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People often ask a version of this question: If mental health awareness is better now, why does it feel like there is so much more mental illness than there used to be? Were people in the 1970s somehow mentally healthier? Did modern life break us? Or is something else going on? The answer is more complicated than most people realize. Because the truth is: It is not that mental illness suddenly exploded. It is that our culture dramatically changed how we define distress, how q

There are books that challenge your assumptions. And then there are books that make you question the foundation the entire system was built on. The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz is one of those books. When it was first published in 1961, it was considered radical. More than sixty years later, it remains one of the most uncomfortable and necessary challenges ever directed at modern psychiatry. And the reason it still matters is simple: The questions Szasz raised were

Over the years, people have asked me where many of my ideas about mental health, addiction, recovery, human services, and institutional systems actually come from. The answer is definitely NOT social media. They came from decades working inside these systems — but also from reading researchers, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, trauma experts, recovery thinkers, anthropologists, cult researchers, and people willing to ask uncomfortable questions about power, identity

Most people have never heard of the DSM. But if you’ve ever been diagnosed with a mental health condition, it has shaped how that diagnosis was made. DSM stands for: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It’s the book used across the United States—and much of the world—to define what counts as a mental disorder. The first version was published in 1952. The current version—DSM-5-TR (Text Revision)—was released in 2022. And over that time, something important h

People think a mental health diagnosis means something precise happened. That someone really understood you Looked at your life. Took their time. And then landed on something accurate. That’s the story. Here’s the reality: Most diagnoses are decisions made under pressure, using a system that has to fit you into something—whether it really fits or not. The System Doesn’t Start With You By the time you sit down, the system already has a list of labels it can use. That list come