Can Mental Health Awareness Make Us More Mentally Ill?
It’s mental health awareness month if you haven’t heard. Oh, you probably have. We've all seen them - the campaigns encouraging us to "check in" with our mental health. While these efforts have undoubtedly helped reduce stigma and encourage help-seeking, a surprising counterintuitive trend has emerged: reported rates of mental health problems are also on the rise.
The rise in reported mental health issues alongside awareness campaigns is a complex issue. While awareness likely leads to better identification, it's important to consider if some of this increase reflects a truer picture of mental health prevalence, or simply a shift in how we recognize and report these challenges.
Enter the prevalence inflation hypothesis. This theory suggests that mental health awareness campaigns might be unintentionally contributing to this increase. Here's how:
A Double-edged sword: Increased awareness can lead people to better recognize and report genuine mental health struggles - hooray! a positive outcome.
The Over-diagnosis trap: However, the same awareness might also lead some to misinterpret normal emotional experiences as signs of possible mental illness. Think of it like having a hammer (awareness) - everything starts to look like a nail (a symptom). I recall my first year in grad school in a class called Abnormal Psychology. Every student had diagnosed themselves with at least a version of a severe psychiatric disorder. By the end of that course, the amazing rates of illness appeared to drop dramatically.
Like repairing your car’s bumper with duct tape, misinterpretation can be harmful. Over-identifying mental health problems can:
· Make it worse: Anxiety about having a disorder can worsen symptoms through a self-fulfilling prophecy.
· Cause unnecessary distress: Labeling a typical range of emotions as symptoms can make them seem more significant.
· Lead to wasted resources: People might seek treatment for non-existent problems, taking resources away from those who truly need them.
So, what can we do? Mental health awareness is still crucial, but we need smarter campaigns. Here are some ideas:
1. Focus on emotional literacy: Help people understand a typical range of emotions and how to cope with them effectively.
2. Promote help-seeking for genuine problems: Provide clear guidelines for identifying when struggles become serious enough to warrant professional help.
3. Avoid oversimplification: Mental health is complex with many nuances. Campaigns should acknowledge the variety of experiences and avoid portraying mental illness as a one-size-fits-all issue.
Fostering a more nuanced understanding of mental health can ensure awareness campaigns empower individuals, not pathologize them, and continue to promote help-seeking for genuine challenges.
It's so true that one size doesn't fit all. Perhaps the awareness campaign should educate us laypeople more on how to find a good fit for our mental health care. When I started to struggle and realized I could use help from a mental health professional, I was pretty much searching in darkness. I guess, like most people, I got a referral by my PCP to see a counselor within their group of practice. Then I was transferred to a therapist because the counselor was leaving the practice. Over time, I realized the therapists' approaches didn't suit me. After spending a ton of time and money, I realized that it was an entirely different kind of therapists with specific training on sexual betrayal trauma that I really needed. But no one told me about it and such information strangely eluded me in my search for the right therapists.
Anyway, sorry for the long story. But I think that there is such a wide variety of therapeutic approaches that we don't always get served with the "right" fit.
Also, what needs calibrating is perhaps the message that mental health is one a wide spectrum, so that those who are experiencing emotions within the "normal" spectrum will not immediately jump to the conclusion that they have some sort of psychological disorder, while those who do have serious mental health conditions will not minimize their problems due to shame and stigma.
I suffered from constant panic attacks, agoraphobia, and major depression from my early twenties to thirties. I will never forget having those terrible feelings and having my therapist say something like, "When you feel anxiety in the future..." I thought, "When I get over this I am never feeling anxiety again!!" Once I realized that anxiety is part of the human condition and that at times I would feel anxiety but needn't get stuck in it, I got better. When normal anxiety would come, I'd realize how normal if was (under whatever circumstances) and I would accept it and move through it and it never again turned into a disorder.