SS: A psychologist argues the increasing awareness of mental health is leading to a pathologising of everyday life. The use of clinical descriptions of what are otherwise normal problems and treating them as a disorder to be cured, is ironically making our mental health worse.
Posted by Fealocht
5 Comments
My psychologist when I was a teenager said I was the most depressed person he ever met, so I don’t think I fall in the faking it category lol.
Publishing the DSM-5 was a mistake. lol
Know somebody who says she’s depressed because she’s stuck in her hometown and not working a job she likes. I suppose that could cause depression but also was that not half of humanity for most of human history and plenty of people accepted that life is not traveling and living in luxury but making ends meet and taking care of the household
Having read the article (shock!) I’m
going to disagree with the article because I believe that a lot of people – maybe a plurality of people – really do live a life experiencing nothing but low-level anxiety and misery 90% of the time – and it’s a minority of the population who naturally feel fulfillment and happiness most-of-the-time and it’s only fair for the miserable-majority to want to have the same experience as the clinically-happy-minority – even if that means “pathologising” that which we consider normality.
As an example of why this is a good thing: centuries-to-decades ago it was “normal” for 3-in-100 people to be a fringe character; perhaps a hermit, maybe a personably offensive and asocial engineer-type if you’re lucky, now we know it as the autistic-spectrum and we have successfully stopped those people becoming hermits and now steer them on to Reddit instead – and that’s a genuine success story we should be celebrating; I’m saying we need to extend this to the other 95% of the population.
Man one thing I realized way too late is that life just kinda fuckin sucks most of the time