a pet - dies. But I’m regularly seeing such experiences cited as explaining PTSD or MDD.

And take the military. Yes, armed conflict has always been stressful, and service-related trauma woefully under-addressed. But my personal (and minority) opinion is that the HUGE number of post 9/11 military applications for VA and other disability reflect a pendulum that has swung well past what is reasonable.

In at least SOME subset of emotional stress cases (we could debate how many), I believe the individual has SOME control (we could debate how much) over how they respond. In other words, do you “give in” to your feelings of self pity/helplessness/anger/whatever, do you pretend it never happened, or - like most people - do you make use of the resources available to you to figure out how to continue struggling on.

I think people - as a whole - are a lot tougher, and able to recover from stress, than a lot of modern commentary gives them credit for. Moreover, I think at least some elements DON’T LIKE TO ADMIT that they recover so readily from stressors such as a loved one’s death. We are fortunate that we are so wealthy, and have the resources to sit around and feel sorry for ourselves, instead of needing to get out there and put food on the table tomorrow.

16

Let’s no forget the legal system and it’s “yeah…but” excuse mongers. Yes, I killed my wife and eight children, but I was mentally ill. Any excuse to shift the blame and avoid jail time.

During the middle of the wrong multiple personality craze three time loser, homophobe, rapist criminal Billy Milligan claimed a lesbian alternate personality of his abducted, raped and robbed three women. He got found not guilty by mental illness and spent 10 years in a mental health facility instead of going to jail as a three time loser, having two prior convictions.

17

Reciprocally, I would suggest that many victims of rape and robbery, if given the choice between having the perpetrator of the crimes against them kept locked away for a decade or subjected to the average incarcerative penalties leveraged by the criminal justice system, would decide that 10 years is about as long as they could hope to have such a criminal put away.
Having said that, yeah, we can’t have it both ways. I don’t think involuntary psychiatric detention without criminal-court levels of proof of illegal behavior should be allowed to continue; but that also means we get held responsible for our criminal illegal actions on the same basis as anyone else.

18

Some people push the envelope, saying the very act of murder is “insane”… Or that people commit certain acts due to brain chemistry, which they cannot control. Then there’s the whole “free will” thing. But such positions (currently, at least) remain at the pretty extreme end.

19

As John Douglas of the FBI Serial Killer Unit wrote: I’ve never known of a person claiming to have a multiple personality who committed the crime being diagnosed BEFORE they were arrested.

20

I agree that people are inherently tough and resilient. But I don’t think people who are concerned about trauma and its effects believe that people are so fragile that they cannot recover to a functional level. They just believe that trauma makes people function in suboptimal and maladaptive ways. Treat trauma effectively and people might actually do more than just “function”.

We all know people who are functional but are disappointing in some shape or fashion. Now maybe some of these people are just lazy sacks. But I think it is reasonable to assume that many are psychologically burdened. Like, the person who was abused growing up and copes with the trauma by overeating, which then makes her depressed, which then costs her career and relationship opportunities. That person is strong in that the abuse didn’t cause her to literally shrivel up and die. But maybe if she’d had help dealing with that trauma when it had happened, she would be healthier and yes, happier. And so would her children.

People have been taking “pills” in some shape or form since the beginning of human history. We seek out anything that soothes pain and elicits pleasure because we have inherited a brain that has been programmed through billions of generations to do exactly that. So it isn’t a PR lie that we all want to be happy. It’s just now it’s more socially acceptable to talk about this desire.