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Podcast: Plain English with Derek Thompson
Episode: America in the Age of Diagnosis
Description: America is sicker than ever. That’s what the data says, anyway.
Psychological and psychiatric diagnoses have soared. Between the 1990s and the mid-2000s, bipolar disorder among American youth grew by a factor of 40, while the number of children diagnosed with ADHD increased by a factor of 7. Rates of PTSD, anxiety, and depression have soared, too.
Perhaps in previous decades doctors missed millions of cases of illness that we’re now catching. Or perhaps, as the New York Times writer David Wallace Wells has written, “we are not getting sicker—we are attributing more to sickn...