Foreword: 100% my opinion
Short version: no.
Long version: [Darth Vader voice] NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
If anything, we’re not talking enough about mental health. I’m not referring to the tendency to ostracise neurodivergent people as “other” and the fervency with which neurotypicals are clawing at the concept of normalcy in order to convince themselves that they have stable ground beneath their feet, although both aspects are a symptom of the greater issue.
In my view, the prevalence of self-diagnoses, the confusion and misinformation around psychology and mental well-being, just as the two elements listed above, are a symptom of the fact that the entire domain is marred by inefficacy, ranging from predatory businesspeople who play us through fake sympathy and understanding in order to get us to click their product’s link and sign up to an expensive program which may or may not actually do us any good, to the overall difficulty of actually getting the help we need, to those who simply spread misinformation either with the intent of gaining ‘something,’ or out of blind incompetence.
We need to be aware of what is happening to us. We need to be able to discuss these things and actually reach a point of understanding, both of our situations and ourselves, as well as to understand those around us. The fact that those who are genuinely trying to reach the truth are frequently going down the wrong path is not a fault of the seekers, but a fault of the system. Referring to that point about hopelessness around the persistence of racism, the solution is clearly not shoving everything under the carpet and trying to ignore the situation because it makes us feel bad, it is precisely to stare right into its eyes, be constantly aware of the problem, and sharing that awareness with as many people as possible. Discomfort is the only path toward change and we should embrace it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Mental health awareness campaigns, they argue, help some young people identify disorders that badly need treatment — but they have a negative effect on others, leading them to over-interpret their symptoms and see themselves as more troubled than they are.
In a paper published last year, two research psychologists at the University of Oxford, Lucy Foulkes and Jack Andrews, coined the term “prevalence inflation” — driven by the reporting of mild or transient symptoms as mental health disorders — and suggested that awareness campaigns were contributing to it.
“It’s creating this message that teenagers are vulnerable, they’re likely to have problems, and the solution is to outsource them to a professional,” said Dr. Foulkes, a Prudence Trust Research Fellow in Oxford’s department of experimental psychology, who has written two books on mental health and adolescence.
Researchers in the study speculated that the training programs “bring awareness to upsetting thoughts,” encouraging students to sit with darker feelings, but without providing solutions, especially for societal problems like racism or poverty.
One of the largest, a 2023 meta-analysis of 252 classroom programs in 53 countries, found that students who participated performed better academically, displayed better social skills and had lower levels of emotional distress or behavioral problems.
Lucy Kim, a Yale senior who has lobbied for better mental health support on campus, described the prevalence inflation hypothesis as “disheartening, dismissive and potentially dangerous,” providing another way to discount the experiences of young people.
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