Gemma Spake

Absolutely not.

This doesn't mean that medication is bad or that clinicians are acting in bad faith.

No, it just means that diagnostic systems don't exist in a vacuum and

They exist as part of all these wider factors to do with politics, to do with economics, to do with clinical understanding.

And some of those factors come with incentives.

And we need to be aware of that so that we're not acting blindly.

Some skepticism is healthy.

not towards the individuals who are trying to find an explanation and trying to better themselves, but towards any system that might profit from telling more and more people that their distress is best understood as an internal problem that has a label that can be serviced through a product, a service or a subscription that only they can sell you.

So this brings me to my final point of the day.

With all of this in mind, is it better to over-diagnose or under-diagnose?

This is a huge question to end on, but I want to break it down.

Underdiagnosing is what we had in the past.

And honestly, I think there are large parts of it that are quite tragic.

It leaves people unseen, unsupported and blamed for struggles others do not understand.

It means people can spend years of their life thinking that they are lazy, thinking that they are difficult and

dramatic, weak, broken, when in reality, they're just dealing with something that has simply never been recognized and that they were never able to have the language to understand.

And that really has consequences.

Of course, I don't need to say that, but it impacts our self-esteem, our relationships, our finances, the quality of life that we have.

We do not want to go back that way.

We do not want to go back to the underdiagnosis path and make it even harder for people to get help.