‘What I see in facility is never ever a collection of labels’: are we in danger of overdiagnosing mental illness?

Our present strategy to psychological health labelling and diagnosis has brought benefits. But as a practicing medical professional, I am concerned that it might be doing even more injury than great

Someone is shot, and virtually dies; the frailty of life is intimately revealed to him. He takes place to have flashbacks of the event, locates that he can no more relax or enjoy himself. He is agitated and restless. His partnerships experience, then perish; he is gradually disturbed by intrusive memories of the event.This could be read as a description of numerous individuals I’ve seen in center and in the emergency clinic over the years in my job as a doctor: it’s recognisably a person suffering what has in current years been called PTSD, or trauma. It isn’t one of my clients. It’s a description of a character in the 7,000-year-old Indian legendary The Ramayana; Indian psychiatrist Hitesh Sheth uses it as an example of the timelessness of certain frame of minds. Various other old impressives describe book situations of what we currently call “generalised anxiety condition”, which is characterised by excessive fear and rumination, loss of emphasis, and lack of ability to rest. Yet others explain what sounds like suicidal anxiety, or ravaging compound addiction.The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or relocated, comes to be now a gleaming field of rhythmic flashing factors with trains of taking a trip stimulates rushing hither and thither. The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning … Swiftly the head mass comes to be a captivated loom where countless blinking shuttle bus weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never ever an abiding one. Continue reading … Source: The Guardian

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