More and more people in Britain are getting diagnosed with mental health problems.... NHS waiting lists just keep growing, and record numbers are off work—clearly, something’s clearly not right!
While it’s tempting to pin all this on one thing—blame social media, overdiagnosis, failing resilience, or doctors medicalising everything, I don't think that tells the full story.....
Life is genuinely tough, and people are suffering mentally as a result, but the system also can't tell the difference between stress and genuine mental ill-health....
So while not dismissing mental health as a fiction, this clearly isn't just about people feeling mentally unwell, it's also cultural... about how we respond to mental health as much as the people suffering from mental ill health.
Medicalising ordinary life
Maybe the problem we've got is that the line between mental illness and normal emotional struggles is getting blurry. Worry about exams, feeling let down, boredom, uncertainty these are all part of life, for all of us, but more and more, we treat these as medical issues that need a diagnosis and treatment.
And we ignore the social causes of all of this mental illness... precarious jobs, massive housing costs, huge uncertainty about global politics, dwindling opportunities, social media which barrages us with bullshit, these are the social causes of our mental crisees, and medicalising these at an individual level ignores the underlying social problems...
Systems under strain
The NHS sits right in the middle of all this. Mental health services can’t keep up, waits drag on forever, and getting in early is often out of the question. When there’s not enough help to go around, diagnosis turns into a way of rationing care—not a careful medical call.
Just leaving them to it isn't good enough!
More and more people are turning to online self-assessment tools, ironically and grimly i guess some of these are being fed to them by the same algos which are partly the cause too.
Whereas what we really need is societal change and societal support.
I guess the one thing we can all do to help is helping people to realise what a load of bullshit most of life is!