> Minesh Patel, associate director of policy and influencing at mental health charity Mind, said there was "no credible evidence" that mental health problems were being over-diagnosed.

> "What we do know though is that the number of people experiencing mental health problems has increased, with 1 in 5 adults now living with a common mental health condition according to the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey," he said.

In an inflationary time, with shrinking social mobility and career prospects, where no one can predict what 5 years from now will look like, and no one can afford to start a family (even more so in places like the U.S.), I don't know why this is such a challenging sentiment for some to wrap their heads around. Of course distress is on the rise.

But equally I do think it's true that there really are more people with mental health conditions, largely because:

* life is genuinely worse today than it was 20 years ago, mostly because of technology

* the excessive amount of screen time that the average person experiences is fundamentally harmful to the natural balance of neurotransmitters in the brain

There's just no hardship anymore and her life is not even that stressful. It's just easy to come with that and give excuses.

The issue is: I want to be sympathetic to her condition and help, but it's really hard to don't sound like I'm judging. I can't just challenge a behavior because she is already doing the best she can. It's like there's an invisible ceiling.

PS: I'm only 12 years older than her.

Hint: mental illness and life being stressful is often comorbid and causal.

Lived experiences can add to stress, but everyone has a stressful nature to their lived experiences, as this article is saying. Being in distress, where you’re the particular target of a person or a group, is different.

If course that's stressful. You can't expect individuals to tame the organization.

I think some parts of IT have deteriorated into anarchy with tyrannic leadership.

Sure, you can have anarchy. But then don't expect any particular timelines.

You can hire armies of people. But then don't expect one corner of the org to be able to deliver something that involves talking to everyone.

You can't have the cake and eat it too.

The empirical criteria of depression, held by most health professionals, are influenced a lot by the mass trend. If all people are depressed (eg during a widespread economic crisis, loss of ambition, hope etc), like it happens today, then depression will tend to be mostly normal.

I believe today a large percentage of people suffer from an uncovered, untold stress and depression and we professionals must resist to accept this as normal. Depression is an unbearable but curable disease and is not like house prices/rents where we have to adapt and get accustomed to.

I do agree that it shouldn't be the job of GPs to prescribe away mental illness though, any more than they should be telling you what eyeglasses to wear. Those jobs should go to psychiatrists and optometrists, respectively. The GP should merely refer you to the specialist.

It does beg the question though, since society is so clearly sick and appears to be getting worse in many countries, whose job is that to fix? The obvious answers are either "politicians" , or "all of us". But politicians seem just as afflicted as the rest, or even to be adding to the sickness in many cases. And saying we all need to come together to fix it might be a truism but is basically useless.

Lots of things come from this: shared resources (less income need, less work stress), shared emotional support, shared childcare (less income need), etc.

Instead of single family homes (one family is not the atomic unit of the human species!) it should've been single community developments with 15 homes and a big shared backyard but still private for all the houses. And the landlord + all the tenants can select the residents based on their personal preferences and anyone can veto.

I think many challenges stem from the lack of this.

I don't know what the fix is though, because housing regulations seem difficult to change.

Perhaps GPs in the future can prescribe mindfulness more often.

They do at least have an official NHS web page on the subject: https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/self-help/tips-and-support/...

Compare that to today: more and more adults have to live with their parents due to cost of living, you need until age 23 until you earn your own money because you're effectively worthless without an academic degree, you get saddled with debt from acquiring said degree, when you finally have a job it's usually impossible to afford even a run-down slumlord shack unless you have two (or, worse, three) incomes... and we never had the time to actually reset after the polycrises - 2007 ff financial crisis, euro crisis, refugee crisis (in Europe), refugee crisis 2 (in Europe), Trump 1, Covid, Russian war, Trump 2...

Particularly the fact that our generation can't rely on our parents and friend networks for support any more is the largest factor to blame. And obviously, earlier generations were significantly underdiagnosed, partially because medicine literally didn't know better, partially because their parents beat them into submission with sheer violence.

Also, people might not be ready for this but, being able to focus intensely on one thing while being easily distracted when forced to do menial tasks is not a disorder.