Mental Illness

Psychiatry, historically consisted of specialist doctors observing patients and producing a diagnosis based upon their contextual observations. However, in the 1970's this came under fire in part due to R. D. Laing and a series of experiments, one of which was the Thud experiment.

Thud Experiment

This psychological experiment saw psychologist David Rosenhan send 10 normal people as shills to be committed into mental institutions across the US. Rosenhan asked only one thing of those that were to be committed, to tell the psychiatrists that they kept on hearing the word thud in their head. Apart from this the shill were told to act completely normally. Each participant was subsequently diagnosed insane an committed for a number of days. After the rouse was up, the shills thought that they would tell the psychiatrist so and simply go home. However, this was not the case, on average the shills were committed for 2 months and were only let go when they accepted to the doctor that they were mad and were getting better.

This and other founded criticisms such as studies showing:

• In primary care "Misdiagnosis rates reached 65.9% for major depressive disorder, 92.7% for bipolar disorder, 85.8% for panic disorder, 71.0% for generalized anxiety disorder, and 97.8% for social anxiety disorder."

Led to the restructuring of psychiatry as a science away from the subjective analysis of bias prone practitioners to more objective psychometric tests. By using a yes / no algorithm based upon reported symptoms it was found that 50% of all US citizens had a mental disorder. This was an issue, and the pharmaceutical corporations diligently invented an answer releasing the first ever antidepressant, fluoxetine in 1988. Prozac as it was called, rapidly became the most widely prescribed drugs in history. In fact, in Australia, 1 in 7 now take one antidepressant daily.

Endogenous vs Exogenous Depression

Given these numbers, its seems there is a huge mental health pandemic globally. However, if you look closer...by relying on psychometric tests to diagnose depression psychiatrists fail to account for a patients context. For instance, the patient might be recently bereaved or had just lost their job, the normal ups and downs in life. These external effects are called exogenous and by using purely behavioural psychometric test that are mixed in with more biological endogenous, disorders. This has created an illusion of a vast mental health epidemic.