Is America going crazy?

Question: Is it just me or does it seem like everyone is diagnosed with ADHD, Depression, Bi-Polar, or Autism? Do you think it is because professionals are better at recognizing the symptoms or have we turned into a society that needs an excuse for everything? Or is there something in the environment that is making us crazy?

This is such a good question that I think I will have to do a separate post for each disorder, and a general one to start on diagnosis.

Part 1: General increase in mental health disorder diagnosis in our society.

The short answer to your question is...yes. I think professionals are far better at recognizing symptoms and since the introduction of better diagnostic tools (like the DSM III, IV, and IV tr) more professionals are speaking the same language and using the same objective criteria to make a diagnosis.

A diagnosis is not a label that you stick on someone and say, “Ok we're done.” It is a suggestion for a course of treatment. The DSM (big book of disorders) is not a menu. Any person looking through it would find at least 10 disorders they thought they had by going through the check lists. That is not how it is supposed to work.

The way it is supposed to work is a licensed professional meets with a client/patient and they get the feeling, based on their experience and the symptoms they observe, that this person may have a particular disorder. Then they check the DSM to make sure there is nothing that they missed, so they don't try a form of treatment that might be more harmful than helpful.

Assessment and Diagnosis are never complete, they are a statement of the best course of treatment so far based on the information we have. If the symptoms go away there is a pretty good chance the diagnosis was correct.

Does our society just need an excuse for everything? I think our society needs a reason for everything, and wants a cure for everything. We are taught that if we feel discomfort something has gone wrong and we ought to diagnose and cure the problem. Diagnosis is not an excuse, it is a reason, and suggests a course of treatment, but there are many people who use a diagnosis as an excuse.

Also I think that while every disorder in the book has been around for centuries (just read Shakespeare or Greek mythology) our environment lends itself to mental illness in a way it never has before.

Why? Kids today have everything right? I mean it is so easy for them, they don't have to work for anything what do they have to be stressed about?

Every mental health disorder is made worse by (and some are caused by) stress. Stress comes from having to make choices and decisions. Freedom and choices are wonderful things that we value, but when you have the freedom to choose there is a possibility that you might choose wrong and that knowledge grinds people down.

Our society has changed more in the last 150 years than it had in the 10,000 years prior to that. I am glad to live in our world today, but with each passing year as we give our children more leisure, freedom, and choices we pile the stress on. It is hard to have a nervous break down when you are a peasant who doesn't have time to worry about anything more than whether or not you are going to have enough to eat.

Finally there is something biological occurring in our present environment which cannot be denied. The increase in peanut allergies in the last generation requires a physical explanation. As does the increase in Aspergers and ASDs (autism spectrum disorders), these disorders exist. We do not know why yet but it is certainly not a failure of parenting, or over protective mommies making up excuses for the children.

The end result is we have a lot of people who are struggling. The good news is we can help and we are getting better at it all the time. I believe we are in the infancy of our understanding and treatment of metal health disorders. In 50 years as our understanding of the brain matures they will look back at our techniques as we do the blood letting of George Washington's generation.