'Life being stressful is not an illness' – GPs on mental health over-diagnosis

In mathematical terms money might not be sufficient to make you happy, but it's a necessary condition indeed.

A group of people are trudging through the desert with limited water arduously pumped from scattered wells. Do you ration water such that everyone gets equal amounts or such that those sweating the most get the most.

Solve this dilemma accounting for the fractal parameters that go into it, and you'll have a utopia.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/aug/22/gps-to-presc...

We are much more constantly aware of the chaos of our world through social media. And in regards to mental illness, perception is reality.

That and of course, housing prices. Jebus, 20 years ago I paid $400 per month for a studio apartment in the downtown of a major city.

I do find this an interesting retort though. I would argue that if a few numbers go one way, and broad sentiment goes another way, things _have_ gotten worse. Like this whole argument on “life’s gotten worse” is inherently subjective so subjective measures have more validity.

Of course I’m joking, but people do generally look back fondly on their youth. I think that’s a big reason for the perception that everything is awful now compared to the recent past.

Byung-Chul Han would have a lot to say on this matter.

I would argue that by those measures, we are worse than let's say 50y ago.

But emotionally, people now inhabit virtual places full of relentless negativity. That is the problem.

But to give you an example - my grandma had 8 siblings, out of which only 4 survived into adulthood. They mostly died before even turning 1, the typical "one day he was fine, the next day he turned purple and died, the nearest doctor was 2 hours away if your neighbour let you borrow a horse cart, so that's just what it was" case. Her father and her uncle were taken into Auschwitz and miraculously returned but never wanted to talk about the horrors they have seen while there. For the rest of her life she endured living under communism, seeing her peers in other countries have access to riches she could only dream of.

So now when you talk to her, how can you blame her for thinking that kids nowadays are spoiled, if they have everything provided for them, they have never experienced physical violence of any kind, but they are all depressed and sad about life being shit and saying how it was better in the good old days.

Like, from her perspective, it's impossible to understand.

But also, from the kids perspectives nowadays, all they know is a world where the "old" people have houses, jobs, stable incomes, and they cannot even hope for any of it. 50 year mortgages, 700 job applications with no interview, social media blasting images of a life that they know they can't ever have.....of course they are depressed. Just showing them stats that say "you live better, comfier, safer andd healthier lives than pretty much anyone else ever in the history of humanity" is not going to help if all they know is how much "worse" they have it than the people who came before them.

What if throughout time they have been right ? Any proof thst while tech brought longer lifes and more material wealth, we haven’t just spiraled down for a while in term of mental wellbeing, sense of meaning, sense of belonging etc ?

That’s obviously not true of every piece of tech (I.e. it’s hard to imagine how antibiotics or replacing a coal plant by a nuclear power plant could have negative impact of people’s mental wellbeing) but it could be true about technology in general. It’s not a stretch to believe that technologies that radically transform what a day in the life of a human being looks like, can also have an impact on said human beings life.

Our bodies and mind, have been finetuned for living in nature and hunting gathering, with a small group consisting of our families and friends for millions of years. Now we live a sedentary life, for many away from family and without any sense of community, in large, noisy, devoid of nature cities having to do day in day out the same job that is more and more compartimentalized and less and less concrete and meaningful, only to go home and sit in front of a tv to be bombarded by ads trying to induce fomo, or god forbid, doom scrolling on tik tok for hours.

If it just so happened that those two modes of life generate the exact same levels and qualities of stress in our little brains, that would be quite the coincidence.

Look at every stat around mental health: anxiety, depression, sense of meaning etc. They are all getting worse over decades. And if you think it’s caused by people just complaining more than before, look at how the rate of people willing to kill themselves, that’s the ultimate truth. All worsening.

i would go a step further and argue that this belief is simply false or bad. it traps us, and makes us unable to grow. we should aim to reject this idea with a much effort as we can.

i have commented that about this before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44361344 this belief is used to excuse bad behavior. it also takes away agency and hope from those who want to change.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38562701 human nature is often used as an excuse for bad behavior

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300344 we risk misusing this belief as an excuse not to support people to do better because we lack the belief that they even could do better

this last one is particularly concerning when it comes to an ADHD diagnosis. not that the diagnosis is wrong, but the diagnosis combined with the belief that we can't change. we need to change our attitude and trust that even a person with ADHD can improve. it's just harder. and ADHD diagnosis should guide us in how to best help that person. it should not be used as an excuse to give up.

I don't understand why you think that the fact that exposure cured you means you didn't have social anxiety?

Exposure is something a therapist would suggest for social anxiety.

The issue seems to be that you think saying that someone has social anxiety means they are permanently broken (and maybe will give up trying to do anything about it?) but I'm not really sure where you got that idea from.

Averages are just that - averages. They say nothing about any given individual’s experience. And probabilities aren’t assurances of a particular outcome. Just because the average person is more likely to face obesity than starvation doesn’t mean that there aren’t millions of people facing starvation in the world. Your argument is based on an incorrect use of statistics.

This easy life you describe requires mountains of people to support it, who themselves are mostly being crushed by it.

Imagine how much worse it is for people who don’t make as much as I do.

Moreover, what of those retail workers? Are they all lazy losers and we shouldn't bother with them? Or are they, partially, victims of circumstance?

Before I got cancer, I used to believe everything happened for a reason. I realize now that that belief can be very toxic. Why punish myself? Thats a choice.

That doesn't mean we need to be doomer. But we need to recognize some things are not in our control, and some things aren't even in anyone's control. And we shouldn't feel guilty about needing help, and we shouldn't punish ourselves out of some pursuit for bootstrap virtue.

Given that a lot of today's trouble are effectively caused by our economic systems being utterly rigged and heading for a hard crash - the former. Elections increasingly don't matter in practice, because fringes aside it's all the same shit just in different degrees of brown.

The only way left to take meaningful control is violence, which is consequently what we're increasingly seeing everywhere - be it escalating protests (e.g. BLM), individual murders (Luigi, Kirk) or executive overreach (ICE, police violence in general).

And that's not just a contemporary thing. Historically, the scale and brutality of violence has closely correlated with economic and wealth disparities - the French Revolution, the violent strikes around the turn of the 20th century and the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany are all directly linked to too few people becoming way too rich while the masses struggled to survive.