The Madness of Therapy Culture

 https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-madness-of-therapy-culture/

Somewhere along the way, the boundaries between mental health and mental illness had become blurred until the former meant the latter. 

Well, not everyone. Even as we are all being told we belong somewhere on the “mental health” spectrum, the World Health Organization is calling for an end to “coercive practices in mental health.” The UN Disability Committee is urging states to pursue “the abolition of substitute decision-making regimes” in favor of “supported” alternatives for those we once called “mentally ill,” but who are now variously “people with mental health conditions” or “psychosocial disabilities.” These are people whose suffering often expressly means they are unable to make decisions for themselves. The rest of us are presumed fragile, but the psychotic is increasingly presumed sovereign. As deBoer writes, it has become “our transcendent obligation to pretend that a man in the grip of psychosis [is] somehow still free.”

DeBoer and Liu both show that attempts to flatten out the experience of suffering, disability, and mental illness fail to accomplish their purported aims, such as “destigmatizing” and expanding access to care. This is because reality, whether in the form of the severity of impairment or of social class, eventually asserts itself, with the consequences falling on those least able to bear them.