Mental Illness - are we truly getting worse? Or are things being overdiagnosed? - Poking at modern mental health

[kūhaku]

Mental Illness, and Mental Well-being are all the rage in our age. Making sure people can be treated, or given the medicine they need is important to keep them healthy. Or, it's just a delusional craze and the drugs are an attempt to control and sedate people, and most mental illness is just regular human behavior. Both can be seen as valid points and I wanted to explore the general idea of mental illness in our time period.

From what I have seen with many other people, you would be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't have something wrong with them in the eyes of a psychologist. ADHD, ADD, Autism, OCD, Bipolar, etc, all seem to be extremely prevalent in the world today, but it makes me wonder, why? Surely if time marches on then we would evolve to have stronger minds, not weaker ones? Is that a product of modern medicine? Or maybe it's that these illnesses are finally being given names, and have actually been present since the dawn of civilization and society.

I would favor the side of "over-diagnosis" for many of these illnesses, however it seems that some true mental illness, such as psychopathy or schizophrenia, though not these specifically, are becoming more common. This could not be explained by over-diagnosis because they are actual tangible issues with the human mind. This to me seems to be due to us being more aware of these, rather than them actually increasing.



What do kiwis think? Do you think there are new disorders that didn't exist hundreds of years ago that are just now popping up? Is it a scheme to drug up the masses? Are people just becoming more aware? Or is it something different? Psychology has always been an interesting subject to me and I'd love to hear the opinions of others on the topic. For the sake of keeping this thread clean, lets keep trans to the trans thread and focus on other more prevalent mental illness because if we talked about that it would just divulge into a transtrender sperg thread.

 

[Takodachi]

Something has definitely changed, mostly the scale at which we operate.
I remember reading somewhere that the human mind wasnt built to even fathom societies of this scale, the idea of being a miniscule gear in such a gargantuan wheel is something our primitive minds have trouble comprehending and starts breaking trying to adapt to such a foreign enviroment.

 

[kūhaku]

Something has definitely changed, mostly the scale at which we operate.
I remember reading somewhere that the human mind wasnt built to even fathom societies of this scale, the idea of being a miniscule gear in such a gargantuan wheel is something our primitive minds have trouble comprehending and starts breaking trying to adapt to such a foreign enviroment.

I've heard something similar. The human mind can only maintain up to around 200 people in a social group (a community, school, town, etc.) before people start to just become names. It's possible that by having such a constant exposure to such a massive amount of people with the dawn of the internet creates a feeling of isolation in everyone due to like you said being such a small piece of a large puzzle. What I feel this fails to take into account is mental illness at a young age, because at that point you probably know less than 20-30 people but things like ADHD or ADD are diagnosed frequently in those age groups.

 

[Sweetpeaa]

Older psychiatry has a bad reputation as being ''inhumane'' but at least back then the only people ending up in a psychiatrists office or a mental hospital where those with a serious psychiatric illness. Neo psychiatry would diagnose and medicate as many people as they could for the sake of profit.

 

[Y2K Baby]

It's less being over-diagnosed and more just actually being diagnosed.

 

[Sigma]

I'd guess maybe it's a mixture of both. In the past, it's pretty safe to say that a lot of people weren't exactly normal but they were never diagnosed with anything. However, those folks had to try harder to fit in with the normal crowd since there wasn't the internet to fall back on back then. Maybe the biggest differences now are that any amount of deviating from the norm can get a diagnosis slapped on somebody with relatively few questions asked. Also the internet makes it easier for weirdos to band together instead of being more or less forced to learn to behave if they want to talk to people.

 

[Glunko the Great]

When so many different mental illnesses exist, you're bound to have something. However, I do think most doctors are way to willing to push prescriptions onto their patients when they first start showing symptoms, which leads to diagnoses being made way to early.

 

[snailslime]

it's easier to get a proper diagnosis nowadays

 

[Lemmingwise]

I honestly believe most mental illness stems from only a handful of things.

1. Erasure of communities and replacing it with smartphones.
2. Spiritual voids in people's lives
3. Lack of exercise/physical work (men)
4. Focusing too much on professional competition and missing the fertility window (women)
5. A psych system that ignores the above 4 and instead prescribes addictive medication while claiming they're non-addictive and that the withdrawal serves as proof for how good the drugs are for you and you shouldn't stop taking them.


Point 2 is specifically for men as they then have higher neuroticism and lower testerone and happiness, whereas exercise doesn't seem to have the same benefit for women (though they can get something similar from condomless sex and not being on the pill).

 

[Otterly]

just from experience at work I’d say yes. Certainly for the less organic types. (Schizophrenia will always have a huge biological component that is maybe lesser in things like depression, anxiety etc. ) the big rise has been in the conditions like anxiety, depression of all types, OCD of all types and cluster B disorders.
I actually think things have got significantly worse in those disorders in the last ten years alone, and that I blame on the societal changes social media and smartphones have wrought. If you look at things like ROGD (rapid onset gender dysphoria ) in girls it’s a huge upward trend from 2013 on. Thinking back, I suspect you will see similar in others. The howling insanity of SJW culture, the huge rise in people hating their bodies to the extent they want to be the opposite sex, these things are linked. Society is removing the brake that shame used to create, so now all fetishes and kinks are brave and stunning rather than grubby. At the same time, normal human interaction like flirting is demonised as inappropriate. SJW culture has everyone checking every thought and word in case it offends. IDpol has us all in our little separate silos. Nobody is interacting in a healthy way any more, unless they’re seniors who don’t use thy ex internet or kindergarten kids who don’t have access yet.
Not directly related but doesn’t help: The closure of the long term psych places in favour of ‘care in the community’ has meant that we no longer have anywhere to put the proportion of people who have always existed who just cannot function safely in society.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

We live in a society.

Being half serious about that statement. Stuff like ADHD would have had benefits when a majority of humans were hunter-gatherers. Outside of some isolated tribes and weirdos running off into the woods, most people have a life where ADHD is detrimental more often than it would be for Ugga back when sloths were giant and wooly mammoths roamed the Earth.

For the more serious disorders like schizophrenia, life is often safer in the modern world. Someone with severe schizophrenia would have met an earlier non-suicide death in the same era when the hyped up nut was thriving.

 

[Wallace]

Social media has definitely exacerbated the problem. We're bombarded by images of our peers as wealthier, more attractive, and generally happier than we perceive ourselves to be, and all of this is interpreted as unfair, so we look for reasons as to why it is not our fault. We are raised more by television and the internet, and less by caring people. Our careers feel less certain, and each day is more precarious than the last. I would think that would make anyone anxious.

 

[kūhaku]

To bring up this point again, why do you guys think ADHD/ADD is so prevalent in children? Many of the problems listed in this thread are great and work extremely well for many disorders present in adults but I feel that it fails to explain the diagnosis of things in children, who do not have exposure to social media, the internet, or large groups of people.

Keep in mind that this difference is not from caveman to modern times, even 200 years ago many of these disorders didn't "exist" or weren't as prevalent. Obviously you can point to the idea that psychology as a mainstream science started as early as 150 years ago, so these diagnoses could not have been made, but it's not as if science was hobo-tier in the 1700s-1800s. If there were mass cases of ADHD, wouldn't we have at least heard something about it from the past?

 

[Wallace]

To bring up this point again, why do you guys think ADHD/ADD is so prevalent in children? Many of the problems listed in this thread are great and work extremely well for many disorders present in adults but I feel that it fails to explain the diagnosis of things in children, who do not have exposure to social media, the internet, or large groups of people.

Keep in mind that this difference is not from caveman to modern times, even 200 years ago many of these disorders didn't "exist" or weren't as prevalent. Obviously you can point to the idea that psychology as a mainstream science started as early as 150 years ago, so these diagnoses could not have been made, but it's not as if science was hobo-tier in the 1700s-1800s. If there were mass cases of ADHD, wouldn't we have at least heard something about it from the past?

Because parents want an excuse for why Junior is a hyperactive sperg. Anything as long as it isn't their fault. Even better if the treatment takes no effort like a pill, or it's something they can bilk for pitybucks. Let your damn kids play outside. Skinned knees heal.

 

[Cheeseburger Picnic]

To bring up this point again, why do you guys think ADHD/ADD is so prevalent in children? Many of the problems listed in this thread are great and work extremely well for many disorders present in adults but I feel that it fails to explain the diagnosis of things in children, who do not have exposure to social media, the internet, or large groups of people.

Keep in mind that this difference is not from caveman to modern times, even 200 years ago many of these disorders didn't "exist" or weren't as prevalent. Obviously you can point to the idea that psychology as a mainstream science started as early as 150 years ago, so these diagnoses could not have been made, but it's not as if science was hobo-tier in the 1700s-1800s. If there were mass cases of ADHD, wouldn't we have at least heard something about it from the past?

Sitting down and learning in a classroom setting isnt something we evolved to do. A brain that is hyperactive and jumps between a bunch of things in its environment instead of focusing on a single task could be very beneficial in a hunter gatherer setting. it's not a "mental illness", we've just pathologized it by created an environment where that type of brain doesn't thrive.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Social contagions are being spread by the internet.

Look at the phenomenon of "gang stalking" for example or the anti-vax movement or flat Earthers.

People get crazy ideas in their head and the internet offers support networks that exacerbate and reinforce them.

 

[Biffo]

Neither, just more people with munchausen

 

[Otterly]

To bring up this point again, why do you guys think ADHD/ADD is so prevalent in children?

Children are not supposed to be sat quietly in a classroom. They have insane amounts of energy and they need to be using it. Kids learn by doing - they should be outside, running around, exploring the world. Countries like the scandi ones have a school start age of 7, and up to 6 they are purely play based and outside loads. They do learn, but it’s based on doing stuff rather than sitting down and being lectured at. Tons of active time, most preschools have a room which is full of soft kit for kids to just bounce off the walls and burn off energy. It is profoundly unnatural to make kids sit still for so long so young,
There’s also an epidemic of shit parenting, where parents aren’t able or willing to do the long hard slog that is socialising children. Too much screen time, not enough outdoor time and poor parenting accounts for a huge amount. Lazy diagnostics and pushy parents who want to medicate their kids accounts for more. ADD exists but an awful lot of kids labelled with it would benefit from a different lifestyle.

as a pp said, these traits are not always maladaptive in a hunter gatherer environment. Someone constantly twitchy and needing stimulation could be the one who finds new sources of food or resources. An anxious mum checking on the baby constantly and constantly running threat scenarios through her mind is going to be more likely to have her kids survive. When the biggest threat is too much soda and sofa then it becomes maladaptive.
Our current living environment is toxic to the psyche. I have no doubt about that.

 

[eternal dog mongler]

Keep in mind that this difference is not from caveman to modern times, even 200 years ago many of these disorders didn't "exist" or weren't as prevalent. Obviously you can point to the idea that psychology as a mainstream science started as early as 150 years ago, so these diagnoses could not have been made, but it's not as if science was hobo-tier in the 1700s-1800s. If there were mass cases of ADHD, wouldn't we have at least heard something about it from the past?

Well the Irish (who have a really high rate of congenital disorders) used to talk about how their kids stepped in a faerie circle and were made into a changeling. Which made it culturally acceptable to toss them into the woods and hope that the wolves ate them.

So there's your example of what happened in the past.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I think that the largest increase as been in depression, which as seen as a hip thing rather than an actual malady and is getting worse by lack of community support and ideals. There might be an increase in actual mental ailments due to us shoving bizarre substances down our throats that's designed to manipulate use to consuming more.