Contemporary epidemiology of mental health

1 De-shaming mental health

2 Prevalence inflation hypothesis

Dark placebos. Is too much mental health messaging leading to actual increased levels of mental illness? (Foulkes and Andrews 2023)

There are many anecdotes and vibes that suggest it is, but also much more general awareness and surveillance such that we expect higher rates of discovery of mental illness, so it is hard to disentangle these factors.

Also, there is pressure to medicalise having a bad time which means that more ways of being are tactically classified as disorders.

It is unclear to me how much any of these drivers is “bad”, except insofar as they introduce suffering or inequity.

3 Munchausen syndrome

At the extreme end of mental health contagion is the mental illness where you claim to have other (possibly mental) illnesses. Notes on manufacturing debilities, who does it.

Stuart Ritchie on Munchausen’s

[…]there is definitely a new genre of social media account which the owner uses to provide regular updates on what’s often a long list of medical conditions. They post photos of medical equipment such as feeding tubes, and seem to take a suspicious amount of pleasure in the trials and tribulations of having a long-term medical condition.

Just to be completely clear, I’m not arguing that disability advocates who discuss their conditions and raise awareness on social media are suffering from Munchausen’s. But clearly, in some cases, the internet can become a crucial crutch for a minority who have a tendency to exaggerate (or even fake) symptoms. Indeed, thinking of the often-perverse dynamics of who gets attention on social media, one could hardly imagine this not being the case.

• Helen Lewis, Krug, Carrillo, Dolezal: Social Munchausen Syndrome

What if people don’t just invent medical symptoms to get attention—what if they feign oppression, too?

• The dangerous side of Munchausen’s

This is intersting and it happens. Unherd will push a line about it being huge and prevalent. This does not seem to me to be likely, but I am open to being persuaded.

4 Social media

Do screens drive us crazy?

5 Incoming

Mostly: Pundits worrying about recreational mental illness:

• Anne-Sophie Bine, Social Media Is Redefining ‘Depression’ - The Atlantic
• Marcella Rick, Why are we romanticising mental illness?
• We need to stop making mental illness look cool on social media
• Why Americans Are Dying from Despair

6 References