Is the medical model still helping?

In the UK, mental ill healthis recognized as the single largest cause of disability, contributing almost 23 per cent of the disease burden and costing over £100 billion ($157 billion) a year in services, lost productivity, and reduced quality of life. Every year in the EU, about 27 per cent of adults are affected by mental disorder of some kind. In the US, almost one in two people will meet the criteria for a mental disorder in the course of their lifetime. Data from the US National Health Interview Survey indicate that, in 2012, 13.5% of boys aged 3-17 had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), up from just 8.3% in 1997.

There is no denying that a lot of people are suffering. But are they all really suffering from a mental disorder, that is, a medical illness, a biological disorder of the brain? And if not, are doctors, diagnoses, and drugs necessarily the best response to their problems?

Since 1952, the number of diagnosable mental disorders has burgeoned from 106 to over 300, and now includes such constructs as ‘gambling disorder’, ‘minor neurocognitive disorder’, ‘disruptive mood dysregulation disorder’, ‘premenstrual dysphoric disorder’, and ‘binge-eating disorder’.

According to a recent report, antidepressant prescriptions in England rose from 15 million items in 1998 to 40 million in 2012, this despite the mounting evidence for their ineffectiveness. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in particular have become something of a panacea, used not only to treat depression, but also to treat anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and bulimia nervosa, and even some physical disorders such as premature ejaculation in young men and hot flushes in menopausal women. In the UK, the SSRI fluoxetine is so commonly prescribed that trace quantities have been detected in the water supply.

But despite all this apparent progress in diagnosis and treatment, people who meet the diagnostic criteria for such a paradigmatic mental disorder as schizophrenia tend to fare better in resource-poor countries, where human distress can take on very different forms and interpretations to those outlined in our scientifical classifications.

Psychiatry is in a crisis precipitated by its own success, and, assuming that it once did, the medical or biological model is no longer helping. The specialty of the heart is cardiology, the specialty of the digestive tract is gastroenterology, and the specialty of the brain is neurology and psychiatry. But neurology is not psychiatry, which literally means ‘healing of the soul’.

Some mental disorders undeniably have a strong biological basis, but even these have many more aspects and dimensions than ‘mere’ physical disorders.

It is high time to fundamentally rethink our approach to mental disorders and mental ‘dis-ease’.

The Second Edition of The Meaning of Madness, due out in September, is available for pre-order.