When Opinion Is Treated as Fact in Mental Health
When a Simple Explanation Starts to Take Over
What struck me about this piece was not just the suffering in it, but the way a neat explanation seemed to take over the whole story. A woman asks for an ADHD assessment because she is struggling to focus in long lectures at 42, after returning to a classroom setting during military service. Instead of being properly assessed for that, her difficulties are reframed as depression and anxiety, and she is moved towards antidepressants.
That is where something in me starts to feel uneasy. Not because depression and anxiety are not real, and not because antidepressants never help anyone, but because once a tidy explanation is handed over, it can start to close down other ways of understanding what is actually going on. And if that explanation is wrong, or only partly right, the consequences can be enormous.
The Mental Health World Often Treats Opinion as Fact
What also troubles me is that so much in mental health gets spoken about as if it were settled fact, when often it is not. Very often it is interpretation. Judgement. Theory. Professional opinion. And that, to me, is one of the biggest problems in this area. Opinions get handed over with the weight of facts, and people are expected to build their lives around them. Once that happens, disagreement starts to look like resistance, and doubt starts to look like illness.
That is where real damage can begin. Because if someone in authority gives an opinion the status of truth, the person on the receiving end may stop trusting their own experience very quickly.
The Low Serotonin Story Has Done a Lot of Harm
What also sits underneath this article is the wider story many people have been sold for years, that depression is basically a serotonin deficiency and medication is there to correct it. I know that line has been softened in recent years, but the idea still hangs around in people’s minds because it was repeated so often and with so much confidence.
The problem is that once people are persuaded they have a chemical problem that needs correcting, they are more likely to hand over trust very quickly. They may stop questioning what is happening to them. They may assume new symptoms are part of the illness rather than part of the treatment. And that is where things can become dangerous.
When the Treatment Becomes the Problem
That is one of the hardest things in stories like this. Once medication enters the picture, it can become very difficult to work out where the original problem ends and the drug effects begin. In her account, the first SSRI seems to trigger panic attacks, suicidal thoughts, bruising, and high anxiety. The second medication appears to help at first, then gradually pulls her into fatigue, tremors, slowed cognition, oversleeping, decline in performance, and a life that starts falling apart.
That matters because medication harm does not always arrive dramatically. Sometimes it creeps in. Sometimes it looks confusing. Sometimes it is folded back into the diagnosis, so the person is seen as getting worse rather than reacting badly. And once that happens, the system can start investigating everything except the most obvious possibility.
Misdiagnosis Is Bad Enough, but Gaslighting Makes It Worse
What makes this story even harder to read is not just the medical side of it, but the institutional response. She keeps raising concerns. She keeps saying something is wrong. She keeps trying to explain that she is not herself. Yet again and again she is treated as unreliable, as though she is inventing excuses, failing morally, or simply not coping.
That, to me, is where the real cruelty often begins. Not only when someone is harmed, but when the harm is denied, minimised, or turned back on them as proof of their instability. It is one thing to suffer. It is another thing entirely to be made to carry the blame for what has happened to you while you are suffering.
And that is what I hear in this piece again and again. The sense that once she no longer fit the expected script, once her body and mind did not react the way they were supposed to, she became the problem.
Not Every Human Struggle Needs Antidepressants
This article also speaks to something bigger in the therapy and mental health world. Too much gets medicalised too quickly. Too many ordinary human difficulties, or situational struggles, or more complex questions, are pushed too fast towards diagnosis and medication. Not every difficulty concentrating means depression. Not every anxious feeling means disorder. Not every painful period in life means the answer is an antidepressant.
Some emotions are healthy. Some nervousness is human. Some distress is trying to say something. That does not mean people should simply suffer, but it does mean we should be careful about how quickly we turn life into illness and illness into medication.
Agreement Is Not the Same as Truth
One of the reasons we should be careful is that the language of certainty in mental health often outruns what is really known. A clinician may have an opinion. A team may agree on an opinion. A diagnosis may become the dominant opinion. But agreement is not the same as truth. And once an opinion hardens into a fact in the system, the person living through it can get trapped inside someone else’s version of them.
That is one of the things I think this story shows very clearly.
Therapy Should Not Become an Extension of Medication Pressure
One part of this piece I found especially telling was her experience in therapy afterwards, that two out of three therapists pushed medication even though they were not prescribers. That says a lot. It says how deeply the medication mindset can spread, to the point where even therapy can stop being a place to think and start becoming a softer arm of the same system.
That worries me. Therapy should be a place where experience can be explored honestly, not a place where people are gently pushed back towards the same thing that may already have harmed them. If someone has been traumatised by medication, that should be taken seriously. Not brushed aside. Not reframed. Not managed.
The Deeper Harm Is the Loss of Self-Trust
What I find most powerful in this story is not just the account of adverse effects, but the breakdown of self-trust that followed. Once a person is told what their problem is, then told the treatment is right, then told their worsening state is not really what they think it is, something deep can start to fray inside them. Their own reading of their life begins to weaken. Their instincts are pushed aside. Their lived experience is doubted, sometimes by others, sometimes eventually by themselves.
That is one of the greatest harms of bad mental health care. Not just the wrong diagnosis, not just the wrong medication, but the slow erosion of a person’s confidence in their own reality.
More Humility, More Listening, Less Certainty
For me, this article is a reminder that mental health care needs far more humility than it often shows. Less certainty too early. Less confidence in neat explanations. Less pressure to fit people into a box. More willingness to step back and say, perhaps we have got this wrong.
Because once people are put on the wrong path, they do not just lose time. Sometimes they lose health. Sometimes relationships. Sometimes work. Sometimes years. Sometimes almost their life.
That is not a small mistake.
This Is More Than One Woman’s Story
I do not think this story means antidepressants never help anyone. I do think it shows how much harm can be done when medication is handed out on the basis of a simplistic story, when adverse effects are not recognised for what they are, and when institutions protect themselves by quietly placing the burden back onto the person who has been harmed.
That is the part I think people need to hear. Not just the medication story, but the blame story. The way the system can fail someone, then leave them carrying the weight of that failure as if it were all theirs.
That is where this becomes more than one woman’s experience. It becomes a warning.
Source material
When my experience did not match what I had been told to expect, it was minimized and dismissed. The post Not Serotonin Deficiency: A Veteran’s Story of Misdiagnosis and Medication Harm appeared first on Mad In America.
Source: Mad In America
