<p>85% of the population qualifies for a diagnosis in the DSMV.</p>
<p>If you believe that 85% of the population has a mental illness, you are welcome to your opinion.</p>
<p>However, most in the professional community understand that the DSMV is an insurance tool. </p>
<p>If you believe that dysthemia is a mental illness, that is your perogative, certainly. I, however, see it as a sadness, frequently due to people’s unprocessed grief, having avoided grieving or feeling legitimate feelings of sadness over too many events in the past. Counseling therapy will, most definitely, heal this pain, as long as one is willing to go through that pain and not avoid it. Sadness is not a mental illness.</p>
<p>Counseling therapy is covered in far too small of an amount by far too small a number of insurance carriers. Medication is covered by all. Regardless, even when in deep grief over the death of a loved one, if you want insurance to pay, you’re going to need a diagnosis out of the DSMV. Grief is not a mental illness.</p>
<p>Poetgrl, it’s attitudes like yours that cause those with emotional health issues not to seek treatment. I repeat, unless you are the treating physician, you are in no way qualified to assess if someone needs treatment or not, or whether their sadness is appropriate or whiny. And emotional issues cannot all be gutted through as you seem to believe.</p>
<p>Find one place where I said counseling isn’t a “good” thing.</p>
<p>I do not believe emotional issues “should be” “gutted through.” I believe the need for counseling does not mean somebody has a mental illness. </p>
<p>Mental illness and the need for counseling are not one and the same thing. Counseling BERORE mental illness develops is also a good thing. You are saying emotional health issues. Before you were saying mental illness. There is a massive difference between these two things, btw. They are very often conflated, but they are not the same thing, at all.</p>
<p>Grief is not an adjustment DISORDER! Grief is not a disorder.</p>
<p>It is a natural process, which can obviously be aided by a skilled counselor, but grief is not a mental illness. It isn’t even an emotional “issue” as the word issue is being used here.</p>
<p>The absence of grief, however, in the face of what we need to grieve can certainly lead to adjustment issues and dysthemia, not to mention mild to severe anxiety.</p>
Actually, as a licensed (I’m assuming) psychologist, poetgrl is well within her bounds of practice to make that judgement (for her clients only, of course). </p>
<p>FWIW, my grad school child and adolescent psychopathology professor cautioned us quite heavily against over dx’ing/overpathologizing, especially with regards to severe and chronic disorders, but also said that there was no harm in diagnosing someone with real but not-fitting-into a-diagnosis distress with something fairly benign and time-limited like “Adjustment Disorder-NOS” in order to provide for some treatment (e.g., coping skills or what have you) if they were experiencing significant, impairing distress and would likely benefit from treatment. YMMV, as I just finished my first semester of my PhD program, so I know close to nothing, and I’m pretty sure that my views will change drastically as I get further ahead in my training and career.</p>
<p>Agree and it’s why it’s darn scary to me that colleges are put in the position where they have to triage the difference for a rising proportion of students.</p>
<p>Yes, and neither are suiciduality (and other things mentioned “being on the rise” at college counseling centers and family dynamics/adjustment issues (what a lot of posters seem to be talking about in the first few replies that speculate on the “why” of the increase).</p>
<p>hey y’all… isn’t it ‘dysthymia’ and not ‘dysthemia’…?</p>
<p>my earlier comments were never meant to minimize clinical depression. my point was just a pet-peeve of the popular tendency to conflate sadness with depression.</p>
<p>I think we may be waiting a long time for the cite to support the claim that 85% of the population fits in a DSM-V diagnosis. I think the source for this figure might be someone’s rear end.</p>
<p>“Three weeks into college kids want to come home because they haven’t found any friends, yet. Kids being homesick is not depression or anxiety, it’s adjusting. We have pathologized adjusting, for crying out loud.”</p>
<p>I’d like to see some support for this, too. Who is “we”? Can you point to something, anything – even a thread – where someone referred to a homesick freshman as being pathologically depressed or anxious? Or something, anything, that shows that 30 years ago, kids didn’t get homesick and ask to come home? I sure remember that happening at camp 30 years ago. All the time.</p>
<p>I could provide yet another book, if you would like.</p>
<p>I think we may be waiting a long time before people understand the difference between emotional distress and mental illness, on this thread. There is a difference and it is significant. Apparently you believe that the kids who are in college today have more mental illness than the kids who were in college in the past. </p>
<p>They are in touch with their emotinal distress and they seek treatment and counseling, and this does not make them mentally ill.</p>
<p>Has anyone on this thread said anything that contradicts this statement? I feel as if poetgrl is arguing against a position that no one has advocated.</p>
<p>I feel as if people are arguing with me because one poster accused me of taking a certain position and instead of even using your own critical thinking skills to see what I actually DID say, you decided to jump on in.</p>
<p>You do realize this is silly.</p>
<p>You are arguing with me as if I have taken a position I have not taken. Look at psych’s posts, all professors are currently cautioning against overpatholgizing, all professionals know the DSMV is an insurance tool. WE ALL USE it, not because we believe there is more mental illness, but because it is the only way to get paid by the insurance companies.</p>
<p>So, “All these kids come to school already diagnosed with mental illnesses,” is more of an insurance issue than a mental health issue. </p>
<p>Poetgrl, in your first post in this thread, you said “We used to call it adolesence and now we call it mental illness.” As Hanna has already asked, who is this “we”? I think very few people, if any, would say that adolescence equals mental illness. Yet, this is a position that you have taken – that people conflate adolescence and mental illness – that people on this thread are arguing against.</p>
<p>07DAD, that article talks about proposed changes to the DSM. Have any of those proposals been implemented? Or does the DSM still have a bereavement exclusion?</p>
<p>Yes, poetgrl, read your own posts. You took a very specific position - that “we” have pathologized normal adolescent adjustments and now call it mental illness - and now you’re upset people are calling you out on it. And we’re asking for proof that “we” have done so. If a normal adolescent adjusting to college is having a rough time and goes to the school counseling center for some therapy, is that “pathologizing normal adolescent adjustment”? Is that suggesting that he’s mentally ill? IYO, is it a good thing or a bad thing that now the school counseling center provides resources for said student, whereas 20 or 30 years ago there was nothing and he just had to buck it up?</p>