It’s hard to just be human nowadays. That’s because there’s a system in place that robs your mental health problems of any meaning – and robs you of the ability to see them as a window onto your deepest self. It colonizes our inner lives with diagnoses. It turns the problems of life into “symptoms” of a “disorder,” best managed by a pill or a targeted therapy. Over time, it cuts us off from who we really are.
Psychiatry – the branch of medicine that treats illnesses of the mind – is part of the problem, but not the whole story. The bigger part is how its worldview has seeped into the wider culture, to the point where our parents, coworkers, friends, and loved ones are always ready to diagnose us – and where we gladly diagnose ourselves.
But there is a way out: a core insight of my books and articles is purpose, not pathology. Mental health problems like depression and anxiety aren’t symptoms of a defective mind. They’re the mind’s well-designed signal to show us that something in our lives isn’t right, and to point to the changes we need to make. The answer isn’t to drug them into oblivion but listen to what they’re trying to say. Understanding this is the first step toward finding our way back to ourselves.
I’m a philosopher at the City University of New York. I turned to philosophy when I realized that improving our mental health requires grappling with the deepest questions people can ask: What makes for a good life? How should I live it? These are questions that the mental health professions weren’t giving me answers to. I explored those questions in my book Madness.
More recently, I turned to history because I wanted to understand how our culture has reached a point where we’d rather silence our mental health problems than understand what they’re trying to tell us. My book The Madness Pill was the start of an answer.
I also write for Psychology Today on what it means to shift from a mindset of pathology to one of purpose, across conditions including depression, borderline personality disorder, hearing voices, acute anxiety, ADHD, and autism. And about cutting-edge tools and therapeutic approaches aligned with this way of thinking.
But these aren’t ivory-tower musings. They’re hard-won insights, gleaned from my own attempts to give up diagnoses and drugs. My father was diagnosed with schizophrenia, then schizoaffective disorder, then bipolar disorder, and was put on a combination of drugs we now know to be neurotoxic – and which disabled him. At the age of five, I began weekly meetings with a psychiatrist, meetings that continued until I was 16, when I was hospitalized for depression for six weeks. I’ve been on and off antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs for much of my adult life, always looking for a better label to explain my suffering.
I found my way out, not by getting a better diagnosis, but by asking a better question: not what’s wrong with me but what is this trying to tell me?
If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a diagnosis and suspected there was more to it, I’d like to hear about it. Subscribe, and let me know in the comments what you’d like me to take on first.
