To think that "mental health/illness awareness" is bollocks

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Before anyone reads the title wrong, I believe that it's incredibly important to bring awareness. What I mean by bollocks is that society gives the impression that it cares about mental health but it's only restricted to depression and anxiety.

My friend is a therapist and when talking to her, she doesn’t believe in ADHD but believes in other mental illnesses/neurodevelopmental disorders. It’s a sentiment that’s echoed by many people in society but I was shocked that a mental health professional refused to believe it.

I also have a cousin who became schizophrenic during her time in college and all her friends slowly drifted away from her. These would be the same people that posted “Mental Health Matters” on their Facebook page.

@Bambamhoohoo , it is widely accepted as genetically caused and seems to be in a cluster with other conditions which show the brain is, for want of a better way of describing it, wired differently than in the majority of the population (left handedness is part of the cluster, as is dyslexia, autism, dyspraxia, tourettes, etc etc).

I wonder if you are thinking of the research on how trauma affects the children of the victims? Like, if a rat has been taught to pair a smell with an electric shock, they will become highly sensitive to and afraid of that smell. Their offspring may not demonstrate the fear (especially if raised by other parents) but will show increased sensitivity to the smell and brain dissection will show that they have more receptors for that smell than normal rats. Children born to fathers who were POWs are smaller and have more adverse health conditions than children of those fathers conceived before the fathers trauma but I am not aware that they have increased chance of ND.

We are still kind of in the dark ages when it comes to understanding a lot of how the brain works, despite the massive advancements being made all the time.

Well, to be fair, when you have seen your 10th person of the week who tells you they must have an anxiety disorder because they get anxious when they have to do an interview, or exam, or they dont like it when people are angry at them........ I hope we can move away from such a focus on diagnostic labels and to a more formulation based approach to mental health treatment. We still need them to some extent, but far too many people are applying them incorrectly. And diagnosis is such an inexact thing anyway. Even with the diagnostic systems in place.

Ds’s school does regular wear a certain colour and bring in a pound for mental health days whilst allowing bullying to go unchallenged beyond a chat with the bully if lucky. If Ds wasn't year 6 I’d move him. anti-bullying week/day is meaningless. There was an assembly by a different year group about inclusion and making sure other children are not left out of games and are treated with kindness. Two days later Ds was told that school was better when he isn’t there. They are a bunch of nasty little bullies at the moment his class. He is neurodiverse and fairly popular but the different kids will always be singled out by those who think it’s cool to bully people.
I used to work in the NHS and there were so many bullies on my ward. The patients noticed it it was that bad.
Trust no one. Mulder is very wise on that one.

Most practitioners do, and always have, used that approach at least in primary care settings/private practice, and entirely appropriate at that level. But it's hella position of privilege to talk this way if you don't work in forensics, crisis, with the severe end of the MH population.

Some people are ill, the ones with the hallucinations etc. The rest can be just sad or lack faith in their good futures...- and this is where big pharma comes. To start exploiting you

I have voted YABU because you cannot even compare ND to mental health illnesses such as schizophrenia.

How utterly ridiculous.

I don't think society cares about depression or anxiety either tbh. They want people to "open up" about their MH but then if they do they'll probably be accused of being manipulative or selfish for putting their depression on someone else. People don't really know how to deal with a depressed person venting. Then we've got this idea being perpetuated that teens are doing "online challenges" that end in their death with no evidence for it. How does it help anyone to just deny the truth of what happened? Depression and suicidal ideation is still taboo.

As far as schizophrenia goes-it's one of the most severe mental illnesses there is, people often lose touch with reality completely so YABU for judging anyone who distanced themselves from someone who had it.

Fucking hell.

I was going to say more but, tbh, fucking hell is all I have.

That's probably because 1in 4 people in England (for example) experience a mental health problem each year. If you work in medium to large organisation, then that's quite a few people, perhaps they have their own issues or are looking after someone in their personal life with those issues and their capacity to support is just not there.

Forget the diagnosis given it’s the behaviour associated with the diagnosis that’s the issue and as MH issue are complex not everyone will behave in the same way.

If someone cries, withdraws, and folds in on themselves it’s very different from someone getting shouty or demanding. I had a relative who had a bad time, no doubt that the issue was sad but she became very aggressive for about a year. Whilst what happened was sad for her, the behaviour meant she lost a lot of friends.

If you look at the symptoms of CPTSD and ADHD they overlap. If you read the work of Gabor Mate, he believes trauma in early childhood causes ADHD symptoms.

I believe that neurodivergence at present is vague and unhelpful. The term Autism is too confusing, I get it’s a spectrum, but a very unhelpfully huge spectrum.

I think trauma ultimately alters your brain chemistry. In the OPs post, she mentioned that the therapist didn’t believe in adhd and I think it’s an interesting conversation to have. In my opinion, it’s either trauma or modern living and the adverse effects on kids today.

Gabor Mate is full of shit about ADHD. He's put no evidence forward for his claims at all other than his own experience. But he does have some helpful strategies to offer families, that I will give him. And he's bang on the money with addiction, where he has done most of his actual research.

What research does tell us is that ADHD and autistic individuals are more likely to also be traumatised, experience ACEs, and experience social and economic exclusion, so even trying to separate them out diagnostically is hugely difficult. When I did assessments, we would usually take the line of working first on any suspected trauma based presentation and if that improved with therapy and parenting changes, then diagnostic criteria were unlikely to be met for ADHD and/or autism. But where challenges persisted, we would need to think again about reassessment.

Neurodivergent is an identity based term, not a diagnosis, so of course if people expect it to have set criteria like diagnosis does, they will find it vague. It isn't meant to substitute for diagnosis.

Where we can agree here is that there are certainly aspects of modern life and modern parenting that are likely to exacerbate the more distressing aspects of neurodivergence. It's unpopular, but too much screen time, if you have a child prone to issues with attention regulation, isn't good. Ditto a carb and sugar laden diet. Not enough time being physically active and outside. Same for lack of structure and a chaotic environment at home. This one is tough, because you're often working with ND parenrs who struggle with those things themselves. So they need support first to be able to support their kids. And compassion, because we have all been over here masking and white knuckling our way through without knowing there were other ways. (I was one of those struggling adults before my DC were assessed and the penny dropped - even as a psychologist, I didn't see it).

The whole "is it ADHD/autism or trauma" debate is bullshit and a red herring, because we nearly always have to think "both/and". People don't fit neatly into boxes that way.

In my opinion, it’s either trauma or modern living and the adverse effects on kids today.

I’m not sure that this theory stands up. Where is the cut off for ‘modern living’?For example, two of DP’s siblings have been diagnosed with ADHD (DP also has the same often very debilitating traits but undiagnosed.) His brother is in his forties (diagnosed in the early 90’s), sister in her fifties (recently diagnosed.) It is not difficult to see that they inherited it from their dad, who was born in 1945. Not exactly a time of ‘modern living’. Or are they all suffering from trauma? Some of the younger generation in the family are now being diagnosed too. I don’t see how it can be explained by modern living or trauma.

Yes, exactly. People who are schizophrenic can be dangerous. They don't just inconvenience people. Usually when mental health professionals get killed, it was a schizophrenic patient who killed them.

It is unreasonable to expect some random students to help people with such serious problems. It is unreasonable to ask them to put themselves in harms way.

My dad worked at a mental health hospital and the day he came back with a hole in his head and blood all over his hair, it was a patient who actually really liked my dad who had done it. My dad said that the patient couldn't help it. The doctor had made him upset and my dad was the next person the patient saw.

Mind you, just because someone is certifiably insane they are usually not stupid enough to attack the big burly men. It is usually the female staff they attack.

I had a friend at uni sectioned due to drug induced psychosis. He turned on all of us. It was way, way more than a bunch of uni students could deal with, it was really sad. He needed professional help, not a blundering bunch of clueless 20 year olds.

Generational trauma. Born in 1945 means parents lived through WW I and then II. Fucks you up and because people didn't sort themselves out with it so they pass on the trauma to some great grandchild born in 2025. My mother is likely a covert narcissist, because her mother is one and because her mother was a nasty one too. Here I am in 2025 in therapy working through the impact this had on me. It all started way back in the 19th century.

The silent generation- a whole traumatised generation.

I'm not one of the kind people on MN. So it's easy for me to not be a hypocrite & say that dealing with other people's poor mental health is painful... and dangerous to my own poor mental health.

Sometimes I have managed to tolerate chronic exposure by enforcing firm boundaries about how much energy & care I was willing to invest.

Kate Atkinson is that you?

I think this is important. Improved mental health awareness, especially relating to schizophrenia and other severe conditions, where the improved awareness is most needed, should not be about trying to equip friends and family to take on massively unreasonable burdens.

Often, close family and friends just are not the ones who can help. And/or if they are, the burden is just too great unless they are working in a framework where the ill person has the professional support they need.

Conversations around awareness shouldn't be about pressuring people to 'be there' for friends and family. They should be about informing people, reducing stigma, and undermining the profound othering of severely ill people so that politicians are under more pressure to fund their healthcare properly.

Exactly.

While mental health issues are widely discussed and accepted these days, those discussions and acceptance do NOT include severe mental illnesses and addiction (which is a mental illness). Those are still heavily judged.

We’ve got it backwards and still have a long way to go. But we are still less than 100 years from the barbaric conditions of the mental asylums. So to expect to be further along would be too higher expectation imo.

🤣🤣

Hear hear 👏👏👏👏👏👏
My sibling has schizophrenia and I have always agreed with this. I hate it.

If something is in the person then I would agree with it, having the mental illness and being able to function in a 'normal' way is one thing but a person with a mental inless that makes them act badly towards others there is only so long the excuse can last 'they are treating me badly but they have x so its ok i will just put up with it'

There is having a mental illness and still trying your best, or having mental illness and playing the endless victim and expecting everyone around you to change but you do nothing

I get where you’re coming from. I understand that trauma can be passed down through the generations. I lived through the Troubles in Belfast and it is a hot topic here. But the poster I quoted was suggesting that ADHD wasn’t a thing in and of itself, but a trauma response. I don’t think any of the current medical evidence supports this. There are overlaps in the symptoms of trauma and those of ADHD/ASD, however two conditions being similar does not mean they share the same source. I’m sorry for your situation. I hope therapy helps you. It can be a very long road