Tell someone with an issue with their physical condition that it is because of diet and lack of exercise and many would change habits, tell them it's due to a incurable but perhaps treatable cancer and some will chose suicide.
Tell kids that they are unhappy due to choices made in day to day life and they might change those choices, tell them it's due to a incurable but maybe treatable issue with their brain and some will chose suicide.
The problem may be classifying typical human misery as incurable illness.
That's not how this works. Having a reason for why you are struggling so badly is a relief.
Your problem now has a name and it's not your fault. Having a name opens up a lot of support and treatment options. This gives you hope that your suffering isn't endless and infinite.
You may not be able to be cured, but you can have a much better life.
I've found the opposite usually happens in my experience. It is easy to give into the temptation to then blame all problems on the condition, and start to abscond responsibility for your behavior. This leads to increasing feelings of helplessness, and not taking any actions that could help.
This ultimately results in you feeling miserable powerless and see no hope.
I think that the framing around this is very important. I had a teacher that constantly used the phrase "Don't let your reasons become excuses." Knowing there is an issue can bring relief and be helpful only if it empowers one to act.
An example I have seen in my life is two people that have anxiety, one started using it as a reason to avoid interacting with people, to avoid school, and to basically hide in her room and read books all the time, to the point they would have a breakdown when forced to talk to a grocery store clerk, her sibling had a similar struggle but forced themselves through it, to learn how to interact, to push themselves to be in difficult and uncomfortable situations, and eventually although still struggles with social anxiety presents a pretty passable facade of being able to function in society.
That is a very optimistic outlook. One person's new relief is another's new label, stigma and anxiety. People experiencing depression-related mental health conditions could lean towards the latter.
In addition, many diagnoses in mental health aren't really tangible or helpful to think about as a layperson, they're just a vague description of a symptom (this applies across a lot of medicine, see IBS, etc.).
Tell kids that they are unhappy due to choices made in day to day life and they might change those choices, tell them it's due to a incurable but maybe treatable issue with their brain and some will chose suicide.
The thing you are trying to say isn't really true, though.
Tell some kids that it is all their fault, and some kids will commit suicide. Some of the kids already think this way and someone telling them this stuff is just going to intensify it.
Especially considering that getting treatment isn't such a stigma now, a lot of the folks being told that it is the cause of the disease will feel relieved and certainly not choose suicide even if they refuse medication.
I think your take is totally ignorant, and your problem is that you imagine people are being diagnosed with mental illness and/or committing suicide because of “typical human misery”.
Physical condition is an excellent analogy. Many obese people are told that any physical complaint is caused by their weight and told to go exercise. This includes people who are later correctly diagnosed with asthma, broken bones, hormone deficiencies and appendicitis. How do you think they feel to be told that they are causing their own problems and should stop doing that?
This shit is a rabbit hole that never ends. If there is anything about you that is seen as abnormal by a doctor (including being a woman yikes — and age also yikes) it gets blamed for everything regardless of whether it makes any sense at all.
I swear so many doctors treat medical diagnosis like it’s a game of spot the difference between you and the reference 25 year old white man.
Not at all, it's exactly the opposite. People feel understood and very relieved when they are diagnosed mental illness. Accepting and managing some condition give people hope.
To respond I need to separate mental illness into three categories.
The first category contains illnesses like schizophrenia, with schizophrenia you can induce symptoms of the illness in healthy people by giving them medicine used to treat parkinsons. We can point to specific structures and chemical reactions in the brain as a cause for the illness, it may not be perfectly understood but we have a good understanding of what is going on.
The second contains things like personality disorders. It's not clear these are actually related to physical defects, at least in the same way the first category is. For example people who meet diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder often report no symptoms and are successful in day to day life, some even thrive. Borderline personality types are often distraught over the state of interpersonal reletionships, that is the primary source of their suffering, however they behave in ways that destroy those reletionships. These behaviors aren't accidental, they involve sophisticated thinking, borderlines spin complex webs of lies to justify and hide these behaviors.
The third are things that are normal human suffering. Most people feel anxiety for a big date or a job interview. Most people feel sad when they lose a loved one. Negative emotions are a part of life. It's hard to draw a line on what is normal but a nonzero number of people are medicated for having normal human emotions.
It may not be helpful for the second and third category to be enabled in the way they have been.
For the second group, as the root of their strife is generally interpersonal, and only changing day to day behavior, over a lengthy period of time will have any effect in alevating the true symptoms of the illness. We can pretend the problem "isn't their fault" but essentially all their issues can be tied directly to their own behavior, it may not be their fault but it's certainly their problem.
For the third it isn't clear that they need to be treated at all, if you are too sad to go to work because your son died a month ago, nothing is wrong with you. Perhaps people are sad in society in general because the society in general sucks, medicating them in mass lowers the collective motivation to fix the society, what's the end game there?
Untrue, at least for functioning autists. It's incurable, but knowing there is others in the same situation, reading about coping mechanism and that what you feel is indeed normal, albeit atypical help a lot.
I don't know enough about the topic to judge most of what you've said, but I can appreciate something about your final point and something you suggested in a later comment: most people feel anxious about meeting someone, going to a new place, interviewing, presenting in public, etc. Or they put off work without a deadline. These are common and largely modern problems.
We might be able to revise society/expectations to address this, separately to how we diagnose/label problems.
I don't doubt that it couldn't in absolute terms, I doubt the timeline in which this happened: treatment protocols don't change that rapidly for this very reason.
Tell kids that they are unhappy due to choices made in day to day life and they might change those choices, tell them it's due to a incurable but maybe treatable issue with their brain and some will chose suicide.
The problem may be classifying typical human misery as incurable illness.