Mental health labels can help save people's lives. But they can also destroy them | Jay Watts

Diagnosis can help, or cause intense distress. A new study suggests that psychiatrists should be putting those with mental illness centre stage

An important Lancet Psychiatry paper has just come out. It is the largest review looking at service user, carer and clinician experiences of mental health diagnosis. For some people, psychiatric diagnosis was helpful, and the problem was that it was not given early enough. For others, a diagnosis was deeply oppressive.

The tensions between these camps frequently threaten to ignite social media. This dynamic, which causes significant distress, is only likely to increase as social media gives a platform to those who have negative experiences of diagnosis at the same time as more and more people identify as having a mental illness as a consequence of changing public ideas around mental health. To drain something of the charge in these inflaming dynamics, it is important to confute the idea that psychiatric diagnosis is a single thing.

Related: What depressed robots can teach us about mental health | Zachary Mainen

Continue reading... April 24, 2018 at 03:30PM