The Myth of Mental Illness

I am currently training to become a psychotherapist.

A career pivot that did not arrive as a matter of choice but rather as a deep, mysterious, inconvenient calling.

To be sure, if I had a conscious choice, I would not have chosen this path. The calling arose from within me, autonomously, through the process of navigating life’s challenges, through the unraveling of trauma, and through my unique, ever-evolving journey of coming into being.

I envision using my education and licensure to work with individuals and organizations. Combining well-being and mental health with traditional organizational development, employee experience, and strategy, I believe, is going to be a key differentiator in the future of work (and the world). I envision teams having a trauma-informed counselor on staff conducting regular 1:1 sessions, group work, assessments, and overall helping to establish human-first solutions and skills in the age of AI.

What I am discovering through my learning may surprise you.

Specifically, the scientific underpinnings of mental health disorders, including diagnostic criteria and definitions, are extremely subjective and inextricably linked to culture, societal values, social norms, and expectations that are often defined by people with power and thus reflect and promote their interests and values.

The all-powerful American Psychiatric Association maintains a monopoly on what constitutes a mental illness with their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) acting as the chief arbiter of who is ill and who is not.

Take, for instance, the label of ADHD.

In a peer reviewed study of ADHD prevalence by Polanczyk et al. (2007), it was found that with every new iteration of the DSM, the prevalence of ADHD diagnoses increases. Those with influence and power have decided that “treatment” is necessary for an identified pattern of behaving, thinking, or feeling that conflicts with social norms or ideals.

Individuals presenting symptoms that include a lack of focus, distractibility, difficulty completing tasks and sitting still.

The answer – diagnosis and medication.

According to recent CDC data, approximately 7 million children in the United States have been diagnosed with ADHD, representing around 1 in 9 children. The rate of adult ADHD diagnoses has almost doubled since 2016.

What this shows us is that as new and broader definitions of mental health disorders emerge, health professionals diagnose and “treat” the disorder at higher and higher rates.

Broader factors are not taken into consideration such as increased use and reliance on technology, environmental factors, food quality, education system challenges/underfunding, geopolitical strife, corporate exploitation, financial and work-related stress, etc. 

This leaves us with questions:

  • What if there is nothing inherently “wrong” with you?
  • What if your symptomology is the result of a sick system in which you are living?
  • What if mental health is a myth constructed by a society who consistently prioritizes power and profit over people?  

When we highlight the subjective and social constructionist view of psychopathology, we begin to discover that so-called psychological disorders are simply variants of normal psychological phenomena caused by the ordinary problems in living and the inherent difficulty in being human.

“Normality”, in the case of mental illness, is in the eye of the beholder, or, let’s say, a culture and its elites. Even scientifically speaking there is no such thing as normal when it comes to mental health. 

Psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz in his book, the Myth of Mental Illness, says that we have become too reliant on medical models, or, believing medicine to be magic. He even goes so far to describe psychotherapy itself as being a myth, saying, “counseling is simply doing the most important thing in human life, listening to someone seriously and talking to someone seriously” (Thomas Szasz Speaks, 2009).

How often we forget to nurture the most basic needs within ourselves and others.

It is difficult to be human, particularly in an endlessly uncertain world where we are more isolated and lonelier than ever before. When we don’t receive the most basic forms of attention, such as being listened to by our care givers, bosses, family members, partners, or colleagues, we start to, as Thomas Szasz says, “talk to ourselves and are labeled insane”.

The aim of mental health treatment is not to try and label, diagnose, and treat a client in some medicalized way, it is first and foremost to listen to them. 

Perhaps it isn’t that we are “insane” or “depressed” or suffering from and “attention deficit”, perhaps it’s the way we are living that is afflicting our soul.

This expanded perspective reminds me of the work of Jungian Analyst, Marie-Louise Von Franz, where she describes that depression is actually our greatest blessing as it allows us the opportunity to look within and resist running away from ourselves. In this way, depression itself is not a disease or disorder to be medicalized and cured, it is a healing agent of change, gifting us with the opportunity of transformation.

From this vantage point, one could argue, as Thomas Szasz did, the potential immorality of eradicating such conditions from a client’s life through use of pharmaceuticals, as the disorder itself is the primary agent of healing. Pharmaceuticals can and do offer life-saving intervention, but when do diagnoses and medicine become a crutch for real societal change?

This is one of the great juxtapositions and responsibilities of our time.