Hypochondria of the mind

A few days ago, in "Worry less. Ruminate less..." I quoted someone to the effect that an obsession with emotions is debilitating. Theodore Dalrymple makes a related case here:

What is mental health? The only definition I can think of is the absence of outright lunacy. Unfortunately, it has come to mean any deviance from a state of perfect equanimity and satisfaction. A long time ago, I noticed that the word ‘unhappy’ had disappeared from the everyday lexicon, in favour of the word ‘depressed’. For every person now who claims to be unhappy there are a thousand who say that they are depressed, and this is irrespective of the conditions that are making them so. ....

But the semantic change from unhappiness to depression, in so many cases absurd and even laughable, is not without its deleterious effects. If you are unhappy, you seek the causes and, if you have what used to be called inner resources, confront them. (Unfortunately, there are circumstances, truly tragic, in which this is not possible.) But if you claim to be depressed, you pass the responsibility over to professionals who are expected to do something to or for you that will remove the depression as a diseased appendix is removed. ....

Of course, there are fashions in diagnosis. A generation ago it was multiple personality – The Three Faces of Eve kind of thing – and the DSM 5 suggested that the prevalence might be as high as 1.5 per cent of the adult population, that is to say one in every 66 people. Multiple personality has since become very rare.

These days it is gender dysphoria that is fashionable, with child gender-identity referrals increasing from 210 per year in 2011 to 5,000 per year in 2021. Either there must be something new in the water supply, or we are dealing with a socio-psychological epidemic. ....

The ever-expanding gamut of psychiatric diagnosis encourages the belief that all departure from a desired state of mind is a medical condition susceptible to medical or some other technical solution. This results in a propensity to hypochondria of the mind, with people taking their mental temperatures, as it were, as hypochondriacs take their blood pressure. But it precludes honesty or genuine reflection and leads to the search for bogus cures of bogus diseases. A corollary is the neglect of those who genuinely require care, who drown in a sea of inflated need. ....

Theodore Dalrymple, "It’s time to eliminate the concept of ‘mental health’," The Spectator, March 2, 2024.