The Mental Health System Doesn’t Want to Let You Go — Because You’re Worth Too Much Broken

Let's not pretend anymore that the mental health system is one of healing. It isn't. It is one of profit. And if you ever do start feeling really well, really free — they lose a customer.

The mental health community doesn't need you to be healthy enough to let you go. It requires you to be stable enough to stay — compliant, quiet, medicated, and billable. Because every "follow-up," every refill, every session, every label is a line item. You are not a person. You are a cash stream.

Let's break it down:

Diagnoses Are Dollar Signs

Once you’re labeled, you’re on the hook for years — maybe for life. Diagnoses justify services, services justify billing, and billing justifies bloated systems of clinicians, administrators, case managers, prescribers, and consultants. No one gets paid if you’re fine.

Recovery Is Bad Business

If you ever do get better, the game is over. If you find your thoughts and feelings are human and you don't need a pill or a shrink each week — the clinic loses money. That "chronic condition" you were told you'd have for the rest of your life? A subscription service. You purchased an annual subscription plan that you never needed.

Medications = Long-Term Customers

Psych meds aren't designed to cure — they're designed to addict. Ineffective most of the time, poisonous at best, always profitable. Mood stabilizers, antidepressants, antipsychotics — none of them establish a lasting fix, all of them generate consistent revenue. If you stop using them? You might destabilize, since they cause the imbalance they claim to fix. And round you go once more. More appointments. More meds. More profit.

Therapy as a Trap

“Let’s explore that…” becomes a cycle that never ends. Weeks become years. You’re encouraged to keep digging, but never allowed to climb out. Discharge is a dirty word. If your therapist told you, “You’re good — go live your life,” they'd lose a weekly payment.

Peer Support is Being Monetized Too

Even lived experience is being taken in by the machine. Peer workers are employed as cheap labor who affirm the system's message. “Stay in recovery,” they say — not freedom, but maintenance. Not healing, but compliance with a new identity. Why? Because endless recovery is a business model, too.

Systemic Codependency

The whole system is set up to make you dependent — not just on drugs, but on the label, the treatment, the system. When you start to believe you don't need them anymore, you're "noncompliant," "treatment-resistant," "in denial." Because the idea that someone would get well and depart is a threat to an industry that thrives on pathology.

This isn't care. It’s captivity with paperwork

So when you start to get better, healthier, more yourself — believe that. Go for that. Because the mental illness system will never give you your freedom. You have to take it.

And they will resent you for doing so.

Because with every healthy individual who walks away, is a minus in red on their books.

• You don't need to stay sick to receive assistance.

• You do not need to stay in recovery to be complete.

• You don't need their permission to be liberated.

__________________________________________________________________________________

References

• Burstow, B. (2015). Psychiatry and the Business of Madness: An Ethical and Epistemological Accounting. Palgrave Macmillan.

• Frances, A. (2013). Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life. William Morrow.

• Gøtzsche, P. C. (2015). Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial. People’s Press.

• Healy, D. (2004). Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression. NYU Press.

• Mancini, M. A. (2007). The role of self-disclosure in recovery-oriented psychiatric services. Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal, 31(1), 1–5.

• Mead, S., & Hilton, D. (2003). Re-thinking the Dominant Paradigm: Peer Support and Recovery. Alternatives Conference.

• Moncrieff, J. (2009). The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment. Palgrave Macmillan.

• Peele, S., & Thomson, R. (2015). The Truth About Addiction and Recovery: The Life Process Program for Outgrowing Destructive Habits. Simon & Schuster.

• Szasz, T. (1974). The Myth of Psychotherapy: Mental Healing as Religion, Rhetoric, and Repression. Anchor Press.

• Watters, E. (2010). Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. Free Press.

• Whitaker, R. (2010). Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Crown Publishing.