Depression Is No More Prevalent Today Than In The Past

In answer to Dr. Gibson’s question, “Why is there such a dramatic rise in anxiety and depression in the United States?” Dr. Frances replied:

#Anxiety/#Depression aren't really rising.
Just a labelling change due to:
1)Loose #DSM diagnostic system
2)Pharma selling ills to peddle pills
3)Docs push pills bec too little time to talk w patients- medicating normal distress
4)Patients expect there's a pill for every problem https://t.co/xTirna3pIu

— Allen Frances (@AllenFrancesMD) April 17, 2018

Allen Frances literally wrote the manual used to diagnose mental illness in this country. He’s top of his field and a force to be reckoned with:

Frances was the founding editor of two well-known journals: the Journal of Personality Disorders and the Journal of Psychiatric Practice.

Frances chaired the task force that produced the fourth revision of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) and became critical of the current version, DSM-5. He warned that the expanding boundary of psychiatry is causing a diagnostic inflation that is swallowing up normality and that the over-treatment of the “worried well” is distracting attention from the core mission of treating the more severely ill.

One of his recent books, “Saving Normal”, I covered here. He says that drugs prevent us from experiencing our “natural resiliency”.