Psychiatry puts forth the idea that a person is one thing, then something happens inside them, a kind of switch, and they become something else. As if so-called “mental illness” appears without context, history, or conditions that accumulate over time. That has never matched my experience.
There was a long stretch of my life where I functioned in a sustained, practical, outward-facing way. I lived in one house for 17 years. I could plan years ahead instead of weeks. I could build things that required follow-through across time.
That material stability was part of a marriage that was not mutual. My partner engaged in passive aggression, emotional absence, and conflict avoidance. Repair was rare to non-existent. The stability provided structure. The marriage reduced relational contact. The structure still shaped what was possible.
In that same period, I was able to become deeply embedded in community life as someone people relied on and invited into ongoing work: political campaigns, homeschooling networks, state associations, boards, and committees. I ran seminars across the state. I helped double membership in a statewide organization in a year and helped create conferences. I supported a variety of organizations in multiple ways.
My community showed up for me, too. When I separated and moved, people came with trucks, furniture, and pizza. When I had surgery, there were people to drive me, to sit with me after, and bring food and good company days later. That was a functioning network of mutual responsibility. I was part of it in both directions. That kind of life runs on continuity, trust, and repeated contact over time.
Looking at it through an Interpersonal Neurobiology lens, I don’t see a “stable personality” versus a “disordered personality,” but a nervous system shaped by conditions.
When housing is stable, the nervous system does not have to spend constant energy on uncertainty. When routines are stable, planning becomes possible. When relationships are reliable enough, even if imperfect, the system can stretch into contribution instead of contraction. When community response is consistent, the system stays more open to engagement because it expects return. Capacity expands because the conditions allow more of the system to be available at once.
Then those conditions changed. When I separated, the material base shifted. Housing and resources changed. The relational network that had been distributed across many people became less accessible. Over time, the pattern changed from accumulation to interruption. Instead of building over years, energy went into re-establishing basic stability.
In that phase, labels like depression or PTSD were applied from the outside as if they explained what was happening. But they do not describe what was lost, or how much functioning is tied to housing, continuity, and reciprocal community systems.
The psychiatric model suggests that a person crosses a threshold and becomes fundamentally different. That there is a before and after that lives inside the person alone. My experience does not show that. It shows variation tied to conditions.
When conditions supported continuity, my life supported long-term building, leadership, and sustained community involvement. When conditions reduced continuity, my functioning narrowed, not because a core identity changed or my brain chemicals suddenly went wonky, but because fewer systems were available to support output, connection, and recovery.
Even in the difficult periods, the shifts were not total. There were still moments of clarity, participation, and contribution. That shows range, not collapse into a fixed state.
Psychiatry takes the lowest functioning point and turns it into a category. Then it treats that category as the explanation for itself. Medications and cognitive reframing are then positioned as primary interventions, as if the main issue is correcting thinking or regulating mood directly.
But thinking and mood reflect the conditions the system is operating under. They change when those conditions change. I learned that as I saw my functioning expand when stability was present and narrow when stability was reduced. I watched community participation grow when I was embedded in place and shrink when I was displaced from it. The pattern was consistent.
Clinical language overlooks that human functioning is not fixed inside a person. It is distributed across housing, relationships, routines, resources, and the reliability of return from the people around us. When those layers add up to sufficient support, the system has room to move. When they don’t, the system contracts. Calling that a mental illness hides the structure that produced it.
I came to greatly distrust psychiatry through repeated exposure, study, and other’s stories of how the industry abused them. And it usually started with the assertion that something in their brain had changed, making them mentally ill like a switch was turned on. But they’re never told what caused the switch. Because psychiatry has no clue.
Years of experience have taught me I can trust Relational Neuroscience, which shows us that the same person naturally has different capacities under different conditions. Capacity is a reflection of how much support the system is receiving at any given point.
When people recognize that pattern in their own lives, the question changes. It stops being “What is wrong with me?” and becomes “What conditions affect what is possible right now?” That question allows choices that support well-being. No diagnosis necessary.
