The Spectrum Of Mental Health And Illness

In recent years the discussion around mental health has hit the mainstream. But as a contributing factor to the phenomenon of rising rates, it is too plausible to be ignored. Reported rates of mental distress and illness were rising before the pandemic, but was mental distress and illness itself increasing? The honest answer is that we don’t really know. Many more people were certainly seeking help for these problems and receiving antidepressant medication. In truth, it’s probably a bit of all of this. What is certain is that, whatever the effects of the global pandemic, all of these factors will play a role in any subsequent increase in mental disorders that we see. And given that is the case, what might be done to better help people across the spectrum of mental health and illness? I call it the Conversation. The Conversation is dominated by positivity and the memeification of a battle won. But Parkinson is expressing a more general frustration with the way we talk about mental health. Along each spectrum, every psychological problem shifts gradually from being mild and controllable to something that can entirely take over your life. There is no sudden change, no distinct shift on any graph that indicates mental illness has begun. Just because something’s a spectrum, and there will be gray areas, doesn’t mean we should use the same language for everything.

Believe Me

If we don’t, everyone ends up suffering more. This is emphatically not the same as ignoring or belittling other negative feelings. Even reasonably mild anxiety and mood problems can be exhausting. If you go through a period of stress like bereavement or prolonged illness, the psychological effects can be devastating. None of this is to say we should keep quiet about distress that doesn’t meet the threshold of a disorder. We need to talk about the psychological phenomena that cause us unhappiness or concern. Not just because they are unpleasant in themselves, but because they can be a warning sign, a red flag that someone is on the road to a more serious problem. But one problematic consequence of the bid to destigmatize mental illness, and to recognize everyone’s struggles, is that we’ve started labeling too much that is negative or distressing as a problem or disorder. This is particularly true of anxiety and depression. These are not, they are not fulfilling times, spiritually. Not just because of the quarantine, but because of the racial strife, and just seeing [the Trump] administration, watching the hypocrisy of it, day in and day out, is dispiriting. I’m not disputing the seriousness of the context she describes, or questioning the idea that it could affect mood and sleep, as she goes on to say.

Putting It Together

But I quote her here because I think her choice of language is so revealing. She could have said she’s struggling, that the current political and social climate are affecting her mood, her sleep, her motivation. They do note this duration in the Happiful article, but the headline and overall tone imply that what Obama describes is a form of depressive illness, one for which a name must be found. They too reinforce the idea that experiencing some of the symptoms of a disorder is equivalent to experiencing the disorder itself. This false equivalence is common now, such that for many people, perhaps the majority, it barely registers as strange. Teens eventually began to consider depression as a possible explanation for their experience and then took action to help them decide if they were actually depressed by talking to friends or family members. They don’t seek help for mental health problems because of the stigma involved or because of a lack of awareness of their own symptoms. Only eventually do they consider depression as a possible explanation. But in the years since that 2004 study was conducted, the readiness with which we label low mood as depression has been transformed. Language is continually evolving through use, and ultimately any attempt to prescribe or control the meaning of words is at the mercy of that process. But as any lawyer, politician, or diplomat will attest, language matters enormously. Calling everything anxiety and depression serves no one.

Where Life Begins

Most obviously, the expansion of mental illness terminology undermines the experience of the people who are most seriously ill. To conflate normality and pathology devalues the currency of true illness. There was barely even a public discussion about mental health when psychiatrist Derek Summerfield wrote these words in 2001. His point is more important now than ever. Within that cohort of students I described above, there definitely will have been some who have clinical depression. But in a context where everyone is depressed, how do they get their voice heard? If every low mood is described as depression, if every psychological difficulty is framed as a mental illness, then we risk losing sight of the people who are truly ill. If we describe everything using psychiatric terminology, another risk is that people will become skeptical of mental illness itself. The unhelpful language of snowflakes is an example of this. Simply saying you have depression or anxiety is no longer enough to get noticed in the sea of mental distress. Many people will now say that they have severe mental illness in order to be taken seriously. There is no mild version. I cycled through every one of the model’s stages of grief several times. And as anyone who has been through the five stages of grief knows, they are not really stages at all, but rather suggestions. Grief is a full body contact sport that involves cycling and recycling through the stages of grief, moving forward and backwards and sideways at the most inopportune moments until the heart and soul decide there’s nothing more to be done and they’ve let go. Grief is involuntary and wild and frightening. Fair enough, you might think or feel. But this is not a description of the writer’s reaction to a quick death. It was about leaving a career in academia.