Meeting that diagnostic criterion leads doctors to think that, without some changes to your diet and lifestyle, your level might rise more and create significant health problems for you. So you might say, “I have prediabetes,” and although that sounds very specific and clear, suggesting that a reliable treatment must exist, what it really means is that you have a glycated hemoglobin level from 5.7 percent to 6.4 percent. The second assumption we make is that ailments are purely binary: You either have them or you don’t. You probably have even experienced some beneficial stress-because, for instance, you worked out harder than normal, and now you have sore muscles. Often, such sensations are an indication that your body is protecting you-for example, you tweaked your back and it wants you to baby it for a few days. You never go to a doctor and say, “I’ve been feeling weirdly good these past few weeks, so I figured I’d better come to get it checked out.” Yet we all know that feeling pain or discomfort is not necessarily a good indicator of what might be ailing you. First, feeling bad is evidence of pathology. W hen physical disease is concerned, most of us make two basic assumptions. But other cases exist for which we may have inadvertently pathologized perfectly healthy emotions-leading many people to believe they are ill simply because they’re reacting normally to the challenges in their lives. For many who have them, of course, anxiety and depression are medical problems that absolutely require treatment.
Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teensīut one other explanation is emerging for the huge increase in population-wide estimates of mental-health diagnoses: the tendency to see stress and sadness as evidence that something is broken inside you. Still another reason (which I have written about previously) is the increase in political polarization, which can lead people to hate one another-feelings of depression and anxiety are elevated in those who direct hatred toward out-groups. One commonly identified factor is excessive social-media use, which can substitute for in-person relationships, intensify social comparison, and elevate loneliness. But some studies have shown that the phenomenon began before the pandemic, so other reasons for it must exist as well. The coronavirus outbreak and its associated lockdowns isolated people, causing widespread increases in feelings of loneliness and distress, which still persist. For example, among politically progressive white women in their 20s, more than half said in early 2020 that they’d been told that they had a mental-health condition. Such symptoms are much higher among some groups, according to the 2021 publication of an extended afterword to the 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt and journalist Greg Lukianoff. A 2021 literature review in The Lancet measured a 26 percent increase in anxiety disorder worldwide during the first year of the pandemic, and a 28 percent increase in depressive disorder. The rates at which these diagnoses are being made have exploded over the past few years.
I f you have recently been told that you have a mental-health malady such as depression or anxiety, you are far from alone. Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.
0 kommentar(er)
