Item — HN Reader

Absolutely. I wish this article wouldn't speak so generally when I hear consistent articles about major spikes in:

- Autoimmune issues (especially allergies) - Obesity (particularly in children) and diabetes - Autism - Depression, ADD, and similar disorders

1 comments

> Autism - Depression, ADD, and similar disorders

My personal impression is that the rise of mental conditions is an increase in diagnosis, not occurrence. An awful lot of people who, just a few decades ago, would have been dismissed as lazy, stupid, whiny, or the all-purpose "crazy" are actually starting to receive recognition and treatment. That's a good thing.

> My personal impression is that the rise of mental conditions is an increase in diagnosis, not occurrence.

Robert Whitaker [1] has looked into the matter, and proposes that standard treatments take an episodic disease and make it chronic.

[1] Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America - http://www.madinamerica.com/product/62043/

My step-brother hates what his psychiatrists did to him. He stopped taking their drugs, and is rather normal now.

I'm sorry for whatever happened to your brother. Psychology is sadly not an exact science yet. But when I stopped taking my drugs, I was basically nonfunctional for months. You can't generalize from one data point.

> But when I stopped taking my drugs, I was basically nonfunctional for months.

The body adjusts to compensate for the activity of the drug in the body, so the original problem frequently gets worse if the drug is taken away suddenly. There are strategies for helping people get off psychotropic drugs, but I don't think they cover this in psychiatrists' training programs.

> You can't generalize from one data point.

I don't know anything about my step brother, other than that my mom mentioned that he'd gotten himself off the pills. It might've taken him a while.

> My personal impression is that the rise of mental conditions is an increase in diagnosis, not occurrence

Do you have a source for this? It goes against much I've read myself recently—for instance, depression has strong links to inflammation—perhaps shitty diets and no exercise are catching up to people.

The problem with some of these conditions unfortunately is that it is only possible to speculate based on behavioral reports, because the term simply didn't exist back then (or if it did, it existed in widely varying terms describing some sort of "insanity" or "neurosis"). So unfortunately I don't think there is an answer to this question.

In reading up on the histories of various classical composers, for instance, several of them appear to have suffered regularly from depressive orders (a very definitive example is Sergei Rachmaninoff). A few of them such as Erik Satie and Anton Bruckner appear to be afflicted with what we now know as OCD. Can we definitively diagnose, though? No, we only have reports to go off of.

Heck, we're still pretty fuzzy with the diagnosis and root cause of some of these mental conditions now. (See: the definition of Aspergers)

The increase in suicide rates seems to be evidence against this hypothesis.

are suicide rates going up overall? all I can find, back to the 1950s, is that the rate has gone up and down with no clear upwards or downwards trend over those years (2010 rates are slightly below 1950s rates)

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0779940.html

For CZ we have stats up-to 1870s: https://www.czso.cz/csu/czso/sebevrazdy_zaj

(link in czech - sorry. First image, brown line is relative suicidal rate that is probably a good metric for comparison.)

Isn't there a connection between anti-depressants and suicide? Basically they give you enough energy to get going, but not enough to break the depression so you have just enough to go and kill yourself.

Basically, you have to watch someone like a hawk when they first go on antidepressants until they get over the hurdle and start feeling good again.