In a society built on distorted hierarchies and unnatural demands, it is normal to feel anxious, depressed, enraged, or dissociated. These are not signs of personal malfunction; they are signs of a system out of balance. But instead of listening to these vital human signals, the mental illness industry has long been an instrument of control.
The dominant agenda isn’t about healing, but conformity and compliance. When professionals label your distress as a disorder, they obscure the truth: you are reacting appropriately to injustice, alienation, and dehumanization. You’re not broken. You’re awake.
By shaming, pathologizing, and medicating these responses, institutions shut down our internal alarms. They teach us to ignore the signals that could guide us toward personal and collective change. They redirect our energy inward, making our suffering a private matter, rather than a reflection of cultural dysfunction that demands collective resistance.
Authentic mental health care would be about supporting people to reconnect with their integrity and aliveness, rather than coercing them to adapt to a culture that violates it.
To put it simply: the problem is not your response. The problem is what you’re responding to, which is a culture of cruelty and contempt.
