lol. maybe they would have gone into neurology ;-)

the concept of mental disorder certainly seems to have changed some since the days when the mentally disordered were kept in custodial institutional care.

now prevalence of depression is mean to be... can't quite remember... somewhere round abouts a quarter of the population. one in 4 are meant to have had some experience of mental illness at some point in their lives.

so is it that prevalance of mental illness has gone up (and we were failing to identify people before) or is it that we are pathologising people who traditionally wouldn't have been regarded as pathological? the latter...

people used to go to church leaders and the like and then 'nerve disorders' became a fashionable / culturally accepted way of expressing distress and there was prescription to go visit a spa, and now there is prescription of SSRI's.

interesting...

and the drug companies get richer...

prevalance rates vary considerably with respect to how severe one needs to be to be diagnosed. inter-rater reliability is poor even under conditions when clinicians know inter-rater reliability is being assessed (how much poorer when it comes to dx for the old insurance forms???)

medicalisation of normality it is called. how did doctors get to be involved in treating the mentally ill and how successfully do they treat them compared with how well they could do simply left to their own devices or with a bit more social support? not very successfully (with respect to efficacy beyond a placebo effect) but shhh if people know this then the placebo effect will work no longer...

it is kinda disturbing actually.