Op-Ed: Do We Have Mental Health All Wrong?
Diagnoses can be vital. In the UK, in any given year, one in four people will experience a diagnosable mental health problem. Having a way to label ourselves can help us navigate a path to effective treatment – it’s no exaggeration to say that my OCD diagnosis saved my life. But years later, I find myself questioning the assumptions of our diagnosis culture and the way we pathologise mental suffering.
Recently I visited the neuroscience lab of Dr Claire Gillan at Trinity College Dublin, as part of a research trip with mental health charity, MQ.
Dr Gillan is conducting big data studies into a range of personality and behavioural traits, across diagnostic categories, to try and establish a more individualised approach to mental health care. Her findings seem to blur the lines between diagnoses, prompting compelling questions about the stories we tell ourselves about mental health.
‘OCD is not a biological reality – that’s what the data are increasingly showing,’ Dr Gillan said at the top of our conversation. ‘There are many commonalities when we average across people with OCD. But they are: one, never applicable on an individual basis; and two, not unique to OCD versus other disorders. Inside a single diagnostic category, you see massive variability not only in presentation but in aspects of brain structure and function.’
‘OCD is not a biological reality – that’s what the data are increasingly showing,’
Dr Claire Gillan, Trinity College Dublin
These findings do not chime which much lay mental health advocacy, which strives to equate mental illness with physical illness. I’ve advocated for that very thing myself, so I know it’s well-intentioned: the assumption that by depersonalising mental problems and calling them diseases, we alleviate judgement and de-stigmatise. But the more I scrutinise that idea, the more reductive it seems.
This isn’t to say there’s no link between biology and the mind. There is, of course. Neuroimaging studies on people with OCD, for example, broadly show increased activity in the basal ganglia, prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. ‘But abnormalities in these regions are by no means exclusive to OCD,’ Dr Gillan explained, ‘a great many disorders show the same kinds of brain changes.’ It would certainly make the mind easier to understand if it could be catagorised discretely the way, say, cancer cells can be, but the definitions simply aren’t that clear.
‘Take schizophrenia’, Dr Gillan said, ‘where two people can have the same diagnosis but none of the same symptoms. Or depression, where you need five out of nine symptoms on a list of criteria to be diagnosed, meaning there are a couple of hundred combinations of symptoms that a person can present with. It’s one of the quirks and flaws in the system we’re using to diagnose people.’
I was especially fascinated by Dr Gillan’s research into those who have no diagnosed mental health problems. What she found in an online study of 2000 ‘mentally healthy’ people, was that many display a variety of traits typically associated with DSM diagnoses, such as compulsivity, anxiety and social withdrawal; which seems to break down the binaries of ‘well’ and ‘ill’ into a continuum.
If you’re looking for professional mental health guidance for some clarity, read more to explore your options.
Written by Rose Bretécher, Author of Pure – now a Channel 4 drama series and Director at Intrusive Thoughts.
