Posted by Robert_Burton_1621 on February 26, 2015, at 19:01:56
In reply to Acceptable vs trivial » stan_the_man70, posted by ed_uk2010 on February 23, 2015, at 13:58:25
> >About one in five American adults (18.6%) has a mental illness in any given year....
>
> I think it's rather unfortunate that the 'mental illness is extremely common' propaganda, which has probably made it more 'acceptable' to have a mental health problem, has also potentially trivialised mental illness in the eyes of the general public. In the past, psychiatry was often associated with negative concepts of 'crazy people' locked up for years in state mental institutions. Now, we run the risk of creating the impression that it's something minor, which most people have from time to time... and which can usually be fixed by popping a pill in a shiny new box.
>This comment, Ed, is lapidary. I agree with it entirely. Putting aside for the moment the commercial interests of pharmaceutical companies in disease-mongering and the loose diagnostic criteria authorised by the DSM, the general problem seems to be partly driven by people with, or who consider themselves to have, very good intentions, promoting the exaggerated statistics as a means, almost as a form of political obligation, to destigmatise conditions which they rightly observe are often sources of shame. But the strategy of destigmatisation is frequently pursued by seeking to "normalise" the prevalence of the conditions, and by a programmatic scepticism (which presents itself as a form of sophisticated insight evidencing an admirable lack of prejudice) to disabuse the general public that the conditions are minority ones.
I agree that this strategy can lead illicitly but almost inevitably to the creation of a climate which denies the often intractable suffering of a minority of patients, and to the arrogant and ignorant belief that, since "depression" is really a form of pathologised "sadness" that most people confront, once you can seek help to "work through" that "sadness", the idea that "pills" should be shoved down your thoat becomes viewed as a pitiful, even a positively unethical, one.
The American philosophy professor and blogger, Professor Brian Leiter, recently ran on online survey at his site seeking to identify (in a preliminary way, subject to the statistical limitations of such an online survey) the prevalence of mental health disorders among philosophy students and faculty. Unsurprisingly, he concluded from the results that "the majority of faculty and students in philosophy have confronted some kind of mental illness in their lives".
An attempt was offered in the open comments section to explain critically the extraordinary statistic that 60% of survery participants "reported some diagnosis for mental illness", but elicited no feedback.
If anyone's interested, you can read the results and commentary here:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2015/02/mental-illness-in-academic-philosophy.html#comments
poster:Robert_Burton_1621
thread:1076926
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20150223/msgs/1077151.html