5 Ways We Are Absolutely Lost When It Comes To Mental Health

But why, then, does the industry so stubbornly cling to a manual that is, if not fundamentally flawed, at least in clear need of a massive update? Why, Big Pharma, of course! It's estimated that over 70 percent of the people who serve on the DSM "task force" -- the group that decides what goes into the manual -- have ties to the drug industry, which is understandably a fan of the "One Ailment, One Pill" approach.

There is hope: In 2013, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health said they would be redirecting their research away from DSM categories. Now, let's all sit back and wait to see how "one earnest doctor" fares against "massive multinational trillion-dollar corporations with tentacles that stretch all the way into the highest levels of government."

We assume well!

We're not great with math, but we're pretty sure there's a bit of a gap there. A gap filled with sick children -- the worst gap this side of the one at the outlet mall, which only sells jeans with one leg.

While an estimated 10 percent of children have some serious form of mental health problem, only about half of them are receiving treatment from an appropriately trained therapist. Another 10 percent of children have less serious issues, and their neglect can be even greater. For example, an estimated 60 percent of children with diagnosable depression and 80 percent of kids with anxiety disorders aren't receiving any treatment. Roughly half of all lifetime mental health issues begin by age 14. To further depress you, studies have found that treatment works super well for young people, but becomes increasingly less effective the longer you wait to receive it.

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Technically, we have the tools to fix this. We know how to recognize the major behavioral signs of children who might need professional help. So, let's just start screening kids and sending them to child therapists, right? It's just that there are only around 8,500 of them in the U.S., and about 15 million children who should have one. That would leave therapists' offices more crowded than a Bangladeshi train. Or an inner city classroom in America.

Depression!

Here's the thing: The medical field was pretty complicit in the whole "Let's justify black inferiority so we can continue slavery" thing, back in the 19th century. Bits and pieces of that old brick wall survive even today. In psychology, this manifests in both physicians' tendency to misdiagnose and black patients' relative unwillingness to seek treatment unless the condition is extremely serious. One feeds the other, in a never-ending, twisted, psychological daisy chain of injustice.

And even if they decide to spin the roulette wheel of mental health, hoping the ball lands on "reasonable treatment for my depression" instead of "dragged away screaming by men in white," black folks are still out of luck. One study had voice actors leave messages with over 300 therapists -- one group of actors portrayed black people, and another portrayed white people. Middle-class black women were 30 percent less likely to get called back than white women. With men, it was 60 percent. With working-class women and men, the likelihood to receive a callback was 70 percent and 80 percent lower, respectively, for the black test subjects.

But don't mention that if you do get an appointment, black people: Your shrink might take it a sign of paranoia ...

We have a deeply ingrained societal belief that pregnancy is a blissful time. Unfortunately, the idea doesn't quite hold up to reality. Research suggests that between 10 and 16 percent of pregnant women suffer symptoms of depression and receive no treatment, likely because most of them are unaware of how common depression during pregnancy is.

Why would they think that? Well, even though we're pretty well versed on depression after childbirth, until very recently doctors believed that the elevated levels of estrogen during pregnancy protected women against pretty much all psychological distress. Wow, estrogen is magical! Where can we get some? We'll shoot it directly into our eyeballs. What can go wrong?

Dr. Mordcai Blau/Wikimedia Commons

Unfortunately, estrogen is not actually Huxley's soma -- this is all just willful ignorance. Studies conducted with medical students reinforce this idea, citing that med students often have a bias against treating pregnant women for depression, simply because they are pregnant. Because we, as a society, think pregnancy is a happy time, we just stick our fingers in our ears and yell until we can't hear the sobbing anymore.

After the 2004 tsunami that devastated parts of Sri Lanka, American trauma counselors visited the country to help disaster victims. Chiefly, they wanted to address a problematic psychological behavior that many Sri Lankans were displaying: the uncontrollable urge to help those around them.

The poor, deluded bastards!

These counselors weren't from the Ayn Rand School of Mental Deviancy -- they just thought that the victims might be deferring, rather than dealing with their own trauma. That might have been true in America, but in many Asian countries, helping others before yourself is an integral part of their culture. This was just how their society functioned. But because American culture is more concerned with self-sufficiency, the U.S. trauma counselors unnecessarily diagnosed many of the victims with PTSD.

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Of course, that was just a case of the American worldview misunderstanding a foreign scenario. That's not nearly as harmful as the U.S. straight up giving another country a disorder. Like the time America inadvertently gave Hong Kong a much worse version of anorexia.

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Prior to 1994, anorexia was a rare and very different thing in Hong Kong. Patients didn't experience conventional American symptoms, such as starving or body dysmorphia, but mainly had issues with food, like complaints of bloated stomachs. In short, the Hong Kong version was milder than the American version, and much less common.

It wasn't without its more serious cases, of course: In 1994, a girl with anorexia collapsed and died on a busy street. But when local papers reported what happened, they unwisely used the American DSM to explain anorexia to the public. The message was promptly taken: The number of anorexia cases exploded, and these days, 90 percent of anorexic patients in Hong Kong experience American symptoms.

But then, we also gave them McDonald's, so maybe this is all moot and the heart attacks will get them first.

For more reasons we don't know a lot about our brains, check out 5 Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Mental Illness and Jokes You Didn't Know Were Indicators Of Mental Illness.

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