Mental illnesses, especially depression and anxiety disorders, Young peopleDemand for treatment is soaring, with some Psychiatric medications I climbed up.
This upward trend in prevalence parallels increased public attention to mental illness. Mental health messages are abundant in traditional and social media. Organizations and governments are rolling out awareness, prevention and treatment efforts with increasing urgency.
Increased cultural attention to mental health has clear benefits: it increases awareness, reduces stigma, and improves help-seeking.
But there could be costs, critics worry. Social media There are sites that induce mental illness, where ordinary misfortune is pathologized through the overuse of diagnostic concepts,Therapy Peak“
British psychologist Lucy Fowkes She argues that the trend of increasing attention and adoption is related.Prevalence inflation hypothesis“Increased awareness of mental illness may lead some people to inaccurately diagnose themselves when they are experiencing relatively mild or temporary problems,” they suggest.
Foulkes’ hypothesis suggests that some people have overly broad concepts of mental illness. Our research supports this view. We show In recent years, the concept of mental illness has expanded, and it is now called “Transformation of concepts” – and it is It depends on the person The breadth of the concept of mental illness.
Why do people self-diagnose mental illness?
Our new studyWe investigated whether people who hold broad conceptions of mental illness are actually more likely to self-diagnose.
We defined self-diagnosis as believing oneself to be ill, regardless of whether one had received a diagnosis from a professional. We assessed individuals as having a “broad concept of mental illness” if they judged a range of experiences and behaviours, including relatively mild symptoms, as disorders.
We asked a nationally representative sample of 474 American adults whether they thought they had a mental illness and whether they had ever been diagnosed by a health professional, as well as other possible contributing factors and demographics.
Mental illness was common in our sample: 42% reported having a current self-diagnosed illness, the majority of whom had been diagnosed by a health professional.
Not surprisingly, the strongest predictor of reporting a diagnosis was experiencing relatively severe distress.
The next most important factor after distress was having a broad conception of mental illness: for the same level of distress, those with a broad conception were significantly more likely to report a current diagnosis.
The graph below illustrates this effect. It splits the sample into levels of stress and shows the percentage of people at each level who report a current diagnosis. People with a broad conception of mental illness (top quartile of the sample) are represented by the dark blue line. People with a narrow conception of mental illness (bottom quartile of the sample) are represented by the light blue line. People with a broad conception are much more likely to report having a mental illness, especially when stress is relatively high.
Those with higher mental health literacy and less stigmatizing attitudes were also more likely to report a diagnosis.
There were two further interesting findings from our study: People who self-diagnosed but did not receive a professional diagnosis tended to have a broader conception of illness than those who did.
Additionally, younger people and politically progressive people are more likely to report a diagnosis, which may explain some Previous researchand had broader conceptions of mental illness. These tendencies to have broader conceptions partly explained their higher diagnosis rates.
Why does this matter?
Our findings support the idea that an expansive conception of mental illness may encourage self-diagnosis and thereby increase the apparent prevalence of mental illness: people with a lower threshold for defining distress as a disorder are more likely to perceive themselves as suffering from a mental illness.
Our findings do not directly show that people with broad concepts tend to overdiagnose or people with narrow concepts tend to underdiagnose. Cause Self-diagnosis or results Actual Increase in mental illness. But the findings raise important concerns.
First, there is growing awareness of mental health. There will be a costIn addition to improving mental health literacy, this may also increase the likelihood that people will misidentify their problems as pathology.
Inappropriate self-diagnosis can have adverse effects: diagnostic labels can become identity-defining and self-limiting when people come to believe their problems are permanent. Difficult to control Aspects of who they are as people.
Second, inappropriate self-diagnosis may lead people experiencing relatively mild distress to seek unnecessary, inappropriate and ineffective help. Australian Studies They found that people with relatively mild distress who went to psychotherapy were more likely to get worse than better.
Third, these effects may be particularly problematic for young people, who are the most likely to hold broad conceptions of mental illness. Social media consumptionand they experience relatively high rates of mental illness, and the rates are on the rise. It remains to be seen whether the broader concept of illness has any impact on the youth mental health crisis.
An ongoing cultural shift is leading to an increasingly broad definition of mental illness. These changes can be both good and bad. Normalizing mental illness may help to remove the stigma. But pathologizing some of our everyday suffering may have unintended downsides.
As we combat the mental health crisis, it’s important to find ways to raise awareness of mental health without unconsciously stigmatizing it.
This article is reprinted from conversation Published under a Creative Commons license. Original Article.
