alt Hacker NewsOne one hand you say sure, they have to provide a diagnosis like an adjustment disorder, and on the other you say walking into a therapist's office and getting that is like a rare pill-mill? Is your only distinction that depression would be harder to obtain?
This article is talking about any sort of mental health "disability", and the way the mental health system financials work is that it's no wonder we have so many identifying as having a disability. The system isn't evaluating an individual and applying a disorder to people that are factually on the 5-10% of the population that would be a rare "disorder". The system is literally slapping a disorder label on everyone that walks in and these people are identifying with the label they're given.
> Is your only distinction that depression would be harder to obtain?
Yes. You seem to be taking chagrin with the fact that therapists have to attach a diagnosis code in order to bill insurance, and then conflating that with inflated diagnoses of mental disorders that qualify as disabilities.
My issue with your comment is that I think you're taking a systemic issue (which I acknowledge, btw) and framing it as therapists' misconduct. If your claim that therapists are categorically diagnosing anyone who shows up for the purposes of billing were true, we'd expect to see very high diagnosis rates specifically among therapists who rely heavily on insurance, relative to those who are mostly private-pay. I don't have that data, but I'd be surprised if the difference were as extreme as your framing implies.
What did change in a clear, documented way was the DSM-5 criteria in 2013, which lowered thresholds for several conditions and broadened who qualifies for a diagnosis. That is diagnostic classification problem, not a "therapists are gaming the system for billing" problem.