I think the opposite could be true – that we're too quick to diagnose mental illnesses in kids today. In the last few years I've witnessed several kids in my family get referred to doctors for potential mental illnesses and then end up on a cocktail of drugs as a result.
It's something I've found really difficult because I was never personally convinced they were mentally ill in the first place and in many cases these drugs have really nasty side effects. I don't think it's going too far to say part of that child dies when they're given high doses of depressants, anxiety and ADHD meds.
Imo we probably need to stop telling kids they're mentally ill and giving them medication, while also finding a way to be compassionate about their struggles. I'm constantly trying to convince one teenage girl in my family at the moment that it's okay to be shy and anxious sometimes. That she doesn't need medication and there's nothing wrong with her. But it's a hard argument to make when certain teachers and family members are telling her she possibly does in an attempt to be compassionate.
Myself, for example, I had raging ADHD throughout my life and only recently in my 40s started to get treatment. And incidentally, treatment isn't _just_ drugs, it's also counseling, to help identify coping mechanisms, work through trauma, identify strategies to help you to become effective despite working differently from how neurotypical people work. I'm in a good place now, but it is largely due to luck. It took a lot of work for me to not feel grief over how my life could have been different if I had been diagnosed earlier, if I had had the level of treatment available now, back then.
And I don't want to get too far into it because it's not my story to tell, but I have friends who are way worse off. They dealt with far more than I ever had to, in terms of depression, anxiety, etc, and they did it by themselves, with no or limited medical and psychiatric support, while suffering the stigma of a society that did not respect what they were going through at all, with friends and family who could only suggest that they "toughen up". Many of them I'm not in contact with any more, for reasons related and unrelated, but overall though, I _wish_ they had the options and respect for their conditions that kids today have. I can't even imagine the difference it could have made.
> It took a lot of work for me to not feel grief over how my life could have been different if I had been diagnosed earlier, if I had had the level of treatment available now, back then.
Well my friends weren't really convinced either when I told them about my ADHD diagnosis. Luckily for me I seriously did my homework on it, and finally getting treatment has helped a lot.
In the last several years since getting diagnosed I have done a lot of reading on the brain, trauma, mental illness etc. I've come to learn that actually a surprisingly large number of people have something going on, and whatever that something happens to be is complex enough that laypeople aren't in a position to understand it very well or at all.
> I've come to learn that actually a surprisingly large number of people have something going on, and whatever that something happens to be is complex enough that laypeople aren't in a position to understand it very well or at all.
I think I have a different perspective on things.
I'm far from normal. I'm prone to depression and anxiety. I'm autistic and anti-social. Most people would suggest there is at least one or two things "wrong" with me.
And sure, I clearly have issues and I'm not "normal", but I suppose I don't seek to be normal either.
I think our increased fixation on being as neurologically normal as possible is half the problem we're having with the increase in mental illness today. And it's possibly being over diagnosed.
You could make an extremely good case for me needing anti-depressants and how they would make me functionally closer to what we consider "normal". Similarly, with the anxious teen I was talking about in my prior comment – anti-anxiety meds would probably make her more "normal" too. But the assumption in both cases would be that normal is always better, which I don't agree with.
Growing up I was taught to hate myself for being different. In my early twenties I went through a bit of a crisis where for the first time I realised how much harder employment was going to be for me as an anti-social autistic weirdo. I hated myself more than ever – why I am autistic, why can't I be normal – I'd ask. But there's only something wrong with me from the perspective of others. I have no problem with myself apart from the fact I struggle to satisfy the preferences of those around me.
It was going down that route where for the first time in my life I actually started to question whether I was the one with the problem or if the world had a problem with me that finally gave me a much healthier outlook on things. The reality is there are just certain people who won't get me and will refuse to try to understand me.
This is a lesser problem today, but I suppose I had this also with my sexuality growing up. There was such an obsession with being hetrosexual that if you were anything but it was easy to hate yourself for being different and wish there was a drug you could take to be normal. Again, it's not that being gay (or whatever else) is an issue to you as an individual, it's that being gay is an issue to others which drives self-hatred.
My whole life I've had to try to get along with happy, extrovert neurotypicals, and rarely will they do the same in return. Instead these people suggest I need to drug myself so I'm more like them – "normal". So screw them.
These days I just embrace myself. I'm awkward as hell. But if you have a problem with that, then piss off – I'll find people who are okay with me as I am.
But what I find funny is that my girlfriend suffers the exact opposite problem to me. She's unable to see the negative side of anything. She's constantly happy and chirpy to the point of often being delusional. But she's seen as normal... But we work because I accept her and she accepts me, and we balance each other out. I'm the one who worries how we're going to address everything that might go wrong in our lives and she keeps us focused on the positive outcomes we're working towards.
Over time I've come to realise there's strength in the vast majority of these "mental illnesses" if we're able to accept them. I can only speak for myself here, and obviously others need to do what's right for them, but my depression and anxiety is no simply longer a problem in the way it used to be because of how I view it and allow it today.
So I guess I don't even understand why you would view ADHD as an issue? Why weren't you able embrace that side of yourself? My understanding is that people who have ADHD are super creative and tend to be less mentally restricted than people like myself? Did you have a problem with your ADHD because the world had a problem with you?
I understand this perspective, but I think that it's an overcorrection. I grew up with depression that went untreated until my late teens, and if I wasn't medicated when I was or soon thereafter I would in all likelihood not be alive today. My sister has really severe ADHD and she was unable to function until she got medicated for ADHD before teenagerhood. Saying "it's ok to be anxious and shy sometimes" is all well and good, but being shy and anxious can often be painful and prevent people from interacting socially in ways that they want to do but are too painful. I think it's probable that we are overmedicating psychological ailments, but I also would be loathe to stop medications without another solution.
This is spot-on. Over-diagnosis and over-medicalization of questionable mental illnesses is a huge problem in (at least) Anglophone societies. Many people know that privately, but it has become a hard thing to say publicly due to the large numbers of people who have received such diagnoses from medical/psychology professionals who they, understandably, believed.
Neurodivergence in general is under-diagnosed, especially women. One of my close friend struggled with OCD her whole life but since it didn’t present like it does in the movies she nor her doctors had any idea. She didn’t get diagnosed until she was an adult which, while good, 20 years of unnecessary struggle isn’t exactly a win.
It's something I've found really difficult because I was never personally convinced they were mentally ill in the first place and in many cases these drugs have really nasty side effects. I don't think it's going too far to say part of that child dies when they're given high doses of depressants, anxiety and ADHD meds.
Imo we probably need to stop telling kids they're mentally ill and giving them medication, while also finding a way to be compassionate about their struggles. I'm constantly trying to convince one teenage girl in my family at the moment that it's okay to be shy and anxious sometimes. That she doesn't need medication and there's nothing wrong with her. But it's a hard argument to make when certain teachers and family members are telling her she possibly does in an attempt to be compassionate.