The Mental Health System Medicalization of Normal Human Life

When did we decide that being human is a disease? Seems to me about 20 years ago.

Every mood, every quirk, every hard season—now stamped with a code from the DSM and billed to insurance.

Sad? You have depression. Angry? That’s a mood disorder. Nervous before speaking? Social anxiety. Can’t focus on boring bullshit? ADHD.

It’s the industrialization of human emotion. The factory line starts with a checklist.

End point: a diagnosis, a prescription, and a monthly bill.

The problem isn’t that serious mental illness doesn’t exist. It does. But it is only in

a tiny fraction of the population. The big problem is that the boundaries between illness and life have been bulldozed. The grief you feel after a breakup isn’t a chemical imbalance. The restlessness you feel in a dead-end job isn’t a disorder. It’s your body screaming: “This isn’t working.”

But there’s no profit in letting you fix your life. The profit is in pathologizing you—turning your experiences into symptoms and selling you the cure (that doesn't even work, it makes things worse). You aren’t just tired; you have a disorder that needs lifelong medication. You aren’t just burned out; you need therapy forever.

The mental health industry has convinced us that the full spectrum of human experience is dangerous. That suffering is abnormal. That discomfort should be erased. But discomfort is what pushes us to change, grow, leave bad situations, and demand better. Strip it away, and you strip away your humanity.

We’ve traded resilience for reliance. We’ve outsourced our understanding of ourselves to people who don’t live our lives, but do profit from labeling them.

Normal human life doesn’t need a diagnosis. It needs honesty. It needs space. It needs connection, meaning, and the courage to sit with pain without rushing to medicate it out of existence.

Because when everything is an illness, no one is truly well!