IS “Overdiagnosis” the new Buzzword culture-war culturally selected? I wondered for this for a while, and then Wes Streeting claimed on Sunday that there was an “overdiagnosis” of certain mental health conditions. Now I’m sure this is it.
I first noticed the term used in connection with anxiety and sadness, then the lack of attention of hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and the latest autism. Two books on overdiagnosis, Suzanne O’Sullivan’s the age of diagnosis and is looking for normal Sami Timimi, has drawn attention throughout the media, adding fuel to a new fire that we can recognize as “bloody everyone is labeled these days, right?”.
It is not to say that those with -set and medical professionals do not have a valid score, or that the medical of social issues are not concerned. We all know how “therapy speaking” is in contact with public discourse, how young people are now throwing terms such as “trauma response” and “stimming” – raised from sincere tiktoks – with confidence that should be surprising to some of their adult “False” with you, or you can’t get divorced.
There is an aspect of developing it, even though the division is determined by our openness in examining our mental health. In some households, a faultline may develop between those who have had a diagnosis and therapy (often younger), and those who will not face it (often older). Just look at Prince Harry, who decides, after extensive therapy, to talk about the trauma of his mother’s death is considered a ghost and exhibitionist of those used in the hard-working behavior of past generations of Royals. Post-traumatic stress disorder-a diagnosis I have in the past-is another of the conditions that people want to claim is not true.
We have all noticed that the autism spectrum has expanded significantly over the past three decades, partly due to the elimination of Asperger’s diagnosis. When my brother was formally reviewed at four years old, in 1997, you usually had to be called “serious”. Today, there are verbal children and can be in the mainstream school with diagnoses. This progress is also appropriate for analysis. However, I’m not one of the people who say this means that those people are not autistic, or they are not faced with massive challenges. Heterogenous and multifactoral disorders tend to be that way.
This is not the existence of overdiagnosis books that define me. I have a lot of respect for doctors’ opinions, especially those who ask important questions about how we treat patients with chronic illness, mental anxiety and neurodivergence. What is worrying is how the concept of overdiagnosis is that the cultural warriors are deployed as a battering RAM to defeat the sick and the disabled, to doubt their diagnosis, to ridicule them and, in the case of politicians, to justify further reductions in their support systems.
Get this passage from a review of the Sunday Times of the Book of Timimi: “Instead of working on the social principles of doctors talking to patients to find the emotional and historical source of their sadness, so many are pivoted in treating mental health such as physical health. They have checked their patients with a ‘illness’, slapped them with a pathologist ( etc.) and they are medicate.
Where to start? The fact that autism and ADHD are not thinking illnesses? Autism and ADHD are neurodevelopmental diseases (they can both be together in mental health issues). But what I have learned most distracting is the suggestion that doctors have slapped the diagnoses of neurodevelopmental diseases in Willy Nilly patients.
Maybe we should now that neurologists, development paediatricians, psychiatrists, geneticists and speech and work therapists involved in a diagnosis? Parents who have noticed that their child is having a hard time meeting their milestones, the special educational educational coordinators, and the GPS and health guests?
Waiting for an assessment of NHS autism – and the little support that can result from it – is more than four years in some trust. No one is “slapped” by a diagnosis of autism to anyone, at least not in the NHS. I remember about the private market for diagnosis, although it should be noted that in order for these diagnoses to be any use, many boroughs need to check them with a panel of NHS experts.
In the midst of all this unknown noise about overdiagnosis, there is little discussion about what is about Britain that makes so many people struggling to work in it, there is no real entry of the fact that this country has become a depressed place to survive, or what has been done in an education system within which anxiety and neurodivergent children are
This cultural war puts onus to the individual to work within a brutal society that makes a little effort to integrate or support them. It demonic to patients as a starting point, and has real-world effects on people’s lives. This means that people repeatedly justify their diagnosis or their children, even others in their families. This means that people have to fight more difficult for support for themselves or their children. This means to deal with the lines of parroting lines like: “ADHD? All he needs is a great smack.” It means a general environment of ignorance and insult.
Poor people, those who are disabled with parents who support their children, as well as professionals who support them, deserve better than this disappointment. The measure of our society lies in how we treat our weakness. Like standing, it’s not good.
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