Comment by yareal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yareal | Hacker News Reader

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I appreciate this. Suggesting that mental health is "just" a chemical imbalance is maybe addressing a very complicated system with a narrow fix.

That said, I'm likely biased to be predisposed to believe that mental health is a complex system based on other beliefs I hold or experiences I have (e.g. having suffered depression myself, having experienced homelessness, believing in the theory of alienation.)

But also, I don't know what you do to address systems that doesn't require radical or even revolutionary change. We're a far cry from even applying the mental health practices we do have to everyone who wants them today. To say nothing of the massive social stigmas associated with therapy, depression, and medications.

I concur.

Perhaps "mental health" is such a broad diagnosis that talking about remedies for "mental health" may be unhelpful. The remedies for a paranoid schizophrenic may be very different to depression which may be very different to say ADHD.

Treating as a disease with a chemical cure does in part remove some of the stigma. But it's really only helpful if it addresses the root cause of the problem.

Much of the root of "modern" mental health is "feeling good" as in "I had to step back to protect my mental health" and that's more a social, and view-of-self issue that's best addressed with therapy.

So perhaps the categorization of "mental health" is as varied as "physical health" and we can accept that no one solution is going to fix everything.

ADHD isn't even a good diagnosis. We throw these words as if we know what the disease even is and all we need is to figure out the cure, when these diseases have dozens of variations "my ADHD is more like this", the definitions of the disease and classification change all the time. ADHD when I was a kid is very different from ADHD today.

So to me the article shouldn't even be "we need to take a wider approach to the cures", it should be "we don't know jack shit about mental health and need way more research".

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