Enduring Mental Health: Prevalence and Prediction
Comments here are predictably (and depressingly) misstating this research as &quot;medicalizing normal emotions.&quot; This is due to two widespread misconceptions:<p>1) A refusal to distinguish between mental illness and permanent psychological disability (along with the idea that all mental illnesses are neurostructural in nature)<p>2) A refusal to acknowledge that &quot;biologically normal&quot; human emotions can nevertheless be a cause for medical concern, in the sense that a high fever is a &quot;normal&quot; and necessary response to infection that can nevertheless cause serious problems.<p>If someone is deeply depressed after their mother dies, they should be considered as having a mental injury that should heal on its own but needs to be monitored for &quot;infection&quot; or otherwise problematic healing. Saying ahead of time &quot;this person isn&#x27;t mentally ill so this is just normal bereavement&quot; is bad medicine and bad science.<p>US society in particular (but also humans in general) really wants to draw a distinction between &quot;the mentally ill&quot; and &quot;the mentally well.&quot; If you were to try to draw a similarly strong distinction between &quot;people with stomach problems&quot; and &quot;people without stomach problems&quot; the absurdity would be self-evident: there is no reason to lump people with norovirus in with people with IBD. But because mental illness is so much more mysterious (and, frankly, scary), and so entwined with social and societal expectations and norms, it is much harder to approach it from the same medical-first perspective.