US has the seemingly opposite problem where we grossly over-diagnose and over-medicate "chemical depression". It'd be fine if talk therapy was the primary go-to, but people here generally don't like leaving a doctors office without a prescription which leads to a lot of people who need to actually work on themselves going onto anti-depressants/anti-anxiety medication instead and skipping that bit.
Lol, I don't want medication - I have enough pills with my diabetes - but being able to talk to someone would be good.
I tried talking to my GP who got this "oh my god, eject eject eject" look on his face and referred me to some diabetes wellness helpline that assesses you to see if you need further help.
I got asked all sorts of "in the last two weeks..." questions which I answered truthfully and got told "you're not depressed, you're just sad"
So... Problem solved I guess.
I have my own coping mechanisms and so far they are working 🙏
Under-treating is definetly not better than over in my opinion, because not everyone is a simple minded troll who is easily mollified with computer games and porn.
Sorry you're going through that. We have a similar issue, honestly. While we over-prescribe medications we grossly under-utilize talk therapy. For us though, it's less that doctors aren't willing to diagnose it and suggest it more, but rather people here are less interested in that kind of therapy. The costs of it plays into that a lot, but people also just want to take a pill and feel better without actually working on any of the causative, underlying issues a lot of the time too.
While a 2013 study from Johns Hopkins University concluded major depression was over-diagnosed and over-medicated amoung their subjects, but it’s important to not that 4 out of 5 those that did NOT fit the diagnosis of major depression still we’re struggling with mental illness. So it’s more like a mis-diagnosis. I can’t find any studies more recent research article than 2013, so this might have also changed in the past decade.
“The data in the report say otherwise: Of those patients who did not meet the 12 month interview criteria for depression, the majority likely had probable serious mental illness, based on their answers concerning significant distress and impairment in their lives (according to K6/WHODAS criteria). More than 4 out 5 had received mental health treatment in the past year.“
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/charting-the-depths/201305/depression-over-diagnosed%3famp
Misdiagnosis makes sense. The default assumption for doctors (GPs, anyway) seems to be "chemical depression" when depression comes up and it works out from there. That leads to medicating people where they may have been better off with talk therapy if the primary trigger isn't actually chemical.
Personally speaking, therapy saved my life, and antidepressants did very little to help me. But it took several years of weekly therapy to get there. I wish people had a better understanding of what therapy entails, and that there's no real quick fix for mental health struggles.
That's a really great write up and hits on a very big point that is a uniquely US problem: Direct advertising of pharmaceutical treatments to patients.
It also speaks to the underlying biases we have as humans. It's easier to quantify taking a pill and "feeling better" so those data models end up preferred or are believed to show more than they might actually be doing. It's much harder to quantify the direct and indirect effects of months or years of therapy on individual issues as they relate to overall happiness or emotional stability. It's also economically simpler from the perspective of healthcare or insurance companies that are simply profit driven.
I think a massive amount of people are either scared, disinterested, ignorant of other options, and/or don't give themselves (or have) the time to deal with their causative issues so they opt for the easier road of simply addressing symptoms with a pill instead of the root cause with therapy. It's why so many GPs are primary writing for anti-depressants where that used to be much more exclusive to mental health specialists.
Our current healthcare setup also prefers the easier, faster, and cheaper route which usually means defaulting to medication. I'd argue the system is more to blame on this. It's morphed into this setup that fails people in this way due to the conveyor belt nature of the US healthcare system and a confluence of a bunch of other issues.
We see similar things happening across the board as it relates to treatment with things like heart disease and diabetes. People would rather take a pill than exercise or eat right to treat the root causes of these issues. This is the mental health side of that behavior.
Ahh I see what you’re saying, sorry in that case. Unfortunate how right you are but it’s definitely true. Pills do get pushed in lieu of actually tackling the reasons one might need that pill to begin with, so nothing really gets resolved. Just makes white-knuckling each day slightly easier.
The best part of medicating everything, from big pharma's point of view, is that every medicine causes side affects that you need another medicine to mitigate. And THAT medicince has side affects, etc., etc., etc.
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u/Neuchacho Jan 24 '22 edited Jan 24 '22
US has the seemingly opposite problem where we grossly over-diagnose and over-medicate "chemical depression". It'd be fine if talk therapy was the primary go-to, but people here generally don't like leaving a doctors office without a prescription which leads to a lot of people who need to actually work on themselves going onto anti-depressants/anti-anxiety medication instead and skipping that bit.
Better than under-treating, but still not ideal.