To think we medicalise the normal throes of life?

it's a case by case situation i think.
when im worried about life type stuff it can escalate to a situation where i dont think its just normal anxiety. eg if im worried about one of my parents, i can start doing stuff like driving round and round thinking ive hit someone with my car and checking that i haven't.

People are becoming less and less able to handle the normal vicissitudes of life.

Not helped by parents thinking their children should never have to feel any feeling that is unpleasant, uncomfortable or unfair. First wave of these kids have now grown up and we are reaping what we sow.

All this means that there is less help and resources to go around to help those who really really do need help with truly severe mental health difficulties.

@Tootleytoo try getting help for an under 18. Almost impossible. My Dd would not be here now if we had not been able to afford to go private. We waited 2 years on the waiting list for GOSH psychology even though she was down as in urgent need of treatment. Her school referred her to CAHMs after she harmed herself at school and were told I would be contacted as an urgent case within 48 hours. They eventually called us after 6 months. After the self harming incident our GP strongly and apologetically advised us to seek private treatment. Thank goodness we had the means to do so.

I disagree that it is hard to get a diagnosis of depression. It is diagnosed within routine appointment in primary care GP services. An estimated 89 million antidepressant prescriptions were issued in 2022-2023. I honestly don't know anyone who has gone to see a GP about low mood who has not been offered antidepressants.

I agree. Used to work in secondary school and the number of children marked being off ill with 'anxiety' was immense. I taught mostly GCSE and A level and found these age groups particularly bad for this, and notes on the register would sometimes add things like 'unable to come into school. Anxious about exams'. If they weren't anxious about this, then I would have been more worried! I think more needs to be done about how it is normal to feel anxious about exams, sad about death, and so on. I also find that with so many people saying they have things like anxiety (without a diagnosis) also detracts from people that genuinely need help. With so many children (parents) claiming anxiety, and seeking CAHMS referrals this lengthens the list for those who genuinely need it.

I think opposite things hold true.

One group is self diagnosing and exaggerating. Seeing themselves as suffering from medical depression and anxiety when it’s really low and anxious feelings due to a difficult bit of life and they’ve never been given the opportunity to build the resilience needed to push through that short term issue.

Another group is struggling immensely because they have serious mental health conditions and cannot get the support they need.

More worrying are those who want their perfectly normal feelings labelled. I sometimes wonder if FOMO drives some of this.
Then there are thise chasing shit labels for some inexplicable reason; boarding-school syndrome for example.
To be frank, these people make it so difficult for those with genuine MH conditions

Yanbu. One of my team went off with "work related stress and work triggered depression" and was off for months, got referred to all sorts of services, medication etc. staggered return to work, lots of time and resources used, welfare meetings, grievances and so on.

The actual reason? They just didn't like their job anymore and expected us to change how we all worked and when we wouldn't they allegedly developed depression.

They left (thank god) and got in touch about 3 months later to apologise for being dramatic about it all and not seeing that it was 'just' they didn't like their job anymore.

Tbf though I got the feeling it was their GP that pushed all this and have seen how quickly GPs are to sign people off with stress, anxiety etc over normal things people should really push through to come out better mentally equipped in future, so I don't think they help matters at all.

I think it's complicated. I suffer with panic disorder and have panic attacks every night. I'm medicated for it (beta blockers) and they are a game changer. I wouldn't have panic disorder if I wasn't on a 45 week waiting list for my medical care. The NHS is broken and the people working in it (including me!) are powerless.

I agree with you OP.

We live in a world where everyone is desperate to have a label.

It’s why so many people self diagnose as having autism, being non-binary or transgender etc.

I agree with PPs that it’s very good to know these terms and not stigmatise them but I think they are overused and it takes away from the people suffering from the actual conditions.

I do think there is a rise in mental health because life is much more face paced, social media means you’re constantly comparing your life to a fake world and you can’t get away from the bad things going on in the world etc but I also think people have forgotten that it’s normal to feel sad or anxious sometimes.

I know of 2 people who had a loved one die, one was a parent and one was a miscarriage and in both cases they were labelled as depressed and given anti-depressants less than a week after the death.
For me, I would have thought this was still feelings of grief rather than depression and it felt like being clinically depressed was ok but grieving was now stigmatised.

The stigma remains - it has to or the field will not survive. It is built on stigma. The diagnosis themselves show the stigma is still alive and kicking.

We never knew anything about mental illness as it was and it hasn't progressed at all today! We have always pathologised normal reactions to situations for hundreds of years.

I agree that some people do this, copying social media drama queens and influencers and celebrities who are feted as “brave” for talking about their “mental health struggles”
As someone with chronic properly diagnosed mental health conditions it pisses me off hugely because it minimises the problems faced by those with genuine illness.
Terms like OCD have become a trendy catch phrase which people use humorously. I actually had somebody laugh when I told them I have OCD so I explained that I am clinically diagnosed with this very draining condition, it doesn’t just mean I like to keep my house tidy.

It’s all in the name of business! The kind doctor says “you’re anxious, depressed, let me prescribe you some pills’. You take the pills and years later you got more problems because them pills are toxic and cause side effects. You then become the patient with more problems to treat. Win, win in the name of business.

Doctors need sick patients to be able to treat and prescribe to get their wages. Drug companies need their drugs prescribed to keep their business running.

You don't need a diagnosis from a specialist though.
You can self diagnose & self refer to talking therapy using an online questionnaire.
A GP can diagnose & prescribe medication based on a questionnaire.

A label means it’s not your fault. And we must never take accountability.

And those attitudes kind of make all the work that’s been done to remove the mental health stigma obsolete because instead of people now hearing “I need mental health support” and thinking “this persons a loony and needs locking up” like they did in that past, people hear that, roll their eyes and think “this person is just being overdramatic”.

I agree. We have moved beyond destigmatizing mental illness to trivialising it by applying mental health language to normal emotional experiences. I can't make up my mind if this is caused by lack of resilience or leads to lack of resilience; probably both. The rush to medicate negative emotions never allows people to find out that, for most of us, they pass.

I've noticed that "over diagnosis" has come up in a few, long form interview, podcasts recently so maybe we are moving towards a more measured approach. The people that I have heard interviewed talk about how over diagnosis applies to physical illness too; we can see this when we look at how thresholds for treating blood pressure, cholesterol and "pre diabetes" have been lowered so that many more people are medicated for these things now.

I had awful anxiety but assumed most people felt like this. It made work difficult and I just didn’t learn things like other people due to it, again affected work. I had adhd and severe social anxiety, only diagnosed late in life. I suspect there are many undiagnosed people out there.

I can remember a time when my circumstances were really difficult and I was miserable much of the time. Several well meaning people told me that I must have depression and should see the GP. I couldn't understand the logic of treating something circumstantial as an illness so I didn't.

I think both of the OP's statements can simultaneously be true without contradiction. I'd be interested to know - but how you would (or whether you even could) work it out, no idea - how much of what gets described as anxiety and depression is in fact "not sleeping well enough".

6 months ago my ds took his own life. I recently had an over 65 health check and the nurse asked me why I wasn't on anti depressants. I said I'm not depressed.
She was adamant I should be " on something ". I take no medication for anything and I think she was amazed at my age there wasn't something wrong with me. I have worked bloody hard over these 6 months to be healthy, exercise and eat well....for me that has helped me enormously. I feel strong physically which has helped me deal with this trauma.

I mean, it’s the normal human experience to have heart attacks snd high blood pressure when we get to a certain age - it’s the normal human experience for millions of children to die from malaria in hot countries…should we not be medicalising these conditions op?

I think both doctors and patients should always be mindful of the side effects of medication, but ultimately if the benefits outweigh the negatives then I don't see the problem.

I get awful migraines - I don't think anyone's ever died from a migraine, and probably I could manage them to some extent with lifestyle choices (ie quit my very stressful job) but it suits me better to just take the painkillers.

I was diagnosed with PND when DD1 was 9 months old. I was struggling but to this day, I can’t tell if I was actually depressed or just so knackered that I couldn’t function properly.

I was put on antidepressants which I took for a few months.

When our DD2 died sleeping I was put on antidepressants. For normal grief. I think I took them for a few months.

I have been prescribed antidepressants twice and I still don’t think I was ever actually clinically depressed.