Why are mental disorders on the rise?

Question

Has anyone noticed that over the past 100 years or so that mental disorders are on the rise drastically? Anxiety, Depression, Paranoia, schizophrenia, Bi-Polar, ect..... Why do you suppose?
Is it society, culture, ect...... What is your opinion?

Answer 1

some mental disorders are on the rise because some are genetic, and because evey year there is more people, means more illness.schizophrenia, bi polar, disorders, and some some clinical depression can run in whole families. other illnesses such as anxiety, depression, agoraphobia's, can be caused by the more difficult environment , and society that we are living in today. these illnesses were not talked about, and we did not have the knowledge or medications for these problems until the last 25 years or so. there is also a lot more awareness of mental illness, and it is not swept under the rug like it used to, giving the impression it is on the rise. also the drug companies are advertising their products on the television, which was unheard of a few years ago. this can be good for the people suffering but not good for the doctors that may over prescribe them ., but not deal with the issues . hope this helps

Answer 2

1. There are more people than there were 100 years ago.
2. Society has changed drastically.
3. For some it is easier to blame on a condition, rather than to man up and take the hit.

Answer 3

Some of it has to do with the fact that not we have names for the weird behaviors people have. Centuries ago people just said that the social deviants were deamon possessed or something. Others hear about all the potential illnesses out there are get paranoid that they have them too. Others fake symptoms for "happy pills," and some actually have problems that can be classified as mental disorders.

Answer 4

I work in this area, the answer is varied:
1) Greater stress to achieve
2) Greater drug use especially methamphetamine (ice)
3) Fewer close, meaningful friends and family disintegration
4) People are living longer leading to an increase in dementia type diseases

Answer 5

If you type your complete title into the search engine here, there are 18 other questions that come back beside yours. Not all are asking the exact same thing that you asked, but some are. I'm sure if you type in other variations of your question, there are more than these that already have been asked.

I didn't read all the answers to these similar questions, but the ones I did read are quite repetitive. Some say the rate of mental illness hasn't risen. It's just better diagnosis, due to some combination of more people coming forward now and more health professionals being wise to mental illness, such as being able to diagnose depression in someone with just physical complaints, someone who doctors might have just kept working on physically in the past. Similar to that would be people having a lifestyle now that allows mental illness to be noticed, instead of an individual in the past being completely absorbed by merely surviving everyday, maybe self-medicating with alcohol or something else.

Then other people say the rise in mental illness is real and give their reasons why that is, from evils in our society that everyone agrees are evil to more eccentric answers, such as the way that Violet Pearl always portrays mental symptoms as being due to diet.

Who's right? Why should it be just one reason that's correct? How can anyone know what they're talking about on this subject?

A few years ago I heard a talk by Lew Judd, chairman of psychiatry at UCSan Diego. It was after this article was published:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T2X-4728C26-2&_user=10&_coverDate=01%2F31%2F2003&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=6bb3ef732e23516b5ed8e8b6ea0403ff

His talk was about the findings of this article, that if you go to hypomanic symptoms that are less than the formal criteria for bipolar disorder, you get a number for lifetime prevalence of bipolar disorder in the US of at least 5%, but it was also about rising levels of depression in general. This particular article was about shifting from unipolar to bipolar some of the at least 20% of the population that becomes clinically depressed at some point in a lifetime, but there are other articles about how depression in general is on the rise, too. If you pick a single point in time, surveys show a higher rate of depression in each younger age cohort you look at. It's not that younger people are seeing different clinicians in these surveys than the older patients. Professional estimates of lifetime prevalence of depression for young people based on depression they've already had easily foresee that reaching 40%. It's hard to say that's all better diagnosis.

Dr. Judd didn't have an exact answer to this question, even though so many answerers here and for those other similar questions only see one possibility. He was sure that some increase in the rate of depression is real, but cautioned people not to ignore the factors that would lead to better reporting by patients and diagnosis by health professionals. Still he thought we are seeing some effect of how hard our modern society can be on people.

Is it getting worse because we let all these wimps live, including me? Well, if there were a great evolutionary advantage in our being emotionless automatons, then we already would be emotionless automatons, instead of the sensitive creatures that many of us are.

Many things about mental illness will improve in this century. Learning so many details about the only 20,000 genes we have will teach us many things about brain development, personality, and mental illness. That will fuel the neuroscience revolution even more than it has been. I'm sure there will be many more objective measures of things in the future than there are now.

Until then people will do the best they can. Because of human nature that includes all sorts of oversimplifications, overgeneralizations, black and white thinking and other cognitive distortions. I know even more about those from being a patient receivng CBT than from my career in science, but it does all fit together. One can get better from being human. People are going to argue about what direction is best for that for some time yet. We all get to decide who knows anything of which they speak.

Answer 6

I think it's a combination of things--that there are more people, that conditions are being diagnosed better and earlier, that the food we eat and environment in which we live all contribute to an increase in mental illnesses.

Answer 7

Chronic infections cause many mental disorders. People are not receiving proper treatment for infections due to rationing antimicrobials by doctors. The earth is trying to heal itself and rid itself of the over populace human plague. These are my perceptions anyway.

Answer 8

Simple..It's the food people eat. Overload of sugar, corn syrup, chemicals, trans-fats, junk foods, preservative, mass quantities of caffeine.
Even fruits/vegetables don't have the nutrients they once did due to over-farming, soil depletion, and not allowing produce to ripen on the vine. Livestock are fed grains instead of grasses, so the amino acids are lower than normal, which means chemical imbalances in our brains.
And to top if off, people seldom exercise, diet with fads, take pills, etc. The top killers are preventable with proper diet (diabetes, heart disease)

Answer 9

It isn't that they are on the rise, it's that they are being diagnosed better.