Gemma Spake

Point one, not everybody has a diagnosis these days.

Yes, rates are increasing, but they are just catching up to an underlying prevalence rate that has always been there.

For conditions like depression and anxiety, those rates are incredibly high.

And that is a real concern.

And that is showing that there is something changing in our society and happening in our society.

And there have been things happening in our society that are deeply, deeply impacting people.

Everybody, really.

When it comes to other conditions, though, rates do seem to be increasing, but a large majority of this rate increase is coming down to people who previously, historically, should have been diagnosed, but they were not included by diagnostic criteria.

They didn't have the language, they weren't seen, or their case, or the way that they represented didn't match stereotypes.

Some people are mislabelling normal human idiosyncrasies

with catch-all inaccurate terms that's coming from social media and other sources.

But it is not our job to be concerned with how an individual chooses to see themselves.

And we should be more focused on ensuring that that person can get in and see a clinician, that person can get help than we should be at trying to correct whether whatever they are experiencing is true or false in our eyes.

We also need to be skeptical of a lot of systems around us right now that are trying to

make more people feel like something is wrong with them especially when they can make money from it especially when they seek to gain from the oversimplification of mental health language so make sure that you are looking out for that make sure that you are aware of the systems in place that may be manipulating certain parts of of distress or impairment happening in your life but again

It is a really complicated, complicated thing.

And until we have more money and until we have more research and until we have the care towards this and just towards humanity that we actually need, like we're going to continue to see this debate like be very intense and continue to see people perhaps suffering and struggling in ways that they don't really need to.

I'm going to finish it there.

We did it.

This is the biggest episode of the year so far.