“I’m so depressed.”
    “My anxiety is so bad right now.”
    “I am literally so ADD, oh my gosh.”
    “Sorry I’m like, bipolar today.”

    As a society, we casually label ourselves with mental disorders to describe our moods.  Sad equals depression, nervous equates to anxiety, unfocused might as well be attention deficit disorder (ADD) and moody is essentially bipolar disorder.  We know the difference, but self diagnosing is human nature.  Being the melodramatic species that we are, we feel the need to exaggerate nearly every situation possible.  This appears harmless, until our hyperbolized moods become grounds for actual mental illnesses.  The harm lies in turning healthy people into patients. 

    In May 2013, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) came out with its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM), largely expanding its list of criteria that constitute a mental illness.  The new edition of the DSM has been criticized as lacking support and reliability, containing contradictory or poorly written information and being heavily influenced by the market of the psychiatric drug industry. 

    Admittedly, the goal of all industries is to make more money and the drug industry is no exception.  It’s a chain reaction:  The expansion of symptoms constituting a mental illness leads to more diagnoses, which leads to more prescribed drugs, which in turn leads to a greater income for the field of psychiatric drugs.  Allowing the drug industry to dictate mental illnesses results in an unhealthy amount of overdiagnosis. 

    Opponents to the fifth edition of the DSM were regarded as over concerned, yet the APA didn’t bother to worry about the logic behind their concerns. 

    The correlation between the expanding DSM and the increased number of diagnosed illnesses is proven to be no coincidence by researchers who study the patterns of mental diagnoses over the years. Dr. Bernard Carroll, a former psychiatry department chairman at Duke University, noted that bipolar disorder has jumped 40-fold in the last two decades. 

    While we become more and more caught up in the world of prescription drugs, we seem to have lost our standing on the effects of these medications, especially on children.  According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), as many as 10 percent of children under the age of 17 have been diagnosed with ADD, not to mention the 7.3 million ambulatory care visits per year that result in ADD as the primary diagnosis. 

Medication for attention deficit disorder has been prescribed to children as young as three years old. 
    When did we start failing to see the risks in medicating toddlers for a disease they haven’t even had the chance to outgrow?  When did learning differently, or not functioning well in a classroom environment, or losing focus, become grounds for diagnosis and medication?  When did we decide that it was okay to medicate kids for acting like kids?

    The belief that mental illnesses are over diagnosed in no way negates their existence.  Disorders such as depression and anxiety are clearly prevalent, yet their abundance is concerning and justifiably questionable. 
    Mind Body Green’s online site provides a list of ten natural ways to beat mental illnesses.  That’s ten ways to avoid medication in a completely wholesome, natural and organic way and still fix whatever disorder is dragging you down. 

    The only natural instinct we should fight is the one to over diagnose.