Is “overdiagnosis” the new culture-war buzzword of choice? I had been wondering this for a while, and then Wes Streeting claimed on Sunday that there is an “overdiagnosis” of some mental health conditions. Now I am certain it is.
I first noticed the term being used in relation to anxiety and depression, then attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and most recently autism. Two books on overdiagnosis, Suzanne O’Sullivan’s The Age of Diagnosis and Searching for Normal by Sami Timimi, have garnered attention across the media, adding fuel to a new fire that we might characterise as “Bloody everyone has a label these days, don’t they?”.
