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Why is more diagnosis better diagnosis? I hear this constantly, literally every time people point out we might be calling people mentally ill now that we wouldn't have called mentally ill 20 years ago people go "wow we must be diagnosing people better". To me better diagnosis would be reflected in things like the suicide rate dropping, drug abuse falling, general health metrics improving, and so on, not in simply inc…
> It seems how we diagnose people is totally unconnected from any empirical data on if a culture more willing to diagnose people is making people healthier on a population-wide level. Speaking of an absence of empirical data: People are being told by doctors that their brain has a "chemical imbalance" which medication can fix, despite those doctors not performing any chemical tests on the patient's brain at all. Supp…
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#181Generally I think mental illness will remain in the dark ages so long as there is a divide between neurologists and psychiatrists, and so long as the ICD and DSM are the gold standard of diagnosis. Mental illness is mostly defined based on others perception of you, and is rarely defined based on any sort of psychological testing. There are a few which can be objectively tested for like Alzheimers but they're in the minority.