Why a Mental Health Wellness Portal?

The name of this site may appear redundant. Why “mental health” and “wellness”. Both are here for very important reasons. Most of what one hears these days about issues of emotional distress is promoted by a mental illness orientation. The Mental Illness industry does not tend to promote wellness, but focuses on approaches that are almost only concerned about symptom reduction. To understand this further we need to look at how the psychiatry field has developed over the past thirty years.

Many people have heard of the DSM: the psychiatry bible. This manual, now in its fifth edition, is the basis for psychiatric diagnoses. It was developed in an attempt to provide a consistency in diagnosis and to allow research to be carried more easily. To do this, it moved away from an etiological approach, that most of medicine uses and that looks for underlying causes, to a simplistic symptom cluster approach. The crucial point here is that the disorders listed in the DSM are NOT DISEASES, but are an ever changing and growing list of descriptions of symptom clusters, that are decided on by a committee, and that were only ever meant to be used as a rough guideline to treatment. The problem is these diagnoses are being sold and used as if they do represent diseases with presumed biological causes. Most people these days have heard of the term “chemical imbalance”. The truth is that there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance in psychiatry. Almost all emotional wellness issues are related to a complex interaction between many factors, mostly life issues, emotional experience and environment, and possibly, in some cases, genetic traits. The same symptoms may have numerous underlying emotional causes, and therefore may require very different approaches to move towards emotional wellness.

Almost all psychiatric and psychotherapy research are done on simplified approaches aimed at reducing specific symptoms. This is done, as in order to do research, one needs to investigate a limited number of issues at a time, and one needs to standardize the modality being tested. The reality of the modalities tested in psychiatric research is that they tend to show that most approaches to treatment work, but that they all work badly. This has not stopped the psychiatric industry for adopting and promoting these approaches, even though there is substantial evidence that often these approaches lead to chronic symptoms and frequent relapse. The American Psychology Association has recognized the need for naturalistic studies that could indicate what treatments actually work well in the real world.

Expert clinicians do not tend to use research modalities in simplistic ways with real life, functioning people, as they don’t work nearly well enough. In psychiatry departments they are used, as people have come to accept mediocre results and chronic illness as being the norm. These approaches and results should in no way be acceptable for anybody, and certainly not for university students.

Most web based information and screening tools collude with the simplistic diagnosis based, superficial symptom reduction model. Most screening tools just givev a correlation to a DSM diagnoses that have questionable validity to begin with. Screening tools can lead to misdiagnosis and mistreatment. A likely outcome of a student using a screening test is for the student to en up at a medical clinic being handed a prescription without a proper assessment.

This site uses a non-diagnosis based mental health quiz that is structured to possibly help a student understand their emotional issues. It does not pretend to provide an accurate diagnosis, because if you are distressed, you do not primarily require a diagnosis. You need someone professional to talk to. Bottom line, if you are questioning your emotional wellness, go speak to someone! Don't waste your time trying to self-diagnose. For relevant information on appropriate treatment information, go to www.studentmentalhealth.ca.