the nuance
Is Modern Psychiatry Turning Us All Into Patients?
A discussion of trauma, resilience, and mental illness with psychologist Nick Haslam.
One out of four American adults now has a diagnosable mental health disorder. About the same proportion — roughly 27% of adults — is currently taking a prescription psychiatric drug.
These figures are at all-time highs. Nevertheless, most analyses find that mental disorders are likely under-diagnosed and under-treated. Based on current conceptions of what it means to be mentally ill, that is surely true. But that truth is dependent on how you answer two questions:
What is a mental disorder and who has one?
These two questions are fundamental to psychiatry, which is the branch of medicine that diagnoses and treats mental illness. And yet the answers to these bedrock questions are far from straightforward. In fact, they’re changing all the time.
I didn’t quite grasp the slipperiness of these concepts until I discovered the work of Nick Haslam.
Haslam earned both his master’s and PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s now a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
