The Mental Health Pendulum Needs to Swing the Other Way

In the years in which I was a student, mental health became increasingly legitimized as an actual concern worth discussing. People started viewing struggles with mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety not as a sign of weakness but as a real health concern along the same lines as a broken arm or fractured ankle. To be very clear: I am thrilled that more and more people view mental illness as a valid health issue. However, I am becoming increasingly concerned through my observations as a teacher that the advocates of mental health might have pushed the pendulum too far. I think that society is due for a slight correction in the other direction.

Concern #1: The Overdiagnosis of Mental Illnesses

In this section, I’ll focus on the two most common mental disorders I see as a high school teacher: anxiety and depression.

Picture this: you are fresh out of middle school. Hormones are coursing through your body at warp speed. Acne covers your face. You still have your braces on. The outfit that you chose for the first day looked dumber than you thought when you checked yourself out in the mirror in the morning, but you didn’t have time to change. Your first period teacher already assigned twenty pages of reading from a book that you don’t understand at all, due next class. You tripped on the stairs in between classes, and you’re pretty sure someone caught the moment on their Snapchat. Your so-called “friends” from middle school have decided to befriend other people, leaving you to eat alone at lunch on the first day of school. Your parents are so incredibly annoying because they left a note in your lunchbox wishing you a good first day, which is simultaneously really nice but so cringe, which makes you irrationally angry at them for being so supportive but also thinking you’re still some elementary school baby who needs notes in their lunchbox, and everything sucks and you feel like a dumb, ungrateful loser who will never get anywhere in life.

Obviously, these events would make you feel anxious and sad. But there is a very important difference between those feelings, which are natural and universal emotions, and experiencing anxiety and depression on a level that requires a diagnosis. I think everyone can relate to feeling nervous in new environments, regardless of age and life experience. Everyone can remember moments of insecurity and loneliness, of seemingly inexplicable frustration. Yet, more and more people are receiving diagnoses of anxiety and depression. Almost 1 in 5 adults in the United States have been diagnosed with some sort of mental illness, a staggering number. Although many of those cases are legitimate, I suspect that some of those diagnoses are unneccessary.

I found this article particularly interesting, in which the researcher asserts that the psychological community has pathologized the natural struggles of the human condition. The researcher was concerned that inevitable feelings of sadness at times of loss and struggle were being over-diagnosed as major depressive disorder. The researcher saw the same trend for personalty disorders such as autism, borderline personality disorder, and anxiety disorders. There are several reasons that these overdiagnoses exist. False positives are common, as psychiatrists rightly want to play it safe and keep legitimate cases from falling through the cracks. The critical shortage of psychiatrists also plays a role, as psychiatrists are so overwhelmed with the number of people who seek help that they can’t spend enough time to actually figure out if the patient actually needs treatment. The pandemic, of course, played a huge role in the massive influx of people who seeked help for mental illness.

My concern is that if people who are actually just experiencing natural human emotions such as nervousness and sadness believe that they have anxiety and depression, the people whose lives are actually debilitated by clinical anxiety and depression will struggle to find necessary resources. Additionally, people who don’t actually need medication become dependent on drugs that they don’t need (which opens up a whole new can of worms about Big Pharma that I am not qualified to discuss). Finally, I worry that the medical definitions of mental illnesses will become meaningless, which brings me to my next concern:

Concern #2: The Meme-ification of Mental Illness

I don’t have much in the way of quantitative research here, but I do have a pretty good idea of the media that my students consume and their general sense of humor. A perfect example of a recent Internet trend was to take an online quiz to determine whether or not someone has autism. Obviously, most people were doing so with a tongue-in-cheek approach, but the concept of making autism a meme, especially in world where being PC as possible is imperative, is surprising. I also hear students joking about suicide all the time. They are always quick to clarify that they’re kidding, but I am disheartened to hear this type of “humor” at all.

I also see this type of humor often:

Meme culture often reflects the sensibilities of a generation, and this type of humor de-legitimizes the realities of mental illnesses. I’m sure you have heard people saying that they are “so OCD” about something when they are really just particular about neatness. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is an incredibly serious and debilitating mental illness that inhibits the ability to live a normal life, not a desire to have shoes lined up nicely on against the wall. I worry that by normalizing mental illness too much, people will become numb to the true realities of those legitimately struggling with these maladies. These important identifiers of mental disorders have become ubiqutious that they are starting to lose their true meaning.

Concern #3: Deficits in Resiliency

Last year, a Tiktok went viral about a job applicant who asked about whether or not her employer would accommodate her “time blindness.” The applicant received backlash for this request both from the potential employer and many viewers of the video. I think she was right to advocate for her needs and to question the status quo of workplace cultures that might not be receptive enough to people with disabilities and mental illnesses, but the video did spark another concern of mine: the lack of resiliency I see among students who, on the vast spectrum of mental illness severity, I think are capable of coping with the difficulties of their disorder(s) while still being productive.

To be clear: there are some people with severe mental illnesses who cannot and should not worry about productivity; their focus should be trying to get healthy. Yet, there are some who are capable of overcoming their mental difficulties but are internalizing that they cannot do so. It’s a really tough balance to walk as a teacher. I spoke to another high school teacher, who I think put her feelings into words brilliantly:

“As a first-year teacher not wanting to overstep or under-step in students’ wellbeing, I found myself in the counselor’s wing of the building quite frequently. I acquired a range of information about students over the year and in a variety of formats. From crying 9th graders who had just gone through a breakup to ADHD seniors who needed a “quick break,” a large handful of students could not sit through an entire 90-minute class period without leaving the room.

In one conversation with a counselor, I asked more about the flash pass system at our school. Flash passes are given out to some students who require a short break from class. Students simply need to ‘flash’ their pass to the teacher and they are excused from the room — a way to formalize mental health accommodations. I inquired about where students are expected to go, how long they’re meant to be gone, and whether or not I was allowed to ask these questions of the students. The counselor I was speaking with sighed and began sharing with me her thoughts on how these flash passes allow students to give into their feelings at every moment, taking away the opportunity for them to practice resiliency. She said there is benefit to sitting through some discomfort, and if students are not practicing that now, where will they be in 10 years when they need to stay at work after a breakup or when they are otherwise not feeling well mentally?

I echo her concerns among the students with whom I work. On one hand, recognizing and accommodating their mental disorders so that they can receive an equitable education is key. Unfortunately, once these students leave the cushy confines of K-12 education, people are less understanding. There are hard deadlines, set meeting times, professional standards that everyone is expected to meet. The key is to teach students about tactics that will help them power through their mental difficulties, but I worry that as more and more people are diagnosed with mental illnesses, those markers become a debilitating marker of changeless identity rather than an obstacle that can be overcome with healthy strategies.

Conclusion

Those close to me know that I care deeply about mental health. I want people to keep talking about the mental struggles, and I want people to seek professional help if they think they need it. But I think society is due for a slight course correction. In an effort to legitimize mental illness, I think that those very real concerns have lost their original, clinical meanings. Without rethinking our approach to mental health and mental illnesses, I think that those who we are trying to help may end up worse in the end.