Labelling wouldn't be a problem if we could actually help everybody with the diagnosis, but they're too often stuck with a "ehh. maybe this pill" approach.
Speaking of an absence of empirical data: People are being told by doctors that their brain has a "chemical imbalance" which medication can fix, despite those doctors not performing any chemical tests on the patient's brain at all. Supposed "chemical imbalances" for which the science of chemistry can produce no empirical data. My brother lost years of his life in a drug-induced haze before he questioned the wisdom of doctors, got off the psyche drugs, and saw a massive improvement in his outlook on life all around. Turns out he had real problems to address and the drugs were only helping him to ignore those problems instead of actually confronting them. He never needed drugs, he needed a mature mentor.
This is the real crisis, and I don't think we've peaked yet.
For the first time in history there is psychological space to care about mental health and social issues en mass. So, of course, there's going to be an explosion of diagnosis.
Maintenance of “safety needs” is part and parcel of finding love and belonging in the first place. If we’re offloading that all together, then yeah I can see how more and more get depressed and suicidal. They don’t have anything to live for when you get down to it.
Moving up means those needs are being met satisfactorily and can be maintained without prolonged attention. And if a lower level stops being met, your level will fall to that level until it is met again.
I.e., if you're hungry and don't know when your next meal is, then who the hell cares if you're anxious, angry, or happy? You have more pressing concerns.
But it’s useful and, in my opinion, captures the most basic relationship which is that some needs have higher priority than others and will drive those other needs to the recesses.
What about that do you disagree with?
1: That the mental health system is actively harmful or 2: That the mental health field is impotent to address mental health issues
The latter case means that the mental health field could be helping, but at the very least, the mental health system is a distraction from the bigger issue of mental health. I believe declines in mental health are driven by things like increasing inequality, scarcity, competitiveness, loneliness, and so on which we can't nessecarily solve by telling people you are disordered with such and such so live in such and such a way and you can maybe be better adapted to a society which has their collective mental health in freefall.
P.S. I specifically resent the label of "disorder" in general and think that label is part of the problem, because no matter how you spin it, somebody saying you are "disordered" is an insult, and as we call more and more of the population disordered I think the adjective will become untenable to keep using. I'm more keen on the concept of neurotypes, because neurotypes CAN be negative, and CAN require accommodation, and CAN require treatment, but none of those things are NECESSARILY true. If you discover your "neurotype" you can try tools and techniques that helped others with that same neurotype. Whereas the word "disorder" sort of has an intrinsically negative connotation, and I don't think it's medically necessary for psychiatrists to regularly insult their patients.
The mental health system is so fundamentally condescending and some of the shitty things they do don't really get examined or critically looked at that much. Like why don't we ask, is telling millions of people they are "disordered" likely to improve their mental health and confidence and self-esteem? Probably not and it's also probably totally avoidable but I don't think people ask if mental health itself so things carry on.
Except maybe shizoids who can count on being aloof to any bad interaction instead of being uncontrollably dragged around by them, but miss me with the anhedonia thing please.
While non-gender conforming people need special protections, it's deeply sad that the industry wasn't able to recognize this itself... they just keep doing it with other people.
As always with these issues, no one stopped to think at a high level about labeling people's personality as a disorder that must be fixed. They just said, "we have to stop doing this to trans people"... "we'll make an exception for them"
I am so incredibly unconvinced that labelling a bunch of people as mentally ill is "better" because the more we're diagnosed people as mentally ill, the more things like suicide have increased. Now obviously that can be due to an underlying increase in mental illness driving suicide, the thing is the diagnosis itself and the resulting differential treatment of society and your self-perception of yourself can be the cause of that mental illness.
So far the increase in diagnosis over time has completely failed to actually improve peoples mental health. I am constantly perplexed at why nobody is worried about this. It seems how we diagnose people is totally unconnected from any empirical data on if a culture more willing to diagnose people is making people healthier on a population-wide level. To me it seems like most evidence points to the population-wide trend getting worse and the increase in diagnosis being a failure, and I can't help but also notice many of those who advocate that the increase in diagnosis is a great thing have a conflict of interest and financially benefit from more people being labelled ill.