‘Life being stressful is not an illness’ – GPs on mental health over-diagnosis

Mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety being situational, or having roots in “life stresses” is how it has always been, but GPs will never get to those root causes with patients, because that isn’t their job. Their job is either doling out medications, or booking referrals to the people who *will* get to those root causes with patients.

Plenty of “normal life stresses” (bereavement, abuse, trauma, poverty, etc) can still very much make you ill. Pathologising “normal feelings” doesn’t mean those people don’t still need or deserve help, so what is even the point of this being raised, if not to dismiss people who still need help? Huge and complex societal issues that need to be addressed such as isolation, loneliness, poverty, and social inequality aren’t solved by GPs throwing pills at them, they’re also not solved by GPs invalidating and eye-rolling patients they’ve made a snap judgement about based on a 10 minute appointment.

We shouldn’t wave people off who have “Shit Life Syndrome”, or just normalise misery solely on the basis that there are a *lot* of people now who are experiencing misery.. “Oh you feel like shit and wish you were dead because you can’t see a future for yourself? Yeah join the queue.. That’s just normal now..” So sad how we got here.

eta – Reading the comments from the GPs on this article, makes me wonder how many of them have compassion fatigue, or how many are just bellends who never had it to start with.

Things like this scare me, it took me from the age of 16 to the age of 36 to finally be diagnosed with C-PTSD. In those 20 years all my GP could diagnose was “only” depression and anxiety.

Why are we demonising the victims of decades worth of mental health being scrapped, even GP appointments scrapped.

And then people wonder why we end up with their commute halted due to a person on the track.

“grief is normal” is such a terrible take when most of the time, the people going to their GP because of grief, are seeking a sick note because bereavement leave in this country is so inadequate.

I lost a parent and my work policy was to pay you for 3 days, everything else unpaid.
I tried returning to work after 3 days and it was definitely not enough time, so I stopped again. In the end I had 2 weeks off and got paid for 3 days of it.

Since then, I’ve found more and more people have taken to going to their GP to ask to be signed off for stress, as it is the only workaround available to help people get the time off they need to register the death and organise the funeral. Apparently the GPs think this is a lack of resilience?

I am shocked that the GPs thought under diagnosis was the problem! There are vast swathes of research saying under diagnosis is what is happening.

Let me outline all this as I see it. I am a psychologist btw. Right so… the diagnostic criteria for mental illness are created by panels of experts, many of whom are based in countries with insurance based systems. This means they need to make emotional distress into a medical illness for insurance companies to cover the cost of care. So this creates a pull to make anything that for some ppl is helped with therapy or medication an illness. Even if the illness is ‘adjustment disorder’ (stress/low mood coping with a major life change eg job loss).

Without removing this funding streams related pull to medicalisation, there is just going to be the need to have a label for anything that might be helped with counselling etc. Or indeed anything a person might need time off work for. (Eg NHS gave me 3 days off when my Mum died unexpectedly. The gp gave me a ‘diagnosis’ so I could have more time off with sick pay.)

Given that this insurance based pull exists. Any discussion of the philosophical or scientific merits of this seems kinda blue skys thinking. Yes- would that we had a non pathologising, yet support providing system, that was individualised to each patient. Given that this is not going to happen, rather more and more people with life stress and misery / mental illnesses (call it what you will), are going to be on waiting lists or turned away, the most pragmatic solution is… reduce stigma and increase access to care and treatment. Alternatively… we could… overthrow capitalism!

Are these the same GPs who have been handing out antidepressants like smarties over the past 30 odd years since the launch of Prozac?