Do we all have mental illness?

[Anonymous]

No but there is a real problem with a subset, not small, of psychologists preferring to treat the worried well instead of those with true mental illness.
It’s easy, low risk, tend to be more affluent or reliable clients, and fees are the same. Double points for not taking insurance or Medicare so you can charge whatever the market is willing to pay, ka ching! It’s in the financial interest of these types to expand the lay persons idea of mental illness to attract the worried well or people just looking for self improvement.

Psychiatrists don’t do this but the best management involves both medication and therapy.

[Anonymous]

It's a relatively difficult time to be alive. There was a worldwide pandemic, authoritarianism, fascism, weather extremes, lack of resources. We could all get some help

[Anonymous]

Have AI summarize the Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate and The Empire of Normality by Robert Chapman. My views on mental illness are aligned with there’s.

As a practicing counselor, I have to assign a diagnosis for all clients paying through insurance. My daughter requires a diagnosis to take tests in quiet rooms where she performs markedly better.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for bumping this old thread. Yes, it turns out so many people who were just keeping it going, really lost it over the last few years.

Here’s a hint, if you need the news cycle to agree with you to keep it together, then you aren’t really keeping it together.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No OP, we don't and here is why...

You have to start with normal and from there you set apart everything else. In short, if there are no normal people but everyone is mentally ill then perhaps the baseline is off? Perhaps normal is not an absence of some or another mental issues but a presence of some? Therefore just as you could say that everybody is crazy you could say, everybody is normal to a degree …

Hope this will help you to rewrite the psychiatry text books.

If I were to drop few more pearls of my wisdom as a lay person...

- you can't help but notice that psychiatry/psychology is "more then happy" to assign the status of mental illness to more and more simple and perfectly normal human conditions. When you google.. or if you are in the field you should know that I kid you not.. there were serious attempts to consider teenage years a mental illness, just as similarly grief was to be designated as mental illness.

- you would need to dive into conclusion that making everything "illness" is a good thing.. for the business. Once you have one condition or another designated as a mental issue then from this is very short road to having it treated and medicated and that we do not discuss here...

- many mental conditions of today might not really be such. Do you know why they are called conditions? Because they are inconvenient.
It is not individuals with many conditions that have a problem wit the conditions, it is the rest of the society does. They decide that this and this is not normal and instead of accommodating the parts of the social fabric to them they just bend all kinds of people .. regarding of shapes, into one square peg hole. If you are a star or circle or pentagon,.. too bad, we need to cut your corners by medicting you so you can fit through the square hole.

- Imagine the brilliancy of many Asperger people, Autistic people.. depending on how you define.. beautiful souls of Down syndrome..
in the ideal world there would be schools designed to teach kids who have ADHD while they run or twirl and where music is played ..
and where kids can walk and talk to eachother all day long learning in very different way,(Montessori is not enough).. or schools
that truly shield kids who have censory issues form stress and provide them with ideal comfort and perfect conditions..
but no, now it is marginal, expensive and rare. Many kids have issues learning sitting straight through 6 plus hours of school day from age 5 regardless of their personalities, what do society do.. send parents to the mental specialist to prescribe pills so they can sit the F straight and listen... Kids have to bend to the rules. Rules do not bend to kids.

And more.. but you get the gist... Crazy or Normal is how you define it. If you go to a planet where everyone has ADHD but you and few other people, who is consider different?... and what is consider normal then?

Aside from that, there is a difference between crazy as in mental illness and going bananas type of crazy. Every person who has relatively balanced mind can go crazy if you stress them enough. We live in the world that nothing but stresses us from early on and from every direction. Why? Nobody asked for it yet we are all subjected regularly and we subject ourselves, our kids.. as we consider that there is no other way until most pay the price but you take your pill and move on acting like nothing happened.

So do we all have mental illness? No. We have conditions and personalities, experiences and limitations, exposures and resources.. and life kicks us down all the time so we sometimes turn not what we meant to be or would be if things were different. So.. are we all crazy? NO...
but if we all were fine then there would be nobody to "therapy".. "medicate" and "treat" and that would be very very bad for the army of people who are ready to cure us of our human conditions. So no, we are not crazy but surely many people would be happy if we all were.

TLDR

So if your child was murdeted you would not suffer from depression?

Does the suffering require a label?

Is the suffering a sign of illness, or is it a natural response to a tragedy, which is a part of life?

[Anonymous]

In 2025, Trump administration. Yes

[Anonymous]

I don't, but if everyone surely has it, then I have the easiest form.

[Anonymous]

Yes to some degree or another.

[Anonymous]

Everyone has periods of poor mental health but not everyone will have a diagnosable psychiatric illness. But most people will have some kind of mental illness at some point in life. Not necessarily chronic.

The brain is part of the body and it is hard to go through an entire life without any illness.

[Anonymous]

People with mental illnesses are often the last to know. They may never know. So some of the answers here aren’t worth much.

[Anonymous]

As others have pointed out, the vast majority of people will experience mental illness of some sort in their lives. However, most people are not acutely mentally ill. This is why we should all work on skills to help us cope during the times that we experience mental illness.

I worry much more about people who are adamant that they are not mentally ill and could never be, than about people getting treatment.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No OP, we don't and here is why...

You have to start with normal and from there you set apart everything else. In short, if there are no normal people but everyone is mentally ill then perhaps the baseline is off? Perhaps normal is not an absence of some or another mental issues but a presence of some? Therefore just as you could say that everybody is crazy you could say, everybody is normal to a degree …

Hope this will help you to rewrite the psychiatry text books.

If I were to drop few more pearls of my wisdom as a lay person...

- you can't help but notice that psychiatry/psychology is "more then happy" to assign the status of mental illness to more and more simple and perfectly normal human conditions. When you google.. or if you are in the field you should know that I kid you not.. there were serious attempts to consider teenage years a mental illness, just as similarly grief was to be designated as mental illness.

- you would need to dive into conclusion that making everything "illness" is a good thing.. for the business. Once you have one condition or another designated as a mental issue then from this is very short road to having it treated and medicated and that we do not discuss here...

- many mental conditions of today might not really be such. Do you know why they are called conditions? Because they are inconvenient.
It is not individuals with many conditions that have a problem wit the conditions, it is the rest of the society does. They decide that this and this is not normal and instead of accommodating the parts of the social fabric to them they just bend all kinds of people .. regarding of shapes, into one square peg hole. If you are a star or circle or pentagon,.. too bad, we need to cut your corners by medicting you so you can fit through the square hole.

- Imagine the brilliancy of many Asperger people, Autistic people.. depending on how you define.. beautiful souls of Down syndrome..
in the ideal world there would be schools designed to teach kids who have ADHD while they run or twirl and where music is played ..
and where kids can walk and talk to eachother all day long learning in very different way,(Montessori is not enough).. or schools
that truly shield kids who have censory issues form stress and provide them with ideal comfort and perfect conditions..
but no, now it is marginal, expensive and rare. Many kids have issues learning sitting straight through 6 plus hours of school day from age 5 regardless of their personalities, what do society do.. send parents to the mental specialist to prescribe pills so they can sit the F straight and listen... Kids have to bend to the rules. Rules do not bend to kids.

And more.. but you get the gist... Crazy or Normal is how you define it. If you go to a planet where everyone has ADHD but you and few other people, who is consider different?... and what is consider normal then?

Aside from that, there is a difference between crazy as in mental illness and going bananas type of crazy. Every person who has relatively balanced mind can go crazy if you stress them enough. We live in the world that nothing but stresses us from early on and from every direction. Why? Nobody asked for it yet we are all subjected regularly and we subject ourselves, our kids.. as we consider that there is no other way until most pay the price but you take your pill and move on acting like nothing happened.

So do we all have mental illness? No. We have conditions and personalities, experiences and limitations, exposures and resources.. and life kicks us down all the time so we sometimes turn not what we meant to be or would be if things were different. So.. are we all crazy? NO...
but if we all were fine then there would be nobody to "therapy".. "medicate" and "treat" and that would be very very bad for the army of people who are ready to cure us of our human conditions. So no, we are not crazy but surely many people would be happy if we all were.

TLDR

So if your child was murdeted you would not suffer from depression?

Does the suffering require a label?

Is the suffering a sign of illness, or is it a natural response to a tragedy, which is a part of life?

Being sad is not an illness. Being depressed is an illness.

There is such thing as situational depression. Yes we are human and we have words for things and the word for depression is depression.

Why are you so against things having words that properly describe them?

[Anonymous]

We don't all have mental illness.

But also, no one's mental health is perfect.

Think of it like physical health - are we all ill? No! I don't have any illnesses or diseases or need to see doctors for treatment or dramatically change my health.

Could I eat better? Of course. Could I exercise more? Of course. Are there areas of my health that are probably not getting as much attention as they should? Of course.

With mental health - do I have any diagnosable issue that I need to be treated for? No! But could I improve my mental health? Absolutely - it's not perfect. I have moments of anxiety that I don't always handle great. I can stress eat. But none of this is at the range of a clinical disease or illness.

[Anonymous]

Yes, I've thought about this too, OP. Especially when people get into conflict, and often you can see how both are engaging in dysfunctional or unproductive behaviors making the conflict worse. Even if one person is more "right" than the other, a lot of times I'll think "but why not handle it differently, why did in" or something like that.

Also, just about everyone has a family member who has dealt with some kind of mental illness. Mood disorders, addiction, neurological divergence, eating disorders, etc. Like does anyone actually have a family that doesn't have at least one person dealing with at least one of those? I want to talk to you if so. Are you positive? These things are so, so common.

Add in the family dysfunction issues that give rise to things like sibling no longer being on speaking terms, parents disowning kids, or kids going no contact with parents.

I have dealt with depression and anxiety. I sometimes just cannot figure out why I was able to push through and figure that out and my brother, who has also dealt with those, wound up also developing alcoholism, and his life is so much harder. Like I just don't get what the difference was. Same with my DH, who has ADHD but is a functional spouse and parent, while his brother with ADHD is completely dependent on their parents in his 50s. What's the difference? I don't think we'll ever understand.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We don't all have mental illness.

But also, no one's mental health is perfect.

Think of it like physical health - are we all ill? No! I don't have any illnesses or diseases or need to see doctors for treatment or dramatically change my health.

Could I eat better? Of course. Could I exercise more? Of course. Are there areas of my health that are probably not getting as much attention as they should? Of course.

With mental health - do I have any diagnosable issue that I need to be treated for? No! But could I improve my mental health? Absolutely - it's not perfect. I have moments of anxiety that I don't always handle great. I can stress eat. But none of this is at the range of a clinical disease or illness.

Spoken like someone who just hasn't had to deal with a medical issue... yet. It comes for all of us. I was you 5 years ago. Now I have a urologist, a neurologist, and a rheumatologist, have had two minor surges, go to PT, and am on meds and have to get annual scans to track issues. I am not "sick" but I have health issues, because I am a human being with a body.

I also have mental health issues, because I'm a human being with a brain. I am not presently being treated or medicated for them and have found other ways to deal with them (exercise, mindfulness, talking to my spouse or a friend) but some people don't have those resources or may struggle more than I do for a variety of reasons. Also I know enough people who were fine until they weren't to know it could happen to me.