To wonder why everyone suddenly has a mental health issue?

[VogueVVague]

Dont get me wrong, im not talking about people who have struggled with long term clinical depression, schizophrenia etc.

But it seems like everyone now has some form of mental issue.

Hey, as a teenager and young adult i was a freaking mess, a teenage runaway, drugs, alcohol, confusing feelings, rage, destruction, depression, fear, shyness sometimes, anxiety. Just thought it was a normal part of transitioning.

Now as a fully formed adult some things still make me feel anxious, mny times i do feel unmotivated, depressed on a kind of existential level, sometimes nervous, sometimes not wanting to do something because it involves big gatherings or lots of strangers, which lets face it, can be awkard and uncomfortable for most people.

Isnt that just life and being human?
It feels like i meet so many people who "have" anxiety or borderline or bipolar. Especially teens. Arent they just experiencing adolescence?

Is social media making us believe the normal default is "happy and relaxed", when thats just one setting and humans are actually also designed to be down or nervous sometimes too?

@mumsnet Not sure why my post was deleted with a reference to the talk guidelines? I wrote about my own mental health problems and challenged the notion that those with anxiety are cowards. Is it because I quoted a post which has subsequently been deleted? Please explain.

rose i can when a so called friend notes down my symptoms then used to them to claim she too had ocd in a way that yook the piss out of me.

@Snorkmaiden85
Its possible that "coward" post was deleted

Hi all,
We have made several deletions on this thread, some merely for repeating deleted posts.
Mumsnet is, at heart, a place of peer support, it would be great if (even while having a more generalised discussion) we could bear that in mind when posting.

Sorry.

I agree that this has been a very interesting thread but it is distracting me too much from my domestic servitude. I MUST go and do the ironing!

YABVVU OP. At the grand old age of 43 I've just been diagnosed as having borderline despite having had MH issues since my teens. Your post suggests this isn't as serious as schizophrenia etc which I find very insulting.

Did anyone else hear the interview on (I think)Woman's Hour the other week, of the mother of the son killed in the Manchester Arena bombing?

The interviewer asked how she coped with the aftermath, if she'd been given anti-depressants or sleeping tablets, and the lady said 'they wanted to give me antidepressants, but I turned them down. I'm not depressed, I'm sad.'

It made me think how brave she was and how I would have turned to any tablet going to try to ease the pain. So maybe, bearing in mind that health professionals were urging her to take antidepressants, we have lost track a little of the difference between 'depressed' and 'sad, caused by some external event.'

It’s a combination of things:

1. reduces stigma means people are more willing and likely to acknowledge having difficulties with their MH
2. the use of certain MH diagnoses in common parlance has gone through the roof. People say ‘I’m feeling so depressed’ when they’re a bit sad, ‘I have anxiety’ when they’re a bit nervous, ‘I’m so OCD’ because they prefer a clean home, which you’d think destigmatises the conditions but actually makes things worse because it undermines and belittles cases where people do have these disorders having a severe impact on their life, and it makes people with them feel like they’re really fucking weird when someone else with apparently the same issue is perfectly fine and coping just great
3. GPs are very eager to prescribe antidepressants for genuine normal human emotions like sadness and grief, leading to a diagnosis of depression to justify it. I had a diagnosis of depression a month after my mother died when I really, really wasn’t depressed, I was grieving. I knew that at the time and rejected drugs, and when I developed actual depression five years later it confirmed to me that grief and depression are totally different! It’s irresponsible to try and medicate away natural human emotions and I think leads to people becoming weaker and feeling they can’t cope
4. it is trendy in some cases to have a diagnosis, while it’s great that MH issues are more recognised, it dilutes the real impact they have on people’s lives for someone who just gets a bit nervous doing something to self assess and self diagnose themselves with ‘anxiety’: a level of anxiety is normal and we wouldn’t want to be without it, trust me
5. a lot of the campaigns to end stigma and raise awareness reallly over egg the ‘it’s super common’ angle and give the impression that if you even feel a bit down or nervous you therefore must have anxiety or depression. People don’t realise that some level of nerves and sadness are normal and an actual diagnosis of these things is something with a clinical assessment and threshold, you literally cannot self diagnose, you’re too close to the situation, you can have an inkling and approach a doctor.
6. the diagnostic tools used by doctors to assess for anxiety and depression were developed by drug companies and are designed to make it very difficult to not meet the threshold for a diagnosis (which would therefore mean prescribing drugs, which makes the drug company/author of the tool money). If you don’t believe me, try filling out a PHQ9 or GAD7 tool online for depression and anxiety, while having a slightly shit week or even just a regular one. The threshold is so low and the tool asks nothing about positive experiences in the past fortnight, so someone with sleep problems for the past two weeks who has felt a bit down (for whatever reason) will meet the criteria for a diagnosis of depression and be offered anti depressants.
7. sadly there will always be people who claim a MH issue for the secondary gains (being cared for, taking on the patient role, not having to work/claiming benefits, being enabled to ignore their responsibilities by others around them who are tip toeing around.
8. it’s infectious, like the contagion effect with suicide attempts in schools for example. One person is diagnosed with anxiety and open about it, suddenly others around who either mistakenly think being nervous before an exam is also anxiety disorder or those who see the attention and secondary gains the person gets will also believe they have anxiety.

MH issues are real and serious and ultimately nobody really knows what a person who claims to have a diagnosis is going through. I don’t think it does anyone any favours to medicalise a normal human experience, neither the person who is being pathologised or the people who do have a MH issue and are left with fewer resources/misinformation being spread about their disorder by people who really don’t.

It’s taken 12 years for me to get a diagnosis. It’s not trendy or glamorous. It’s my life and it affects every area of it.

Sorry, this post is massive, but I really hope someone will read it and respond to me directly

I posted a thread in Mental Health about one way in which my severe OCD is currently affecting me and no one replied Reading some posts in this thread have made me feel a little less isolated, so I'd like to thank the OP.

I have a list of diagnoses including OCD, depression, psychotic ideation (paranoia, some delusions), and bulimia. They all interact to become a complex mesh holding me down fast and utterly unable to function "normally". I haven't worked for nearly 15 years, have lived in supported accommodation for more than 10 years, and have received many rounds of therapy on the NHS (20-50 sessions at a time) that have made no difference at all. I want to talk about my OCD in depth, but maybe here isn't the place.

What I will say is that when my anxiety manifests as a panic attack, I become a hyperventilating, dribbling, howling mess; stars flash before my eyes or sometimes my vision goes dark and I all but pass out. My hands seize up into twisted claws that I can't move at all. This may only last for 15-30 minutes, but I will be shaky and easily moved to tears for up to three days after a particularly bad one. Because I have reduced my interactions with people to a minimum, most of my panic attacks now happen in my home because I can't get an OCD ritual to go right.

A lot of mental illnesses exist on a spectrum of severity: anxiety disorders can be completely debilitating and bipolar disorder can be relatively mild and easily controlled, with any periods of marked impairment being shorter-term. I think it is wrong to assume everyone diagnosed with anxiety and depression has been wrongly labelled or isn't suffering too badly, but I do have to say that most people talking about their poor mental health do only have mild and short-term issues. This is good for them, of course! But my problem is that they seem to be the loudest voices in the quest to end the stigma of mental illness and I don't think people with long-term, disabling psychiatric conditions of all kinds are benefitting from this.

Modern life:
Less community spirit. People dont want to mix with neighbours or people in the street anymore. "It takes a village to raise a child". Nor now when you cant even chat ti strangers kids or tell them off without being threatened with physical harm.

1. Internet use and smart phones. Blue light harming sleep. Watching photos of other peoples fab lives or travel. Marriage. Babies own houses nights out when you cant afford any of it.
2. Jobs are hard to get. Hard to keep. Minimum wage. Slogging your guts up with zero reward especially up north.
3. People becoming more insular. Staying inside and not even seeing friends a lot.
4. Obesity epidemic and lack of excercise because most people are sat at a desk all day then cant be bothered to go for a run or swim after so endorphins are low.

I was just reading about the plague on the internet. Loads of people contracted it and died- I am talking half the population in Europe. I wonder if the plague actually happened or whether most of the people were faking it. Because surely to be really ill, you need to have something that nobody else has.

It made me think how brave she was and how I would have turned to any tablet going to try to ease the pain. So maybe, bearing in mind that health professionals were urging her to take antidepressants, we have lost track a little of the difference between 'depressed' and 'sad, caused by some external event.'

The thing is, the tablets probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. I reckon she knew that.

They’re not happy pills, they don’t provide euphoria like opiates, they can take weeks to kick in and the effect can be almost imperceptible.

I know plenty of people who turned to drugs (not antidepressants as like I say they don’t work like that) after a trauma. And a decade later, when they finally stopped, that grief was still there to work through like it had happened yesterday.

I also declined antidepressants a month after a traumatic loss as the clue is in the name and I wasn’t depressed, I was very normally and expectedly grieving.

It’s extremely irresponsible to go putting people dealing with normal human emotions on antidepressants based on a nine question tick box that doesn’t differentiate between having these symptoms of depression due to depression or due to a trauma, a loss, a break up, an attack. It horrifies me that doctors do it so routinely. From talking to them a lot admit it’s because they don’t know what else to do, they feel bad doing nothing, and in some cases even get patients who demand to be given something as they themselves aren’t able to realise that they are going through a normal emotion and aren’t depressed.

A compassionate reassuring and normalising discussion from the doctor would be so much more appropriate.

Bit nasty PeakPants. People are making some really well thought out and compassionate points. Nobody yet has claimed mental illness is made up.

I agree with everything Walkingonaflashlightbeam said, and would have elaborated further in my post to say similar if I hadn't already written an essay!

The changing of the language used: mental health problems instead of psychiatric disorders, service user instead of patient, etc, and certainly the perpetuated idea that almost everyone has a mental illness is harmful, I think. It reduces people's understanding of serious conditions to not far off zero.

Everyone has a mental health as much as they have their other physical health. Therefore its likely that everyone will encounter some periods of adverse mental health in their lifetime in one way or another, just as we would expect them to be ill in another physical way.
some people may have a lifelong mental health issue and for other it may be shorter term, same as any other fleeting illness.

@goodnessidontknow
There is some very interesting research that shows eating disorders are basically non existent in countries where food is truly scarce. This suggests that things like anorexia are triggered by our environment and that body dismorphia develops when the basic requirement to survive is no longer a challenge (because our psyche needs something to be top of the list)

Cultural differences can influence how mental ill health manifests, and, of course, if an element of how anorexia starts is controlling the intake of food as a method of having some control over your life, then if you live somewhere where you don't have enough food that doesn't work.

Hmm I guess I am not sure but some people I know who are unhappy and on AD's seem to be more dissappointed in life and how its turned out even though they have good lives. Its almost like they expect too much fame, glamour and wealth. They seem to compare themselves to the people they know who are wealthier and more successful then themselves and even to famous people. For example a friend was resentful and depressed because their parents didn't hot house them as a child and as a result they weren't a top class sports person or musician. Another friend was depressed because her life was as glamourous or opulent as she had hoped for as a teen even though she had a good life style in London, she just focused on her friends who had married rich guys and envied them.

They were both on antidepressents and very unhappy people. Perhaps it was something chemical but part of me felt that they both spent too much time comparing themselves to others and hankering after a teenage fantasy rather than focusing on the good things they did have.

However I guess that could be what depression is for them.

I don't think there is a rise of mental health issues, they're simply better understood today. I think everyone on some level has mental health problems. I don't mean everyone's schizophrenic, but anxiety, stress, depression, food related issues, body image issues, poor self confidence? yeah, I don't know anyone who doesn't experience at least one of these, and they've always been around, and it's always been about mental health.

flourella - I'm so sorry you're having to deal with all that, and I wish I could think of something better to say, really.

most people talking about their poor mental health do only have mild and short-term issues ... But my problem is that they seem to be the loudest voices in the quest to end the stigma of mental illness and I don't think people with long-term, disabling psychiatric conditions of all kinds are benefitting from this.

I've had the same feeling, especially in the world of social media. At least in my (granted, kind of limited) social media circles the people who talk publically about their struggles have been those with less severe issues. There are several people in my SM who I know to have severe issues, but they (including myself) don't talk about it in their own name, probably for the fear of stigma that is still there, if you're one us hallucinating, non-working "lifers". I do wonder if it gives a skewed view of the issue, and an impression that problems in general are curable by medication, counselling, some running and yoga. I suppose realistically more people would fall into the "less severe" category, but it's not common to hear others speaking publically in their own name.

Well that made no sense. I meant it's not common to hear the more severely affected people speaking publically in their own name about their problems.

And I do understand why their don't.

A4710Rider I started them a couple of months ago, and I've seen a noticeable difference

Now, I really really don't want to take them longer than needed, I see these very much as an additional tool to help me come to terms with some difficult life shit, and get out of a black hole. I don't see myself staying on them long term, because I don't perceive that I suffer from depression per se. If you've got sad stuff going on in your life, you're going to feel sad! But after two years of feeling sad ALL the time, I realised my existing coping strategies just weren't cutting it. The sertraline has definitely evened things out - it's basically allowed me to remember what it's like not to feed sad! It has definitely helped me be on a more even keel, so I'm hoping that in a few months I can taper off them.

On the whole it is a good thing that mental health is now being talked about, becoming acceptable (as it should be) and we will live in a better society if there is honesty about this often silent illness.

However the word 'depressed' is overused, and often not clinically correct. You are unlikely to be clinically depressed if you are still fully functioning. Being off work for 'stress' or having a 'breakdown' these things can be life changing in their severity. A nervous breakdown is very serious.

It is normal to be unhappy, sad, pissed off, tearful and downright at end of your tether. But if that feeling runs into weeks and months it is clearly a more serious problem that needs some investigation.

So yes mental health is being overused in my experience (and then maybe response and the help to those living with the true condition can be watered down) and yes that is a concern. If everyone has a MH condition then he who is helping and supporting those that are truly suffering?

If everyone is depressed (whether they are or are just having a bad day is anyone's guess) how do we not overlook the people really struggling?