Don and Tricia Edgar on mental health

Prompt: Dear Gemini, how has your day been? Please illustrate Tricia and Don's article. The image should be cute and somehow 'on-topic' but still incomprehensible if you think about it.

Tricia Edgar sent me the piece below, which she and her husband Don had worked hard on. It had been knocked back by the deftly named Pearls and Irritations and asked what I thought. I said not only that I thought they should have published it, but also said I would. Normally I'd publish an edited version of it and point you to the whole thing if you needed more. But, in the words of Groucho, in this case, I'll make an exception.

Don Edgar & Patricia Edgar: The commodification of mental health and the creation of a dysfunctional society.

Mental health has become a fashionable disorder. The epidemic is accepted as genuine by governments wishing to placate vocal mental illness advocates, pharmaceutical company lobbyists, and a very confused public who have been persuaded they may be mentally ill or will become so.

Media journalists, ignorant of evidence-based research, seize upon the latest alarming set of numbers, or medical 'cure' to grab a headline and pharmaceutical companies employ social media to manipulate young people, as drug sales skyrocket. Enough medical specialists are complicit, for there's much money to be made from mental health. Particularly by labelling normal developmental and socially generated behaviours as mental health disorders.

Citizens on Human Rights Victoria are letterboxing Melbournians warning of Psychiatric abuse, and the harm that can be done through mental health treatments.

The American Psychological diagnostic manual lists 374 disorders for depression with criteria so vague as to potentially include all of us. From bedwetting, to being elderly; from juvenile delinquency to simply feeling low can get a diagnosis of depression. About 3.9 million Australians (roughly 1 in 7 people) take antidepressants.

The initial surge in antidepressant prescribing began in the late 1980s. Prescribing rates tripled between 1990 and 1998 and nearly doubled again between 2000 and 2011. The pandemic triggered another major spike in prescriptions, particularly among young adults and adolescents with the average user on antidepressants for about 4 years. While adults make up the bulk of prescriptions, the relative increase in long-term use has been highest among young people (aged 10-24).

As many as seven million Australians are taking mind-altering drugs for emotional distress and behavioural challenges (including anxiety, depression, ADHD and OCD). That is more than one in four. And those numbers, among the highest in the world, are growing.

There are well researched publications challenging these wide definitions of mental illness and arguing their treatment may be doing more harm than good. Psychiatrist Dr Paul Denborough, Head of The Not Broken Project at Alfred Health has called for an urgent review of the data supporting prescription drugs to 'fix the brain', claiming there is zero evidence for the efficacy of the medication first approach. Rather, the root causes - the social, developmental and environmental roots of mental distress need to be addressed.

The champion for increased government funding for mental illness, Patrick McGorry, founder of the National Youth Health Foundation, which has over-seen 700,000 young Australians through its100 Headspace Centres, has questioned how ADHD has become a 'fashion statement'.

In the late 20 ^th Century psychology eclipsed sociology and turned us inward to our personal moods and thoughts, away from the shared economic and social circumstances that produced them. The fallout that has followed is the epidemic of mental illness.

It is estimated that up to 1.2 million Australians live with ADHD. While historically viewed as a childhood disorder, adult prescription rates have risen by more than 450%. Adult women make up the majority (about 52%) of treated adults.

Diagnoses of autism are also spiralling. Until 1980 autism and ADHD were treated as separate disorders; after that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 111) the bible of psychiatry ruled they could both be found in the same person.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) recorded 290,900 autistic individuals in 2022, with peak advocacy bodies like Autism Spectrum Australia (Aspect) estimating prevalence could be as high as 1 in 40 (over 600,000 people).

Autism rates surged dramatically from 2013; the count now at 290,900. The prevalence among 5- to 14-year-olds climbed to 4.3% in 2022. Experts explain there is significantly higher awareness of neurodiversity in the general population today and the staged rollout of the NDIS from 2013 to 2020 provided a centralized way and an incentive for people to access government funding for life-long disability supports and therapies.

Behind statistics, of course, are real people, with their hopes and fears, worries and pleasures, challenges and triumphs. None of this is to deny the reality of truly disabling psychoses; depression can lead to suicide, escapes through gambling, acute alcoholism, domestic and social violence and drugs. Severe mental illness is as damaging as much physical illness, costly to the individual and society at large. It should not, however, be a socially produced plague benefiting large corporations and seducing governments into spending public funds on ineffective treatments.

The worried public, isolated young people, parents desperate for help with low achieving or recalcitrant children, workers who can't cope with a discriminating and changing workplace are all susceptible to medical disorder propaganda; they seek an answer and embrace a label of 'depression', 'autism' - on the spectrum- or 'ADHD' which might explain their or their child's dysfunction and excuse them from blame.

To add to the confusion about mental illness social media has led to people, including a very large number of young people, self-diagnosing with no professional assessment. Through self-diagnosis any quirk can be defined as a mental disorder.

Freya India in her book, GIRLS: Gen Z and the commodification of everything (2026), gives a chilling documented account of the insecurities young girls are feeling about how they see themselves and their bodies. Obsessed with every flaw they find, spending hours to look like perfect avatars, punishing themselves for not looking perfect, they turn to cosmetic surgery; eating disorders are prevalent.

India writes, "Mental health has become a market, with influencers, therapy apps, medication apps and medication companies all profiting from our pain. And like the beauty industry, this is a market worth billions".

Girls "share their suffering" on Tumblr blogs or Reddit forums, showing their dirty underwear and plates of half-eaten food. Mental health influencers ask "Are you hurting?... then you have trauma". Anxiety symptoms include excessive yawning, and digestion problems. Therapy is recommended. By 2024 one in four American gen Z adults had been to therapy as teenagers. Medication can be sent from your screen to your door.

Trigger warnings have become mandatory, suggesting we should avoid the challenges of everyday life. Regularly news items on television are preceded by a warning followed by a reference to a Help Line if you didn't heed the warning and watched; university lecturers have been dismissed for teaching lessons from history that some students don't want to hear. Always we must feel 'safe', whatever that might mean.

It's that push to be 'ordinary', to be 'normal' that lies at the heart of the current 'normalisation' of mental illness. But no amount of counselling will solve poor parenting, ongoing domestic violence, poverty or unemployment, yet governments continue to pour money into clinics and programs that claim they can help. Help lines are serviced by poorly trained people. How could it be otherwise with the overwhelming demand for attention?

Exposure of fraudulent advocates and their claims would help alleviate this dangerous trend to a new conformity and the costly marketisation of mental health/illness. The media, especially online social media, are villains in this crisis, magnifying the problem, not talking about lax parenting, the normality of temper tantrums, the normal variations in timing of child development stages, the natural anxiety of facing life-changing school exams, job interviews, losing your job or living in poverty.

This is life in 2026. Is the cause of the mental health epidemic environmental? Is it the food we eat? Is it misuse of social media; a combination of all these factors? Or is it a symptom of America's Suicide Pact , the apocalypse that Chris Hedges has written about in P&I., the decline of Western civilization.

Fixing the problem would require comprehensive, radical, rethinking, reform and funding of education from pre-school to the tertiary sector; the overhaul and elevation of teaching as a profession; training programs, including parenting training; and of monumental importance is curbing the tech cowboys and calling them to account for their evolving inhumane revolution. All is necessary to adjust the exploding economic and social inequities we are living with. What hope have we got?