Comment by riazrizvi
Comment by riazrizvi 3 hours ago
My first-hand experience of the healthcare system in the USA leads me to conclude we don’t have good data on pathological anxiety levels. Psychiatry is over-incentivized to positively diagnose.
You can get diagnosed with ‘anxiety’ when you’ve been in a hard circumstance for a while, since it’s simply a self-reporting questionnaire on levels of concern. That’s not a way to determine pathology - how do they tell when it’s appropriate behavior, eg when you’re actually in a dangerous situation.
This economy, since the financial crisis, has had weak employment (when you factor in not-in-workforce trends over the last 50 years), being under-employed for a long time is a threat to life. You can be in a location or situation where you’re blind to a loss of economic opportunity because there is so much misinformation. Anxiety is not maladaptive then.
This happened to me, and when my situation finally began to improve after a change in direction, my anxiety went down. Before I made that change, I found anti-anxiety meds put me in a dysfunctional ‘happy’ state, that made it harder to course correct or care about my reality. So I quickly stopped taking them last year, shortly after receiving them. And yet a diagnosis was made then, and looking at my medical report, this so called disease remains on my medical record. Ridiculous. All that self-reporting showed was normal human behavior.
Luckily, at the worst time, I also hedged by seeing separately a psychologist who helped me understand through a series of interviews that all my behavior was appropriate to my situation.
I went to a psychiatrist to be evaluated for ADHD. He diagnosed me with anxiety, saying that being anxious made it hard for me to focus.
Uh.
I went to another doc who diagnosed me with and started treating me for ADHD. Boom. Anxiety gone. Turns out I was just super anxious about having a hard time working on the un-shiny things I needed to be working on.