Mental health|Mental health diagnoses are talked about as if they explain a person’s symptoms and problems.
About depression giving common people generally misleading information. Even many websites of reputable international operators do so, according to a Finnish study that appeared last week In Psychopathology.
In common parlance, the idea that a depression diagnosis explains what causes a person’s deep depression, loss of joy and decreased ability to function is repeated.
That is not the case in reality, write the authors of the study Jussi Valtonen and Jani Kajanoja.
According to them, the way of speaking reinforces the general misconception about the nature of psychiatric diagnoses and hinders people from coping with their problems, perhaps even finding social solutions.
Kajanoja is a doctor of medicine at the University of Turku and Valtonen is a professor at the University of the Arts. He has previously done his dissertation on neuropsychology.
Valtonen says that one incentive to do the research was the type of story frequently repeated in the media. It tells how, thanks to a psychiatric diagnosis, a person finally got an explanation for the difficulties in his life.
However, a psychiatric diagnosis usually does not explain anything. The mechanisms by which depression and other mental health disorders arise are unknown.
Most psychiatric diagnoses are descriptive names given to sets of symptoms.
Thus, depression explains human suffering as much as a headache explains pain in the head. There can be many reasons for both.
When the depression diagnosis is used as an explanation for the symptoms, we are guilty of circular reasoning, the researchers write in the article.
According to Valtonen, the researchers were surprised when the majority of the influential English-language expert websites reviewed systematically wrote about depression as the cause and explanation of symptoms.
Among them were the World Health Organization WHO, the American Psychiatric Association APA, the NHS responsible for health care in England, and Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities.
None of them presented a depression diagnosis as a pure description of symptoms.
Is it does this kind of confusion matter to a person who feels that he gets clarity in life from the diagnosis?
According to psychologist Valtonen, it is. If your mind is down and you are no longer interested in what used to bring joy, it would be useful to understand what it might be related to in your own life.
The diagnosis offered as an explanation does not encourage it.
“It’s important to learn to trace where your feelings come from. Otherwise, it is difficult to react to difficulties in an appropriate way.”
Kajanoja criticizes the way of presentation as harmful in the research announcement.
“Presenting depression as a single illness that causes depressive symptoms is a circular conclusion that obscures our understanding of the nature of mental health problems and makes it difficult for people to understand their suffering,” he says.
For depression a clear cause has been searched for, but none has been found.
In the 1980s, the serotonin hypothesis surfaced, according to which the cause of depression may be a chemical imbalance in the brain.
However, during all the years, the hypothesis has not received proper support from research results, says another year An umbrella review published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
A diagnosis interpreted as an explanation and belief in an external pathogen can also hinder recovery, as it reduces people’s faith in their own ability to change the situation, Valtonen and Kajanoja point out in their article.
According to research, it would seem more useful to see feelings of depression as a reaction to life’s circumstances. It is possible to influence them.
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