Is the incidence of mental illness increasing? Like for real, not dsm inflation and scope creep…
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How are you thinking that this question could be answered without relying on the DSM?
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People had ways of thinking about mental illness long before there was such a thing as the dsm… when the map is untrustworthy you just go direct to the territory
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Yes. Cf Seligman, whose findings are pretty robust. Whether you accept his explanation--general agreement is that mental illness has increased dramatically.
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I think it's not possible to know this. Various mechanisms whereby a mental illness is more likely to be recognized as such presently than in the past can be imagined but that's speculative.
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with all the caveats and asterisks that are needed, i would answer in the affirmative. i'm not so sure the human brain has evolved as fast as the world we've built, and modern life wreaks havoc on our wiring
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Isn’t illness defined by a standard bell curve, and thus deviation of the norm will always remain more or less the same? I feel like I’m missing something obvious tho.
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Yes. Short attention spans and screen life is not conducive to establishing deep interpersonal relationships and critical thinking. Most online forums are flame wars. You do miss the "cack sessions" in IITB, don't you?
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Our evolutionarily tuned emotional regulation systems do seem poorly matched with modern environments. Hard to believe the deracinated modern individual would not be subject to more dysregulated mental/emotional experiences, as is reported. Otherwise seems impossible to measure.









