There are a lot of (temporarily) depressed teenagers, but it’s rarely clinical and they rarely go for a formal evaluation to a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist.
How many people, do you think, go to a doctor and say “I think I’m mentally ill”?
How many people, do you think, go to a doctor and say “I think I’m mentally ill”?
Ah, when you phrase it like that I realize that my estimate is rather low. Near vs. Far mode, I guess. Since it’s relatively unlikely that someone would do that if they weren’t actually mentally ill, and some mental illness is mild enough that one wouldn’t bother, and a lot of the severe ones could prevent someone from consulting a doctor on their own, a pretty low proportion of the population seems reasonable.
Does that line up with your reasoning?
edit: I think that part of what was muddling me was that your original phrasing (“talked to a mental health professional about an assessment or a diagnosis”) was sort of unclear, so I resorted to nearby heuristics rather than trying to parse it properly. We might want to fix that up before putting it on the survey.
Well, I meant this in the context of being a follow-up to the previous question about self-diagnosis. So it mostly means “Did you take your self-diagnosis seriously enough to go to a doctor?”
Such a question outside of this context needs to be more precisely formulated, I think. As we were discussing with Nornagest, going to a doctor and saying “I can’t sleep, life sucks, can you help with that?” is sufficiently common.
Are you sure about that?
I don’t have data, but my prior is fairly strong.
There are a lot of (temporarily) depressed teenagers, but it’s rarely clinical and they rarely go for a formal evaluation to a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist.
How many people, do you think, go to a doctor and say “I think I’m mentally ill”?
Ah, when you phrase it like that I realize that my estimate is rather low. Near vs. Far mode, I guess. Since it’s relatively unlikely that someone would do that if they weren’t actually mentally ill, and some mental illness is mild enough that one wouldn’t bother, and a lot of the severe ones could prevent someone from consulting a doctor on their own, a pretty low proportion of the population seems reasonable.
Does that line up with your reasoning?
edit: I think that part of what was muddling me was that your original phrasing (“talked to a mental health professional about an assessment or a diagnosis”) was sort of unclear, so I resorted to nearby heuristics rather than trying to parse it properly. We might want to fix that up before putting it on the survey.
Well, I meant this in the context of being a follow-up to the previous question about self-diagnosis. So it mostly means “Did you take your self-diagnosis seriously enough to go to a doctor?”
Such a question outside of this context needs to be more precisely formulated, I think. As we were discussing with Nornagest, going to a doctor and saying “I can’t sleep, life sucks, can you help with that?” is sufficiently common.