I realise now that my view on mental health overdiagnosis was divisive. We all need better evidence |
Earlier this year, I appeared on the BBC and was asked a question by Laura Kuenssberg that I hadn’t anticipated: did I believe there’s a problem with mental health overdiagnosis?
I gave a simple answer, that yes, I did think there was overdiagnosis, that too many people were being written off, and too many people weren’t getting the support they needed.
I was then deluged with messages and emails of both enthusiastic agreement and visceral disagreement – including from mental health clinicians on both sides of the argument. One angry patient messaged to say: “Far from overdiagnosis, I can’t even get an appointment to get a diagnosis.” The worst thing was that I agreed with them, but I had failed to capture the complexity of this problem.
The truth is there has been a massive growth in mental health and behavioural issues and there isn’t a consensus within the mental health clinical community on what is driving it. There was an almost 50% increase in mental health problems among adults between 1993 and 2023. Mental health referrals for children and young people increased by about 50% in just two years during the pandemic. And