Most GPs say everyday stress is mislabelled as mental illness

Whilst I agree that I think there are some people who say that they’re depressed when they have just had a bad day/week, etc, at the same time I don’t think GP’s are actually qualified in this area to actually give a respected opinion on this topic.

It’s not their area of expertise.

I half agree, just depends what the stress is and how or what can be done to resolve the stress. As the title states ‘everyday stress’, more of an emphasis on ‘everyday’, eventually the mind and body would form a non medicated way to cope.

There are a lot of people who claim they have a mh disorder but are just experiencing human emotion there is a distinct difference

This also happens with autism and adhd

It feeds into long waiting lists and detracts from people that need specialised support

4/5 GPs think GPs overprescribe for mental health? So are they admitting that they themselves are poor practitioners, or is this one of those polls like “80% of drivers think other drivers are terrible at driving” that mostly just reveal the narcissism of the respondents?

Like “well of course the people *I* prescribe to genuinely require it, but I bet all my *lazy colleagues* are handing out pills like chocolates at Christmas”

Yeah the false positive rate for depression and anxiety is probably higher than we would like

I do a bit about well-being with my students and the best analogy to explain this is ‘you can be unfit without being ill’- poor mental health like anxiety, stress etc are like being unfit, they make your life harder and possibly more miserable…but they might not be an illness (though obviously they can lead to them)

One issue is just we were lazy with language you can be depressed without having Depression, you can be anxious without having Anxiety…we should’ve really just invented new words rather than taking existing ones for universal feelings and naming Clinical illnesses the same thing

Nick Haslam and many others have also highlighted issues like this as ‘concept creep’ where terms like mental health/illness, trauma, abuse etc have broadened over time which has diluted the originals severity and raises the severity of things which wouldn’t have fit (also see things like ‘the blue dot effect’)

I’ll say after 12 years of trying to get help with mental health issues and only getting a diagnosis after going through my teen years borderline suicidal and horribly anxious, the inverse seems to happen very frequently too.

Jobs. Home life. Coming out of school. Nothing changed it. But I got told it was hormones and all sorts of shit for years.

I see this in schools too. Typical teenage experiences, like friendship breakdowns, causing feelings of depression/anxiety, but being labelled (esp by parents) as actual MH issues. Then the effected pupils get special passes, coddled and reassured, without building up their resilience. This snowballs into seeking GP diagnoses, especially once the pupils are in exam years as they want private rooms – they become used to special treatment

I think I’d get in a lot of trouble by saying that the UK is so fucked that a lot of people are rightly deeply mentally unwell. You shouldn’t come out of some of the situations I’ve seen without it having serious impact on your mental health. The problem is that the way the UK expects to deal with stress is awful. A doctor can at best give you some pills which all have weird side effects and refer you for talk therapy which has a ridiculous waiting list.

You can’t say “the reason your depressed is because you have no money, a miserable job and no friend or foreseeable way to make friends and most of that is so far beyond your control that I honestly understand why you chose to overdose on whatever you could find”.

To whom do they say this? 🤔 Not their patients as they spend most of their lives hiding from them.

Our grandparents used to go to church or consult with a priest in moments of great desperation. Most people in this country don’t, most are completely removed from any local culture – they go to a doctor because who else to turn to?

Idk, I guess I’m just speaking for myself really, but it makes sense to me…

GP say everyday stressed is mislabelled.

Employers say mental illness is mislabelled as stress.

Surely being stressed everyday isn’t healthy though?

Welcome to capitalism. Alienation.

Rational responses to an economic system that demands constant productivity, undermines community, and erodes work-life balance. People perform rote tasks they have no say in and never get to see the end result of their labour, often doing it for wages that barely sustain them. Markets replace genuine social bonds with transactional relationships. Personal fulfillment is sacrificed utterly, totally taking the backseat to mere survival, causing extreme existential distress.

“Mental Illness” depoliticises it all and shifts responsibility from systemic structures to individuals themselves. The system medicalizes their suffering – offering therapy and medication (and if you’re in the US, does it for even more profit) instead of enacting systemic change.

Normal and healthy human reactions to their material conditions i.e. “mental illness”. Only a matter of time before that finger in the dam doesn’t cut it any more.

Just my two cents as an old man who has lived around the world and has seen how the UK and other countries have evolved over the decades. When I’ve been most stressed over the years, and I’ve seen it with my friends too, it’s always been to do with affordability. The mismatch between what my income was versus what I thought I needed to live a secure life and plan for the future. This has become a much bigger problem for millennials and gen Z then it ever was for my generation- certainly in the UK- because of the ridiculous cost of housing- whether that’s buying or renting. The reason the UK haven’t built nearly enough homes is because a significant number of influential people – be that voters in certain areas, landowners in other areas, property owners, don’t actually want new housing to be built, at least not in their neighborhood. The population went from 55 million in the 1970s to 69 million now, most of that was due to net migration (including me! This isn’t a racist post). Anyway, my point is: this financial insecurity has been normalised incrementally and this is why GPs can now say in all seriousness that it’s not mental illness, it’s everyday stress. “Everyday stress” belittles the brutal reality that leading a fundamentally insecure existence brings. GPs earn up to around £110k a year for NHS work alone. That’s literally 3 times the average UK income. So, take this from someone who’s actually doing pretty well financially, has had an easy life, and is old enough to know what stress is: don’t let the UK middle class tell you what is and what isn’t “reasonable”, whoever they are, on the stress front. If I was young, I would be rising up, banging on my local councillors and MP doors, and ask them what the fuck they are going to do about it and when.

While I agree, life is getting harder for people as wages stagnate and the cost of the basics keep going up. I suspect a lot of people feel like they are drowning and that low level of constant background stress is not helping people deal with everyday stress at work. It might be situational stress, however the economic situation of a lot of people and an increasingly interconnected world does mean that escaping the situation has become a lot harder. People are burning out because the grind is harder than it really needs to be.

The trouble is that the system we live in has made “everyday stress” an acceptable and standard thing.

So obviously we’re going to find a way to profit off “fixing” a problem we caused.

It’s hard to imagine overworked and underpaid GP’s are using their free time to keep up to date & educated on topics of mental health to be able to diagnose accurately.

Shit Life Syndrome is what doctors call this when patients aren’t present. It’s an epidemic in the UK

It doesn’t help that people like to use anxiety and depression interchangeably with nerves and sadness. It then means those people think it’s worse than it actually is and people are actually have the conditions don’t get taken seriously.

But it is concerning here (in the comments) that a lot of people don’t know the criteria for these conditions and refuse to learn them. If you do not know what these conditions require, you simply won’t understand the difference (and often nuance) between the normal emotions and the disorders. Someone here mentioned how they “weren’t depressed, but had a really shit job and worked in a bad environment” but those facts do not negate an existence of a depressive disorder. Depression doesn’t involve an absence of external stressors.

Tldr people use language that makes mental health get taken less seriously but also the general population don’t tend to understand mental health and its processes + criteria and should therefore not police it.

Funny that, my GP misdiagnosed my ADHD as Stress for 7 years.

The problem is GPs often spend as little as 5 minutes with a patient, so they dont actually investigate.

You lay out the symptons and *they* declare it stress.

My problem with this is stress can be genuine and it can duck you up mentally and physically. I have had a short bout of it recently dude to some shit situations at work. Now thankfully my line manager and team is great and has eased it and made me feel much better. But another senior member of the team is very much not like that and thinks you should just work longer and harder and not have a personal life outside of work and he made things worse before I admitted my problems and they were made better.
Now imagine you have that manager not mine and then it just gets worse and worse untill you speak to the doctor. Then the doc isn’t sympathetic as this article suggest the my have been too much your gonna feel worse not better

I know exactly what my anxiety and stress are caused by but it’s not reasonably possible to remove that cause. Anti depressants are helping me. I’d rather the root problem was solved but this is the best I can do right now.

Ah Tony Blair, in his memoir he said he used alcohol as a prop for his stress levels. 

We should all follow suit and drink to mask our issues. 

What a great role model he is. 

/s