Mental Health Support

For almost 12 years I've read all manner of stories which are basically chest-thumping vanities about how the poster is strong enough to get by without so much as an aspirin. These posts basically bully and mock as lesser human beings those who do take medicines.

I am pretty sure these people have never suffered from an arthritic joint.

Prescription meds are a popular target for the uninformed. They are sometimes expensive, their availability seems to depend on a sufficiently large target of suffering to support profitable exploitation, etc. etc. etc.

And we have a belief being pushed that all the mass-shootings in America are the work of SSRIs...even those mass shootings that took place before SSRIs were being marketed and mass shootings for which the public has no knowledge of the prescription history of the perp.

There seems to be no awareness that illness, including mental illness, is expressed along a spectrum from mild to very severe. It's ok to take cold medications to get comfortably back to work, but it's not ok to take a medication for grief so that a person can get comfortably back to their daily life.

And there seems to be no understanding how 'standards of practice' influence whether or not insurance companies will recognize and pay claims. Some people may suffer worse with grief than others, anti-depressants require prescriptions, without APA recognizing grief as a potential target, many people couldn't get insurance reimbursement to deal with grief that interferes with their daily lives.

2013 seems to hold great promise for more uninformed affective tempests in GD.

I expect at least a handful of storms in GD and the Feminist fora over premenstrual stress having been included as a mental illness. It's not hard to imagine a repeat of Feminists blogs and mainstream media running stories which will make many woman angry. Their 'lady parts' have been seen as the source of hysteria since the time of the ancient Greeks. The DSM's "pathologizing" is going to be controversial.

It's also likely that media advocates for women are going to much dislike the demise of histrionic personality disorder, which during it's existance was diagnosed 4x as often in women as in males--In the new DSM it will be placed inside of America's most hated personality disorder--narcissism. I don't expect that to go smoothly with the public.

Masturbation as a category of "hypersexual disorder" will likely get ripped by the public as well.