“Today’s young people are medicalized natives, they talk about their discomfort in medical language,” said the Mental Health Commissioner of Spain. Words like “stress”, “depression”, “anxiety” or “phobia” are increasingly common, although they are not always used to designate a mental disorder.
In fact, today practically no one admits to be sad, but many claim to be depressed. This trend could reflect greater awareness and openness around mental health, a positive phenomenon that would lead to greater seeking of help and treatment. However, it also raises another question: What if we are pathologizing normal emotional problems? What if we are sinking into a medicalization of mental health?
In that case, the popularization and misinterpretation of mental disorders could lead to overdiagnosis and unnecessary prescriptions, in addition to trivializing a very serious problem: mental conditions.
Have we forgotten that part of the human condition is recognizing our vulnerability?
It is likely that never before in the history of humanity have we enjoyed the current level of well-being – at least a part of the population. However, this has not eradicated suffering, rather it seems to have increased it, especially in new generations.
In recent years, the consumption of antidepressants and psychotropics has skyrocketed. Recently, Unicef also raised the alarm indicating that 1 in 7 adolescents has a diagnosed mental disorder. The number of young people who claim to have suffered from mental problems frequently has increased from 6.2% in 2017 to 15.9% in 2021.
There is no doubt that the new generations do not feel well. However, perhaps that “We are having a bad time” is being expressed in medicalized terms. Contemporary life poses innumerable conflicts and challenges, but the same could be said of human beings throughout their history. Part of the human condition has always been to recognize that we are vulnerable and dependent beings.
So why does tension turn into anxiety and sadness turn into depression?
The pathologization of the emotional universe
Stress has not always been accepted as a legitimate health condition. In the mid-1930s, it was Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye who conceived the biological disease model of stress, uniting fields such as neurology, psychiatry, and evolutionary biology.
Then, at the end of World War II, research carried out in the field of military neuropsychiatry on combat fatigue promoted the cultural acceptance of a more dynamic and universal concept of mental illness that normalized the phenomenon of mental stress. This cultural shift encouraged the medicalization of anxiety, which in turn spurred the growth of the anxiolytic market in the 1950s and helped link mental and physiological health.
Does that mean it doesn’t exist? Absolutely not.
However, perhaps popular language is becoming excessively medicalized.
The words we use to identify what happens to us are important because they can end up shaping our world. Not knowing the differences between sadness and depression can cause us to confuse these states, turning something that is completely normal into pathology.
By breaking the taboo that revolved around mental health and being able to talk about it openly, medical jargon has also crept into the discourse of new generations, but it is often used to legitimize suffering.
This is confirmed by the fact that, if we need to take a break from work because we are mentally exhausted, we can only receive sick leave from the family doctor, whether for an illness of physical or psychological origin.
As a result, “We have translated global suffering into a health language,” as psychiatrist Belén González pointed out. In the burnout society, our daily problems become disorders.
The “adverse effects” of the medicalization of mental health
The new generations could also be resorting excessively to healthcare, because they cannot find another place to express their problems. Previously, this discomfort was channeled through the community, the group of friends, families or even work spaces, but the advance of an individualistic philosophy that focuses on productivity and profitability has relegated the close relationship with the other to the background.
In a world of liquid relationships, when we need comfort, emotional validation, accompaniment or understanding, we cannot find it in conventional support networks, so we turn to the doctor, who will limit himself to diagnosing a condition.
The problem is that, upon receiving a diagnostic label, such as depression or anxiety, many people begin to consider that they have a problem within themselves, so they stop asking themselves what makes them feel bad.
Since they already have an answer, they stop asking themselves what’s wrong with them. This is the main problem caused by rapid diagnoses carried out by untrained personnel. In fact, a very interesting study conducted at Marshall University revealed that the increase in biological explanations for more common mental disorders and their medicalization in culture, which has occurred in recent decades, has diminished non-pharmacological therapies.
The prescription of psychotropic medications increased 20% between 1985 and 1994 in the United States, and the use of stimulants tripled. In contrast, the number of psychiatric patients receiving psychotherapy decreased by 28.9% from 1996 to 2005.
As a result, we can find generations that increasingly use medicalized language to label what is nothing more than normal suffering or discomfort due to certain situations or living conditions. And a society that prefers psychotropic drugs to therapy.
The suffering that reflects a generation
Obviously, mental health is a complex issue, so there are no simple answers or universal solutions. The way young people express their discomfort is a reflection of the society in which they live, as well as the pressures they suffer and the unique challenges they must face in today’s world.
When a person feels bad, it is important that they ask for help. But we must remember that the excessive medicalization of emotional problems can have consequences as negative as the lack of attention to genuine mental health disorders.
The structural problems of the economy and relational failures at the social level cannot be resolved by resorting solely to personal means. We cannot look for “Individual, biographical solutions to what are actually structural and systemic problems,” as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman warned.
Psychological studies have linked experiences of insecurity and hopelessness, as well as rapid social changes and increased violence, to poor mental health. However, social problems are not solved by medicalizing a generation, but rather by giving them the tools so that they can face their challenges in a balanced and thoughtful way. It is crucial to recover emotional granularity to adequately identify each of the internal states.
Is there a need for more psychologists and psychiatrists? Definitely. Are they the solution? No. And neither should them be. We must understand the cause of this suffering to take measures at a macro level to solve these issues, not limit ourselves to prescribing drugs or doing psychotherapy to better tolerate life situations that are actually intolerable and that have to be changed.
References:
Casas, M. (2023) The medicalization of life: An interdisciplinary approach. Heliyon; 9(6): e16637
(2023) La comisionada de Salud Mental: “Los jóvenes de hoy son nativos medicalizados, hablan de su malestar en lenguaje médico”. In: El País.
(2022) Salud mental e infancia en el escenario de la covid-19. In: Unicef.
(2021) 1 de cada 7 adolescentes tiene un problema de salud mental diagnosticado. In: Unicef.
Burrows, V. L . (2020) The Medicalization of Stress. Tesis doctoral: Universidad de Nueva York.
Wyatt, W. J. (2009) Behavior Analysis in the Era of Medicalization: The State of the Science and Recommendations for Practitioners. Behav Anal Pract; 2(2): 49–57.
Patel, V. & Kleinman, A. (2003) Poverty and common mental disorders in developing countries. Bull World Health Organ; 81(8): 609–615.
