“There is no health without mental health,” the World Health Organization famously says. Fortunately, people are getting better at taking care of both their emotional and physical well-being, but there’s still a long way to go before we completely combat the rising numbers of mental disorders.
Instagram account The Happiness Project, run by a ‘bloke from Manchester,’ is set on helping the cause, one post at a time. It’s full of real and raw experiences from people struggling with mental health that help people not feel alone. To find them, all you have to do is scroll down.
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“The U.S. has reached peak therapy,” the Times reported in 2023. Reaching out to counseling when people need emotional support has become a topic that is widely discussed in books, movies, and podcasts.
Celebrities, professional athletes, and politicians nowadays are more open about sharing their mental health struggles, sprinkling their statements with words like boundaries, toxic people, and gaslighting. Everyone seems to be using the language of therapy, whether correctly or not.
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Such emotional well-being awareness is reflected in statistics too. About one in eight US adults takes antidepressants, and one in five has received some kind of mental health treatment. Since 2002, an additional 15 million people have turned to mental health care, and between 2019 and 2022, such services grew by 40%.
However, even with rising awareness and more people going to therapy, mental health seems to be getting worse by several metrics. Suicide rates have gone up by 30% since 2000, and almost a third of adults report having symptoms of depression or anxiety, about three times as many as in 2019.
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One in twenty-five adults suffers from a serious mental health illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Unfortunately, only 31% of adults in the US considered their mental health to be very good in 2022, down 43% from 2002.
Such figures can be explained by the fact that more people are comfortable seeking mental health care, which in turn increases the number of people getting diagnosed and treated for mental disorders.
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In fact, a poll in 2019 found that 87% of US adults believed that having mental health issues was nothing to be ashamed of.
On a less positive note, more people are struggling with significant societal disruptions like the pandemic and the Great Recession, which prevent them from getting the support they need. However, some experts attribute the population’s worsening mental health to insufficient modern psychiatry.
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Unlike physical health, mental health doesn’t have a clear-cut answer to healing. Often, a diagnosis can have an ambiguity to it or a gray area, which doesn’t make it certain. That's why research suggests that misdiagnosis as well as overdiagnosis are common in psychiatry.
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“If I’m giving you an antibiotic but you have a viral infection, it’s not going to do anything," said Dr. Robert Trestman, one of the chairs of the American Psychiatric Association.
Exactly how an antidepressant may not work well for someone with bipolar disorder, which can be mistaken for depression. This may explain why, even though so many people are prescribed this drug, they don’t always experience great results.
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Even certain styles of therapy aren’t always suitable for a person. Sometimes therapy in general doesn’t yield any benefits. Even though some might view counseling as an automatic fix, it doesn’t work for everyone. Those who improve need at least 20 sessions, which requires a lot of time and financial resources.
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To really make a difference and improve our population’s mental health, we should look beyond a therapist’s couch. Non-medical solutions like making housing and education more accessible, implementing job training, and increasing fresh food and green space availability can have profound effects on our health.
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California, for example, has already started expanding what healthcare is. However, such policies are moving slowly. In the meantime, experts urge the system to provide resources in the right places, like online counseling, and to focus on quality rather than quantity.
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