'Life being stressful is not an illness' – GPs on mental health over-diagnosis

Part of the problem is the medical system doesn’t have great language around this, I think in America in order for insurance to pay for therapy there has to be diagnosis. My therapists solution to that was to provide a diagnosis but we didn’t really lean into it, he just explained that’s the process.

But the language around diagnosis unfortunately has implicitly power. We probably should talk about mental illness much less that way.

It's easier (read: cheaper) for the broken NHS and cash strapped government to shovel pills than it is to get someone to revamp their life.

Imagine the alternative cost of talking therapies for the NHS. There are three year waiting lists for them already.

Depression usually occurs for a causal reason, it just may not have been found for the individual yet. It could be poor diet, lack of exercise, excessive escapism as a response to unprocessed trauma etc. Ultimately though these causes require the patient to exert effort toward improving their life, and so they have to have willpower and motivation.

Thankfully exercise can now be prescribed by doctors in the UK!

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Almost everything today in absolute terms is better than 20 years ago, even more so outside the developed world.

What specifically today is worse than 20 years ago?

That might not be true for the USA but overall it is.

What I think is a big cause for my generation (gen-x) is that we were promised this “perfect” harmonious world beginning of the 90s/00s with all kinds of tech marvels and no more wars and oppression and freedom and abundance for everyone.

Waking up to the reality of the human condition hasn’t been easy for that generation.

The quoted GP in the headline is correct. Life is just stressful. Previous generations understood this more, but my peers (Millennials) have an annoying tendency to complain that things are worse now than they ever have been, and their ADHD/anxiety is related to how "the world is now." It's BS. And it robs them of agency. Constant "happiness" should not be the goal, and the successful people Millennials admire are all living with stress and anxiety. It is normal.

There is a growing movement that says life is too easy nowadays and we're handicapping our ability to develop coping strategies.

Life is incredibly easy nowadays. We have more luxury and access to everything than we've ever bad. Crime is at all time lows. We're safer and have an incredible access to just about anything. This leads to self segregation and an atrophy of basic coping skills.

But the media convinces us of the opposite. People are told from birth that their lives are hard, the system is broken, etc. This conditions people to not bother. This atrophies skills or they never develop.

I recently read an article that something like 25% of Ivy league students have a "disability". They don't, but they think being depressed is a disability which enables them. The author made a good case that they were taking advantage of the system, which cheats themselves out of developing their skills. https://reason.com/2025/12/04/why-are-38-percent-of-stanford...

My friends sex addicts group has also touched on a similar thing lately: emotional comfort is not emotional maturity. People today segregate themselves from people to protect their emotions, then they wonder why they can't handle people who disagree with them. It's easy to avoid things.

The main thing I'm saying here is that today's modern life allows us to avoid things we don't like. This leads to a lack of development in many areas. Then we claim everyone is struggling. Then the media reinforces this.

Over time it can become difficult to gauge people's conditions and legitimacy of those conditions. therapist friend of mine and I talk about this a lot. "What's an actual condition and what do people think they have?" is a big issue in modern therapy. People Self-diagnose way too much nowadays. The media convinces everyone that they're broken.

My life experience also mimics this. In college I thought I had crippling social anxiety. Turns out I just needed to be around people more to develop my abilities. I forced myself to work customer service jobs and voila, after a year or two I became a social person. My stutter went away and I became comfortable in groups.

Our perspective is fucked and it creates a cycle of apathy/complacency. Then everyone is "depressed" because they can't handle their latte having soy instead of cows's milk. This is hyperbole but it isn't untrue.

I believe the issue is more broad than that though. I believe the issue comes from the very strong belief in our modern world that our behavior, our ideas and moods are what we are, what we have always been and always will be. That comes with our global theory of mind that one's character is given once and for all, from birth to death. I insist that this is a belief that is not universal, for some other cultures ideas and moods are transient external inhabitants of our minds. And indeed, people do change along their lifetime, and sometimes immensely; once you have witnessed these changes a few times you start to realize how even conditions that are usually considered impossible to cure, can actually be fixed.

But not one wants to acknowledge it, because it’s society doing it to itself?

Yet “mental illness is the only rational response.”

Happiness = Reality − Expectations

Most of material Reality is fine. The part of Reality that’s broken is spiritual/emotional. The expectations causing unhappiness aren’t for more money or stuff, they’re subconscious, millions of years deep, baked into the species of tribe, offspring, transcendence, cosmic order.

Leftism spent half a century screaming that those instincts are bigotry, that family is oppression, that religion is a mental illness, that wanting roots or rituals or a legacy is fascism.

You can’t propagandize the human soul out of its own operating system. The subconscious still demands what it demanded in 200,000 BC. We just demolished every institution that used to answer the call and replaced them with therapy, porn, and corporate pride slogans.

That’s the real insanity. Not climate change or late-stage capitalism. The soul shows up for duty and the building’s condemned.

Life is fucking easy. One push ordering for almost anything. Cushy houses with hvac.

We make life hard by buying into the narrative that it's hard and we're all helpless. This cheats us out of our development and ability to handle real conflict.

Perspective is important. Does life happen to you or are you in control of your life? Are you a victim or do you take control?

The idea that life sucks isn't new. It's been around forever.

The difference is today we have a global media that reinforces this idea to sell us products. A victim is a much more lucrative customer than someone who is empowered because they can be convinced they aren't capable of doing things themselves. Ever notice the "life is hard, pay us to take this off your hands" advertising?

Start looking for the victim mindset or the "life happens to me, I'm powerless" mindset in people. You'll see it all over. Then look at people who are busy and doing things and generally happy, they don't have this mindset. They're more mindful, is one way of looking at it.

If ya wanna be a sad sack victim, go for it, but don't be surprised when happiness passes you by because you never bothered to experience adversity and don't have the skills to navigate life or the ability to inconvenience yourself. There is a lot of happiness to be had, just gotta go find it or make it happen. One person's great experience is another person's bad time, perspective is what changes that. If your perspective is victimhood then you're never gonna have a good time. You're always gonna think you're depressed if that's your perspective on life.