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Does the Mental Health Community Diagnose Effectively?

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Does Mental Illnesses over diagnose? By Eric Galvin

Does the Mental Health Community over diagnose patients? In a world where almost everything is solved by taking some sort of pill it’s not at all irrational to question just how many people are taking prescription medications for illnesses they may not even have. The question isn’t whether these illnesses exist as decades of research prove that they do and psychiatry has moved bounds from its neanderthalic behavior early on. Shock treatments and lobotomies were common for everything not quite understood and even slight differences in normal behavior could be classified as some sort of malady. Children with ADD/ADHD were considered mentally deficient but we now know that their minds just function differently than most people and there truly is no difference in their intelligence levels. Depression is the most widely afflicting mental disorder in America. Current statistics show that 16.6 % of the population will develop it at some point in their lifetime. Major Depressive disorder is much different than the typical lows we all experience during stressful times in our lives. It’s a state of depression that lasts for an extended period of time with feelings of emptiness, apathy and lack of appetite.

A british phycologist named Gordon Parker carried out a 15 year study of 242 teachers and found that nearly three quarters of them met the current criteria for depression. Obviously the odd that 171 of the teachers have a mental illness is ridiculous. He also said that prescribing medication to people without biological issues could raise false hopes and might not be effective as there was nothing biologically wrong with the patient. He continues and adds that “over the last 30 years the formal definitions for defining clinical depression have expanded into the territory of normal depression, and the real risk is that the milder, more common experiences risk being pathologised." So It would seem that although depression has become something better managed through counseling and medications over the years it’s definitions have been scattered within the grey zones of normal human behavior.

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