On abnormality - Camilla Nord in TLS:

‘In 2001, the World Health Organization estimated that 450 million people around the world lived with a mental disorder. In 2019, the WHO put the figure at 970 million – one in every eight people. This rise has coincided with an expanding list of diagnosable conditions, decreased stigma about receiving a diagnosis and, in some cases, a weakening of the criteria used to meet the thresholds for diagnosis. In short, more people are considered “abnormal” today than was the case two decades ago.
Three new books explore the possibility that medicine has fallen into the trap of overdiagnosis, bringing vulnerable patients with it.’

(…)

‘Psychotherapist Sami Timimi writes that the medical approach to mental health is ultimately false, arguing that “there is no such thing as a psychiatric diagnosis”, and that a better approach is “a narrative that will help rehabilitate emotions back into the sphere of the ordinary”.’

(…)

‘Perceiving one’s many adversities as “trauma” has the capacity to make the challenges themselves worse – harder to overcome. Even our “compassionate cultural habit” of issuing “trigger warnings” is unhelpful, worsening anxiety in anticipation.’

(…)

‘Searching for Normal concludes with the idea that de cerca nadie es normal (“up close, no one is normal”). For him, the solution is “the tearing down of the current paradigm” he argues for “no more use of psychiatric diagnoses”. “Technocratic diagnostic philosophies do not work in mental health. They make things worse.” O’Sullivan and Santhouse, however, maintain that diagnosis benefits some patients enormously. One patient comes to Santhouse’s clinic with memory deficits, convinced that her future lies in deterioration and progressive amnesia. Santhouse identifies her problems as functional cognitive disorder (a complex condition that shares many symptoms with dementia, but is not caused by structural damage to the brain), a diagnosis shared by somewhere between 12 and 56 per cent of people attending a memory clinic.’

(…)

‘The nuanced point she makes is not that these diagnoses cannot be identified reliably clinically, but that in identifying them, one may be labelling the wrong thing. She extends this to long Covid, as well as less well-known conditions such as mast cell activation and Chiari malformation. The cause of these conditions, and their co-occurrence, is that “people who express distress through physical symptoms tend to do so with lots of symptoms that attract a range of diagnoses”.’

(…)

‘Perhaps the real difference between the three books lies in how they – and we – decide what it means to be “unequivocally sick” in the first place, and how best to help those unlucky enough to find themselves in this category.’

Read the article here.

Trigger warnings are not helpful, the word ‘trauma’ itself does do harm, can do harm.

Labels are necessary but often people are mislabeled.

And unequivocally sick is still a category, what do to with people in this category remains a riddle. Mitigating their suffering is often the best strategy, but it can happen that the mitigators (doctors) are making the suffering worse.