May is “Mental Health Awareness Month”. In a crowded contest for the most pointless of all profession-peddled observances, this might be the winner. Mental Health Awareness Month is actually worse than pointless, though. That’s because excessive attention to mental wellness is over-medicalising the healthy and neglecting the seriously mentally ill.
Mental Health Awareness Month was officially proclaimed in 2013 by former president Barack Obama to “shine a light” on “debilitating illnesses”. Obama put “anxiety, depression” and “bipolar disorder” all in that same category, erasing the line between common distress and serious disorder. An ever-inflating “DSM” — the mental health field’s diagnostic tool — has formally done the same. The DSM was originally around 100 pages, listing around 100 diagnoses. Now in its fifth version, it’s ten times longer and clinically classifies everything from jetlag to bad premenstrual syndrome.
Continue reading the entire piece here at UnHerd (paywall)
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Carolyn Gorman is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute.
Photo by Richard Drury/Getty Images
