I've been thinking about psychology lately, or rather the social effect of psychology on our society. Seems these days that just about everyone you talk to has anxiety or depression or autism or something, everyone has a diagnosis. Seems like half of the people on this forum have a form of autism or something else. I'm not questioning individual diagnoses. Your experiences and brains are your own affair. But I wonder what this is doing to us.

I'll level with you. I'm 28 years old. In my time, I've gone through some [censored]. Not gonna go into detail, but throughout my childhood I was in and out of therapy and on this drug and that. I was a timid, asocial, paranoid mess through most of my youth. I am not anymore. What happened? I grew up. I moved out when I was 18, I held a job, I made likeminded friends and kept those I had from school. I made mistakes, I fixed those mistakes. I came into my own in my early 20s, as you do. Throughout the time from when I was 18 to now, I have had exactly four therapy sessions that I did out of obligation to someone and had zero pharmaceutical aids. I still have difficulties from time to time. I occasionally have depressive episodes or anxieties. However, I'm firmly convinced that everyone gets these. Moods are (for the most part) normal. But I've found that the best way of dealing with it is pulling a Constanza and doing the opposite of what my brain is telling me to do.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm well aware that I'm not everyone, and anecdotal evidence is functionally useless. But I'm not running a scientific study here, I'm opening a discussion. Some people will need a hand. Some people don't just have a little bit of baggage to work through. Some people need therapy, some need drugs. However, have you thought of how absurdly frequent mental illness seems to be in this day and age? It often seems to me like people are so hung up on psychology that they let it define them, "I am an aspie" or "I am borderline". They go to therapy and dutifully take their pills and make absolutely no move to improve. It's like people aren't looking for a diagnosis, they're looking for an excuse. And the psychology and pharmaceutical industries are happy to oblige, since it means reliable income that's not going anywhere.

I'm not trying to invalidate someone's genuine suffering. Only you know what goes on in your head. But for many psych patients, why does there seem to be so much stasis, so little change? Personally, I couldn't imagine sitting there going "Okay, I have X illness. [censored]. Guess I'll live with it." I'd much rather do whatever I could to win. Rather than roll over, I'd personally much rather go down fighting. So, I suppose my point is this: Is the psychology business essentially just offering an enabler for people who could otherwise just get better on their own?

The reason there is little change for most people with genuine psychological conditions is the nature of their problems. You cannot just "get over" something like autism. You can work to deal with the symptoms and make your life better, but the basic problems will not go away. That is because many of these conditions are not like diseases that can be cured or wounds that can be healed; they are like congenital defects. You would not wonder why someone born with only one arm does not just grow a new one and get better. It would be just as ridiculous to say the same to someone who has autism.

Also, the main reason for the higher rate of diagnoses in recent years is that psychology has come lightyears in the last few decades. We now recognize that some people are not "just weird", that there is a physical problem that manifests their behavior. So there are not that many more instances, we just recognize them at a much higher rate.

For 19.5 years I have had no problems that I know of and have never been to therapy or diagnosed of anything.

I think that a lot of 'depression' in our western society is just some sad emotions, but as with standard diseases and stuff, it can be blown way out of proportion whether it is self diagnoses from the internet or some corrupt doctor taking bribes from the pharmaceutical companies.

If I'm not mistaken Autism is a pretty new diagnosis and even when doctors first knew about it people didn't have it very often. Now there are more people who have it. It is suspected that just as many kids/teenagers had the same thing back in the pre-1970s but those people were just the sort of weird or shy or the parents raised their kid wrong.

True, and I understand that. I'm not talking about incurable, untreatable cases. However, take certain forms of autism. Aspergers and HFA patients have a high rate of "beating" the illness, and becoming savvy enough to function in the world in such a way that they don't even fit the diagnostic criteria anymore. Many mental illnesses and developmental disorders are not incurable. They are descriptions of a current state of affairs, not a sentence. Even more major problems can be mitigated, if not functionally cured. Using your man born without an arm anology, sure I wouldn't wonder why he didn't grow a new one. I'd wonder why he didn't get a prosthetic.

Going to therapy and taking medication is, by definition, making a "move to improve."

Yes, but even in those cases, it takes time. Many years of therapy and medication. You are not going to see the progress unless you are watching over a long time scale.

I don't want to sound cynical - but I think there has been a negative shift in society that has lumped responsibility for a person's phsychological wellbeing onto the people around the person, and away from the person who is mentally-affected's own attitude and determination.

Obviously, people's depression usually comes fom the failbile philosophy of staking your own personal sense of worth or hapiness on the opinions of others. This is a natural development - in evolutionary terms, we want ideas to propagate and survival techniques to remain uniform across the species, so a behaviour of mimickry developed to facilitate this. However, in the modern day sense of social-interaction, this has placed unnecessary pressure on seeking the approval of others.

I have never been depressed. I have always loved life - though I personally suffered from the idea that I had to be liked by everyone I met, and this made me feel rather down in social-situations because I could never steer to conversation towards things I'm genuinely interested in, because I'm often with the wrong people. I genuinely think social-anxiety can be overcome simply by maturity, as you said, OP. Realising that nobody is particularly interested in your set of friends, or how nerdy you are, so long as you can hold a conversation and be genuinely pleasant and polite, you will find yourself, especially at University, not wanting for nights out/recreation time, and hapiness as well.

Perhaps, nowadays, people are encouraged to wear the feelings on their sleeves. The only real way to overcome these sorts of depressions is to develop a degree of self confidence, and always have a personal goal to keep yourself going. I think the fact that I have that has prevented me from slipping into self-pitying (which I feel is what a lot of depression amounts to).

As to autism- people attribute this to mere stubbornness and stoicness. Sometimes, when someone makes a joke about something which I know a lot, like Engineering, or History, I will tend to correct them, even if that was the butt of the joke. Friends have told me this is a display of autism, but I think by that definition, everyone is a little off-zero on the spectrum.

To be honest, what grinds my gears the most is when I see one of those people who are all like "I have asperger's and I'm proud of it". What the hell is there to be proud of?

I usually see that as a "i'm not ashamed" not a "hoorah for aspergers."

Not ashamed and publicly letting everyone know without anyone actually asking is very different. You won't come to a birthday party and introduce yourself with "Hi, I'm Steve, my IQ is 84 and I don't see red colours". I used asperger's as an example because I met a couple of people who used the condition as a license to be an ass.

So much this, it's not a nice feeling when you go through a stage of feeling like you would just like to be dead every half an hour for weeks at a time, and yes it wasn't from a worry about the opinion of others.

So this has always bothered me with clinically dianosed depression.

Has there become a rise in actual depression in the world and is it ctually a problem?

or Due to people ignorant of this knowledge there were depressed people but nothing was done.

Or can people just be really sad and psycologists just like putting large names on everything to make their field sound important and relevant?

I don't know if these were stated clearly, the question is whether these people need to be fixed and if so how is the correct response? discussion with the patient and trying to cope or should they be medicated.

I agree, you can't simply say that there is an obvious cause of depression. I have my personal favorite theory about what creates an environment where it can take hold, however, and I think that this plays into this discussion nicely.

Beginning with the oh-so-cliche "There are two types of people in this world", there are: People with an external or internal locus of control. People with an external locus of control do not feel 100% in control of their own lives, and consciously or not look to external causes for the events in their lives. Those with an internal locus of control are the opposite: Events in their life are within their control, and if something happens to them, they feel the need to take responsibility for the events in their life, and take responsibility for fixing problems themselves.

Now, typically, children have usually had an external locus of control and advlts have had an internal locus of control. The transition to advlthood could very well be called a transition in locus of control. However, something about our times, whether it's the absence of traditional rites of passage, the somewhat extended adolescent period, or simply the lack of certainty that we all live with prevents certain people's locus from shifting appropriately. Many people feel like they lack control over their own lives, and this creates an environment where depression and anxieties are allowed to proliferate. While simple scientific solutions explain those specific illnesses (Things such as a chemical imbalance or childhood trauma), they don't explain the proliferation of those illnesses in our generation. They certainly don't explain the proliferation of autism.

Now, here's the problem: Psychology works based primarily on the shifting of loci; The therapist acts as a guide for the patient, and utilizes the patient's external locus to do so, but over the course of the therapy, the therapist gradually turns this on its ear. The entire point of therapy is to teach a patient to exercise control over their own lives. Of course, in many cases this does not happen. The therapist sometimes retains control and extends the sessions, typically out of a desire to extract more dinero from the patient. Sometimes it is easier to throw pills at the patient, creating yet another dependency. Particularly in the latter case, the locus is not shifted, and in many cases the external locus is actually reinforced. This is inherently problematic, as it is in both the therapist's and psychiatrist's interest to retain the patient as a dependent rather than to guide them through this transition.

Therefore, psychology as it is practiced today may not be helping the problem, but compounding it.

im sorry to ask but where did you learn all this? did you just pick this all up one day or are you a psychologist?

No, I'm an unemployed anthropology student, lol. But that's just what I've been able to logic out over the years.