Creating panaceas for emotional and other mental health problems

I want to look at some of the wider implications of the BBC Panorama programme exposure of private ADHD clinics. I'm not convinced the NHS is necessarily coping any better than private services with the burgeoning demand for psychiatric diagnosis of emotional and other mental health problems, of which ADHD is just one of the diagnoses for which remedies are being sought. A uncritical biomedical approach to ADHD can be an excuse for licensed fraudulence (see previous post). 

Panorama is not the first media programme to highlight the exploitation of ADHD diagnosis (eg. see previous post). Adult ADHD is a relatively new diagnosis, as ADHD was originally a diagnosis made in children with symptoms of hyperactivity, impulsivity and inattention. Such behaviours may be displayed when children feel frustrated, anxious, bored, abandoned, or in some other way stressed. The increasing diagnosis of ADHD in children, over many years now, has been compounded by diagnosis in adults without a previous childhood diagnosis, considered to have been a major unrecognised condition (see eg. my article). Many psychiatrists see this as an example of the overmedicalisation of mental health problems (see another previous post), which at least partly explains why adult ADHD services have generally been hived off into a special service, mostly with massive waiting lists.

Not all negative emotions and experiences should be labelled as mental disorder. A moral panic about mental health may encourage the packaging of our everyday problems as conditions that can be diagnosed and treated. The reality is not always so simple (see eg. previous post). As this is mental health awareness week, it is perhaps worth highlighting how destigmatisation campaigns seem to have encouraged this oversimplification (see another previous post). Services themselves also ironically have encouraged the expansion of demand, apparently with the misguided notion that a perseverative call for more funding will provide the answer. The cultural process of seeking to create panaceas for emotional and other mental health problems doesn’t always work and may create more problems than it is worth.