There are several general trends visible here. Older people have fewer than younger; men have fewer than women; conservatives have fewer than liberals.
My sense about psychology is that you get diagnoses more or less because you ask for them, so these numbers may simply be explained as the willingness of these various groups to seek psychological counseling. You have to check however many boxes off for the current DSM, and then you get a diagnosis that will allow your insurance company to pay for the counseling you want. If someone doesn't believe in the value of such counseling, they won't go and they therefore won't get a diagnosis. I don't think this necessarily says anything about the actual mental health of these demographics.
Still, the delta is pretty big. There's an order of magnitude difference between the young liberal women and the oldest conservative men, and right at that big a difference between them and the oldest conservative women.
Given the conflicting pressures on young women and girls today, a higher percentage of anxiety and depression makes sense. Young women are strong, independent, full of grrrrrl power, and are victims who will suffer sexual assault and who can't advance without special accommodations. All at the same time. It's terribly unfair to them, and explains some of the problem.
ReplyDeleteLittleRed1
Maybe the older men are smart enough to go to Joe's Bar to commiserate with their buddies instead of some place that will forever indicate mental illness on the now mandated electronic medical record. I went to a counseling session with a former wife a long time ago and the psychologist wanted to proscribe lithium for me. Took about a femtosecond to say no way, no how, not ever- that would look real good on a flight medical record.
ReplyDeleteThere's a new consideration for conservatives, too, with the proliferating Red Flag laws that the liberal states want. "Oh, he's been diagnosed with a mental health disorder?" Suddenly law enforcement officers are SWATting your house to raid for any guns you may own? No thank you.
ReplyDeleteUltimately I think this statistic maybe is a better proxy for "trust in psychology/counseling as an institution" than it is for who actually has mental health issues.
How do the numbers look when broken down by religious observance?
ReplyDeleteThat information doesn’t seem to be available, but potentially it makes it a very different question. You’d like to believe, I gather, that mental health correlates with religious faith; and maybe it does. I’m suggesting that the issue is faith in psychology, which will tend to generate mental illness diagnoses.
ReplyDeleteBut maybe it’s not so different. In “The Century of the Self,” the BBC showed that participation in psychoanalysis— a subset of psychology, AVI tells me— tended to destroy religious communities like nunneries. It maybe that there’s a basic hostility between the religious and the therapeutic vision of the world.
Jonathan Haidt covered this in some depth in this post on his SubStack
ReplyDeleteHe's also posted additional commentary and responses to comments on the first article.
I would say also that younger people today are strongly incentivized to get a psychological diagnosis, because they can then use that to get exemptions from school requirements (e.g. due dates, timed tests, etc.) This is particularly the case with ADD/ADHD, where the treatment is stimulants-- which give everyone, even 100% normal people, a boost to their mood and performance levels.
ReplyDeleteJanet
Grim, I also worry what can be done with diagnoses down the road, even years down the road. Once a record exists, even if it is HIPAA protected it can be subpoenaed. The assessments of bad clinicians go into the record, same as good ones. We were continually reminded to write our notes and enter our information with a constant eye toward defending it in court, even under cross-examination. (Note: That usually doesn't impress you until you actually have to do it and get made to look like a fool.) I think my hospital did very well at that, certainly compared to what I saw coming in the door from other facilities. But even we had people writing things that I thought were clinically and thus morally indefensible.
ReplyDeleteI was wondering along similar lines, Grim. To whom do you turn in trouble? There will be some correlation, of course, since we already have a correlation between religiosity and socio-political views. The question is: Is that correlation stronger for the religion question than for the socio-political question?
ReplyDeleteYes, AVI, it's a real issue for internal ethics to the profession as well as external trust. As you note, it's not all their fault: the government and those who bring civil lawsuits can both end up prying into these matters. These 'diagnoses' are treated as if they were as reliable as a diagnosis of, say, cancer by courts and juries who don't understand that there's something very different about a psychological versus a physiological diagnosis.
ReplyDeleteAs you know, it's been an issue for the military and other similar professions for a long time. In the fire service, there's a real push to try to get people to go to talk to psychologists if they feel troubled. It's gone so far locally that I could (if I were so inclined) call a place in Asheville and show up there, be taken in a back door, and counseled exclusively by people I won't know who have no connection to our county's government. Yet there is still great reluctance (and also then the practical difficulty of trekking all the way to Asheville on a regular basis, which means getting time away from work and family and incurring the expense of the travel).
Priests operate under an inviolable seal in Confession, which the courts have in general respected. That speaks partly to James' questions as well, as it establishes a pragmatic reason to trust the institution that is absent in psychology.