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Thelo's avatar

Those raw numbers look staggeringly high to me. 60% clinical anxiety? 20-40% clinical PTSD? 30-50% ADHD? Really? I'd expect these sorts of things to top out at more like... 10% maybe.

It's really, really hard to look at these numbers and not conclude that our society is just way too quick to pathologize everyday experiences. By which I mean, to treat them as ontologically separate "illnesses", rather than as sometimes harder parts of everyday life.

I promise to still keep an open mind about all of this, I really do. But hot damn.

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Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)'s avatar

I hope this stupid trend of people needing diagnoses for their regular old personality ends soon. By the time this generation ages into middle age, we're all going to be bankrupt from paying for everyone's "diagnoses" and the "medication" to treat their personalities. These numbers are a joke.

Or maybe the pharmaceutical/mental health industries could do us all a favor and come up with a new mental illness/diagnoses for being annoying. If we could attach a fancy term to that, and come up with a pill to solve the problem of annoying people, we might actually be improving the world! As opposed to whatever train wreck these results show.

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