In our modern world, a host of conditions are referred to under the umbrella of “mental health.” This naming is a significant case of intentional misdirection. How you describe something changes how you address it. Calling someone’s feelings their “mental health” is more than just unnecessarily complicated. It’s an overt and successful attempt at absolving individuals from any personal responsibility over how they think, feel, and act. Saying someone has “mental health problems” does nothing to address the cause of their undesirable feelings nor the consequences of having them.
Mental anguish is a symptom, not a disease. Anxiety, depression, stress, and other bad feelings are not the manifestation of something you have. Rather, they are merely the manifestation of something you don't have, namely the ability to regulate your emotions through the choices you make.
Mental anguish is a sign that you are missing something—the solution to a puzzle within that you have not yet solved. It is a signal calling you to action: go and find and fix the choices that are leading you to feel this way.
The simplistic explanation that your feelings are a result of deficient chemical process in your brain oversimplifies the complex processes driving your body and grossly overstates the results of research into them. In fact, it may shock you to learn that there has been no peer reviewed evidence of brain chemistry causing mental anguish. Though obviously a multi-factor problem, the incidence of modern mental anguish is a crisis of internal perspective more than anything else.
The phrase “mental health” might be new, but the problems it labels are not. Human happiness is not a new goal, nor the abundance of the alternative a new condition. We need not treat this as a new puzzle nor an ongoing mystery; it’s a problem for which a sufficient solution has always been available and—until very recently—widely employed.
The principle problem is not that modern people have undergone a sudden genetic shift that renders them inadequate to face challenges that most people managed quite well since the dawn of time. While life is more complex in many ways than it was in prior generations, humans since the dawn of time have faced significantly harder situations than we do. Because people in the past successfully managed their emotions, you can rest assured that the problem is not one of genetics, and that the power to change your feelings is much stronger than any biological imperative.1
The significant difference between this and prior generations is not genetic, but cultural. Since WWII, multiple generations have been led to believe that how they feel is a purely physical phenomenon over which they have no control. You see the intentional minimization of the role of choice in every description of this problem. Suicide, addiction, and obesity—all personal choices—are described as things that happen to you. “He was a victim of suicide,” “she got addicted,” “she was afflicted with obesity.”
Poor choices should not be referred to or treated as illnesses or genetic flaws. Character flaws should not be described as anything but optional. Your choices are yours to make, your character is yours to shape, and you are free to learn and live to manage your emotions or not. Regardless, how you choose to respond to your feelings is your responsibility alone, and referring to feelings in any way that abdicates responsibility for them is dishonest and harmful to yourself and others.
Footnotes
- 1. Some would argue that past social stigma is responsible for the marked modern increase in selfregulation problems. Since past people outperformed modern people on every desirable metric, this suggests that if social stigma for performative abnormality is indeed responsible, it worked better than anything we are doing today. ↩