When I think of a mental hospital or mental asylum, the first image that pops into my head is from Batman. I picture crazy patients in a dark and dingy Gotham hospital, with wide eyes, straitjackets, creepy laughter and imaginary friends.
But what exactly is mental illness?
And how prevalent is it really?
How is mental illness diagnosed and what are the clinical criteria?
Diagnoses are often based on subjective assessments and self-reported symptoms, leading to potential discrepancies in prevalence rates. There are significant variations in mental illness across different geographical regions and cultural contexts, indicating that the understanding of mental illnesses lacks consistency.
Allen Francis is a psychiatrist and lead editor of the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (universally known as the DSM-IV). He is the man who wrote the book on mental illness.
There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it. These concepts are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the boundaries.
Allen Francis
We’re taking every day experiences that are part of the human condition and we’re over-diagnosing them as mental disorders, and way too often providing a pill when there’s not really a pill solution for every problem in life.
In spite of the supposed high prevalence of mental illness, a substantial proportion of “mentally ill” people do not seek professional help or receive formal diagnoses, meaning that the actual prevalence and is probably heavily inflated.
The pharmaceutical industry has a significant financial interest in promoting the identification and treatment of mental illnesses. The widespread use of psychotropic medications has become a multi-billion dollar industry, which incentivises over-diagnosis and over-prescription of drugs for conditions that probably don’t even exist.
Peter Breggin is a psychiatrist and said that over-diagnosis is driven by profit.
All these antidepressants, the SSRI antidepressants, and the serotonin-norepinephrine uptake inhibitors, SNRI antidepressants, are all knock-offs of a drug that’s very common on the street, and it’s called cocaine.
Peter Breggin
Kevin Corbett is a British nurse who grew up in a mental hospital and spoke to me about the above.
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