Children to be taught worrying is not a mental-health condition
https://www.yahoo.com/news/children-taught-worrying-not-mental-160000440.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmluZy5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAIDQC2Up1b7WX8CuAcks-rnTK4kdA5TMAxFVim6EmwLCpnaFdAmBpNGf1dFrCDhVd5nbfaA3rPMch-FfuLwFNgSc4ZhBhgU77HXwZavT3t0Kw4Z4xuiPJ9ct_YiWQQYC1G8gVEalEZPG8-2xQrqxBnf8xUMOtHAIaWaDDlGPuIgX
Posted by Shiny-Tie-126
31 Comments
Bridget Philippson to make up some shit that circumvents actual medical diagnosis because the billionaires need as many serfs as possible.
How about making life less shit.for people? Wild idea, I know.
Doesn’t someone need to tell this to doctors? They’re the ones that diagnose everyone who is worried about a symptom with anxiety…
We opened the national discussion about mental health without any consideration of the impact of teaching young people to speak about it without clearly defining what constitutes a mental health condition. Every person under a certain age thinks they have a debilitating mental health issue that doesn’t allow them to function. They have absolutely 0 resilience when it comes to mucking in and riding through difficult periods.
To the same end, since COVID we’ve now got swathes of working age adults on long term sick due to ‘mental health’ conditions that are undiagnosed. Its gotten a bit out of hand IMO
Of course lots of people have actual mental health conditions, but they are far more prevalent today than they should be and claimed by many people who, to me, are taking the piss a bit.
Edit: let me make it clear I’m not looking to call anyone out here, particularly those who have suffered or struggled and have had to seek support, I’m trying to say that the problem is systemic and putting forward my somewhat cynical view which I believe is grounded in some level of truth.
My wife has anxiety and is on the spectrum for autism. And honestly this kinda annoys me because this feels like demonising people with genuine anxiety because there are people who constantly over-worry to the point of their lives being dictated and need to rely on SSRIs to functions
If my wife didn’t have them, she wouldn’t be able to work period.
Slight worries about the future and specific things in their lives? Sure they don’t need medication, but they do need to be taught how to manage those things.
But this constant battle to demonise mental health just fucking exhausts me and makes worry about my wife.
Good. This has already gotten way out of control and many people believe that they are trapped by conditions that they diagnosed themselves with. Passing this insanity on to children has probably always been inevitable if the parents think this acceptable, but this adoration of mental health issues has turned into a pandemic.
Not sure this is a good thing. On one hand it’s important to teach folk that stress is a natural part of life. How we deal and overcome it is how we grow as people (socially and professionally). I guess the danger is that we go back to minimising the feelings and experiences of those with anxiety.
Sometimes there’s threads on Reddit where they describe a regular human condition being a sign of Autism/ADHD/Anxiety and all the comments are like “omg I knew it”
Rehearsing conversations in advance, temporary short term obsessions, struggling with eye contact, fidgeting, changing personality to match the situation, aversion to phone calls, public speaking/job interviews
Got young people where I work (18 -20) self diagnosing themselves with clinical depression, anxiety, ADHD, Autism you name it.
They seem to be living perfectly normal young person lives though so no idea if they actually are ill or not.
Bridget Phillipson is an ignorant disaster as Minister. I’ve not seen one thing from her I don’t find morally repulsive.
How about she takes one second to actually try and understand why kids are struggling with mental health and the societal causes of it, before arrogantly deciding she already knows what’s best.
Im sorry but I just can’t with this government anymore. Hateful, know nothing, populists who should be nowhere near government.
I can’t wait for them to go. I urge people never to vote reform or Tory, but seriously, after this last year, I’ll never vote for Labour again either.
And no, I don’t care if you think im gonna let reform win. They’re winning anyway because youre party does not know how to rule.
My daughter has friends who have “anxiety” when faced with doing anything new. They genuinely do not get the difference between nervousness and a full-on panic attack… and then work themselves up into a genuine full-on panic attack over it.
You know, when I was finishing up in (quite a bad) state school and then going through Uni in the very early 2000’s:
I could see that if I got a profession, I’d probably have a pretty nice house compared to my parents.
I would likely be financially stable from my mid 20’s.
The backlash to misogyny of “girl power” and the widening partipation of women in the workplace suggested to a teenage me that maybe things were getting more equal, and perhaps we could do anything in the workplace.
The backlash to toxic “tough” male stereotypes was allowing boys to express themselves, whether they were into music or drama or nerdy or emo and not just sporty; whether they wanted to go into traditional male professions or, like a schoolmate, become a male midwife or a primary school teacher.
There were LGBT societies at university, when most of us could still remember Section 28, age-of-consent equality was on the way and it felt like one day anyone might be able to marry too.
Meeting potential partners when you were out with friends several times a week was easy.
Going on a night out was a handful of pounds.
Uni tuition was charged for, but it was very heavily subsidised.
Rent was manageable even if your parents were working class and you were the first in your family ever to go to Uni.
Apprenticeships and further education colleges for anyone who didn’t go to uni were easily accessible.
Part time jobs at (for the time) rates that allowed you to support yourself if you only had your student loan were very easy to come by.
Things could still be tough – BUT they appeared to be getting better.
You know what? I didn’t get the nice professional-grade house on a professional wage, as it became impossible before I got to home ownership.
I didn’t become financially stable until my late 30’s, and that’s probably due to us not having kids.
A lot of the rest of the stuff is either gone now due to the economy and housing market being trashed, or has been set back by social media expectations of masculinity/femininity, or dating apps, or right wing culture wars wanting to take away people’s rights or “make them” behave as assigned to them by a more rigid society.
There are fewer opportunities, less support unless you come from a middle class family, fewer libraries or social clubs or decently paid part time jobs, fewer ways to climb up the ladder, and fewer safety nets to keep you steady as you attempt to climb (including easy access to basic medical and dental care!)
There’s just the opportunity to grind, with your salary getting lower in real terms, for less life in return than your parents had.
I’m not sure that telling people that “feeling crap is unavoidable and normal” is going to fix this. I think they might need some hope for the future to help them through the crap times, like we had, even if it didn’t quite all turn out as we’d thought in the end.
It’s going to interesting to see what peoples mental health is going to be like, when AI and offshoring to cheaper labour countries, takes even more jobs?
Depends on the extent
There’s anxiety the emotion and then there’s anxiety the disorder
Terrible, short-sighted idea. I’d rather have people be too hasty than have even a single more child live in the hell that is the anxiety and shame loop.
So the state says worrying is not a mental illness, so they can reduce having to support them.
But also the state creates so much chaos, uncertainty, unfairness and anxiety that causes people to worry like fuck.
There’s that saying that China is laughing at us.
So, I spent a month travelling around China and – they’re not.
They’re so far ahead of us that we’re not worth thinking about.
Good, there’s a difference between feeling anxious and having anxiety
Ok, just to put the other perspective. Back in the 80s and 90s we had very little awareness of mental health conditions. Anorexia was perhaps known about but otherwise very little. Kids like me were described as ‘highly strung’. Turns out I had undiagnosed ocd for decades! Finally on the medication that makes me able to function normally. If you have a mental health condition from a young age you don’t know that what you experience as ‘worrying’ is pathological and not what others mean when they talk about being worried or anxious. This led to an awful lot of unnecessary suffering for people with treatable conditions. I can’t be the only person this happened to.
People do claim that their “mental health really suffered” when they are just experiencing normal negative emotions that you would expect in various situations.
Being sad after a break up isn’t a mental health issue.
I work with trauma, people seem to really think everything is trauma, I see distress and upset being described as trauma all the time.
Anxiety, worrying, stress and panic are all normal feelings. You need to feel those to develop your emotional regulation.
A lot of young people tell me they smoke cannabis to calm down. The human body doesn’t need cannabis to calm down, if you said you did to have a good time that would be far healthier than essentially stunting your own wellbeing.
We must be positive and outgoing at all times. All Times!
As someone who has genuinely had a severe anxiety disorder since childhood, I don’t know how to feel about this. Worrying isn’t a mental health condition but anxiety is different, mundane things paralyse you with fear, you are on edge or terrified all the time, even doing ‘normal’ things.
Worrying isn’t on its own but if the adults around that child give zero shits to help them relieve those worries then that’s how it becomes one
My daughter and her friends all self diagnose as
“We are gay and have poor mental health”
But they all have boyfriends all the time and just hate getting out of bed.
I don’t know how you square this circle.
I personally believe that opening up the the conversation about mental health has been a good thing overall, but the TikTokification has come so quickly
I’m sorry but I had worry disorder and I had to have therapy for it as it destroyed my life. Let’s not say worrying can’t be a mental health condition. Thanks.
>It’s normal and cool to be afraid most of the time actually
Don’t forget – it’s ok to not be ok! Just shut the fuck up about it, if you could.
I think they need to actually teach about mental health conditions properly. We went from not really talking about it considering mental health conditions at all, to mental health being this big thing, but never properly explained, especially to children. It is normal to experience anxiety, worry etc as part of life. You may also experience bad spots where you feel very depressed for a long time, but it doesn’t mean you have a permanent mental condition. By better explaining what a normal range is, people can better understand when/if something is wrong, either on a temporary basis or permanent.
Part of me wishes mental health awareness came around sooner. I look back and realise just how not normal it was to me. But I never knew anything different. Or, at times, felt that there was something unexplainably wrong with me, leading to hiding my difficulties more.
There was a time I never went anywhere with friends. I would avoid telling my parents these plans so they wouldn’t make me go. I was so anxious I just wanted to hide, my default reaction was to avoid at all costs, despite also feeling terrible about missing stuff.
There was a time I couldn’t ask questions. I physically couldn’t get the words to leave my mouth.
There was a time I would get so anxious about someone possibly breaking into my house (despite it never happening or has happened) I would frequently patrol the house at night secretly, or I would lay awake for hours listening for any sounds that could be intruders. I don’t think that is normal
I wasn’t suggesting youre pushing the narrative. Im suggesting youre legitimising it. Youre using anecdotal evidence to suggest their is a large problem and I’ve already said that causes diagnoses to get missed as children are not believed.
We hear countless stories of kids and adults who clearly state they weren’t believed when they reached out and it caused monumental issues for them. Like physical health, we shoukd always institute a safety first approach and just assuming kids may be lying or not having significant issues, without investigation, will likely cause misdiagnosis.
Furthermore, the narrative that there is widespread issues with kids being pathologised by parents are deeply unpleasant accusations to make and you should do so with better evidence than youre supplying. There are plenty of issues with parenting that are well documented and evidenced and there are similar accusations aimed at our education system. Yet this narrative that there is an agenda for kids and or parents to over pathologise is dangerous, reckless and not born in truth.
I doubt highly that any kid whi suggest a mental illness that may not be accurate, has no issue at all and writing them off because they are not accurately describing their issue is also potentially really harmful.
Worse, this narrative can lead to prejudgement of kids before they present evidence of mental distress and prevent them getting help. Thats not ok either.
Life is getting worse. Young people have literally zero prospects.
And they’re right. Anxiety used to just be called apprehension which is a normal trait to have.
Good parents make their children overcome the actions that made them apprehensive so it doesn’t affect them in adulthood.
Bad parents don’t.