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Diagnosis Inflation

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Submitted By aarroyo
Words 594
Pages 3
Angelina Arroyo
Mod 5 Essay
April 11th, 2016
English

Diagnosis Inflation:
The age of the Cry Babies

At one point or another in our lives we have over heard someone say something like “I’m like so OCD”. At some point in the past several decades the harmless play on phrases related to mental illness has definitely increased, but how much of it is actually harmless. We live in a day and age where not everyone diagnosed is actually biologically mentally ill. Allen J Francis is a world renowned MD in a psychiatric unit based out of the Columbia Presbyterian medical center and new York psychiatric institute. He is also the author of “The New Crisis of Confidence in Psychiatric Diagnosis; a paper written in 2013. The paper reports that there has been an uprising in diagnoses of anxiety disorder, mood disorder, childhood bipolar, autism, and ADD. The question to ponder is how of these numbers were deemed correctly and how many are the crybabies of America. Who is sick and who is not? There are multiple theories as to why the inflation has occurred. The first is the awareness levels. Due to the fact that mental illness is more prevalent now, more people are able to recognize what’s going on. Though this is a great step forward, it is a weak theory and can only be accounted for a small percentage. The next theory is that the age we live in is stressful. I think this is the weakest of theories because we have life much easier than those who used to freeze to death while they were hunting. We have everything at our fingertips. Human nature is not something that evolves quickly. Labels on the other hand change quicker than they have before. Diagnostic inflation is not uncommon. In fact it happens just like economic inflation. There isn’t much you can do to keep it under control and it has a million different causes. Severe psychiatric disorders are easy to define.

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