The 'Mental Illness' Social Idea: Care or Control?

I have been in some form of counselling, therapy, or some sort of treatment since I was around 14, now 29. These 15 years of experience has uniquely displaced my view on these treatments, and beyond just that, into how my Western society discusses and uses 'mental health'. Now, I need to be careful here. People have an amazing ability to take the thoughts that leave my mind and inject some bizarre meaning into them that I did not intend. My criticism is not mental health denialism; that would be quite strange for someone in my position. However, now that I am leaving all 'mental health' services  a disillusioned being, but I am enlightened on the polypurpose of 'mental health' as a social idea.

It's impossible to capture all my experience and thoughts in one essay, or even one book. So, I am going to focus on what even the definition of 'mental health' is, when we say, "This hurts their mental health," what does that mean? Because I am certain that relatively few people understand what 'mental health' is. If I ask people, they might return with some description about causing depression and anxiety, maybe labelling a few conditions like OCD or Schizophrenia. When I try to define 'mental health' as it's discussed and used in community and society, I find it incredibly difficult to develop a satisfactory definition.

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines 'mental health' as this:

The condition of someone's mind and whether or not they are suffering from any mental illness (defined as, an illness that affects the mind).

Cambridge English Dictionary (dictionary.cambridge.org) Read

The definition is accurate but not particularly helpful, however, we see the connection between 'mental health' and 'mental illness'. What is a 'mental illness'? Well, an illness of the mind.

I find these definitions almost useless. Given how much 'mental health' conversation has exploded over the last decade, I would have thought our understanding of the topic would have created a valuable assortment of specific words to house their own sub-topics. When I tried to name some words or topics that I think should have been included and discussed right now, I couldn't easily think of anything. And this is because 'mental health' has been isolated and segregated from all other social topics.

If someone said, "Work is really affecting my mental health." You could reword that into, "My boss is abusing me." This, I believe, is why 'mental health' must remain generic and must be segregated; it rarely occurs in isolation, but recognising that and perusing that thought might lead someone to recognise chronic and systemic failures in their state, society, and community. If someone's boss was abusing them, that should trigger an investigation and maybe even a tribunal. But by focusing on the individual's mental health, the problem is their health and ill mind. 

The way 'mental health' and 'mental illness' are discussed individualises people and isolates them. If that person being abused by their boss develops an anxiety disorder, or even something like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, this can give them uniquely powerful experiences that are all labelled 'mental health'. It also makes them 'mentally ill', and the implication of that term is their mind is diseased, wrong, non-functional, and in a society that claims to value intellectualism and rationalism, what does it mean to have a diseased brain?

During the 2024 presidential election in The States, there was rampant debate over if Donald Trump or Joe Biden's brains were capable of being president – if their minds were functional enough for the responsibility. It's indicative of a much wider conversation about 'mental illness', are the 'ill' capable of being a human-being? The discussion doesn't attempt to understand how people with 'mental illness', which includes everything from basic anxiety to conditions like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, think or how these conditions affect thought, only that the brain is wrong and that is dangerous.

When Kanye West started espousing Nazi talking points early in 2025 the other side of the 'mental health' limitation shows up; people were claiming it's because he has Bipolar Disorder. This happens whenever a famous figure with 'mental illness' acts abhorrently, the people attached to this idol find a way to defend it by arguing it's a result of 'mental illness'. The implication, intended or not, is that West and other people with chronic conditions fundamentally are not capable of understanding their thoughts or actions. Is it that? Or is it a lack of ethics and moral action? And how can you know?

As someone who has been diagnosed with several conditions, I know that we have intense and bizarre experiences that can feed us thoughts that the world is dangerous, or inject our lives with turbulent uncontrollable emotions. There is no natural guide for this, we are not born understanding how to manage these experiences, and we might not understand they're even 'not normal' if we have them since birth. The lack of language that affects that individual is also shared socially, and together we fundamentally lack the language and skills for 'mad analysis', to dissect the intersections between these conditions, their effects, ethics, and society. The best people to perform this analysis are persons with lived practice of managing these experiences. So it's convenient that those people are also fundamentally incapable of sound thought, do you remember that their mind is ill? Diseased, whatever that mind produces must be treated sceptically for that illness.

So instead, that discussion happens by people who do not know. That lack of knowing has turned 'mentally ill' into an accusation, a modern-day leper that has to be pushed away from our communities but also controlled to ensure 'mentally ill' people are not a threat. They are ill of brain without cause, which fundamentally changes their capability to be a human-being because now their minds are out-of-control, alien, and incapable of coherence. Despite this essay, composed by an 'ill' mind, being a comprehensive critique of that idea in essence and existence.

When 'mental health' is something that affects everyone and 'mental illness' can occur within any person, it stops being a useful idea to improve lives and has become an accusation to dehumanise and limit the discussions which are permitted to occur within society. That is because the root causes of 'mental illness' can be some social, economic, or systemic problem, and challenging this would require making sweeping changes to our societies – without even unpacking that pre-existing conditions can be worsened by these problems. Instead, we find ourselves in a strange state where we allegedly 'understand the importance of mental health', without engaging with the topic in any depth. Now it is a social branding and marketing aesthetic used by people, companies, and politicians to give lip-serve to the idea that they care about foundational problems in our societies. They invent new mechanisms to ensure that the problems they are responsible for addressing can not be discussed, while creating a new market for product.

'Mental health' and 'mental illness' as social concepts do not honour our experiences, nor the complex nature of consciousness. Our mind deserves to be understood and explored in detail, with all the language and interest it deserves. In some cases of 'mental illness', the mind is not malfunctioning or diseased, instead it is reacting normally to the experiences it has endured. Like soldiers returning from war with PTSD, what about their 'mental illness' is abnormal or strange? It is reacting perfectly normally to the extreme stress of an abnormal scenario. If it causes someone to be depressed that's 'mental health', if it causes someone to experience hallucinations, relivings, or heightened reactions then that's also 'mental health'. Despite these experiences being radically different. So if someone with PTSD reacts normally to a violent reliving and run and hide or believe they are being attacked. People do not understand this experience and, because it seems so alien to what most peoples' understanding and experience of 'mental illness' is, this cognitive dissonance requires rejection.

Rejection isn't merely rejection of others, but a rejection of oneself. 'Mental illness' can happen to anyone, and there is a massive overlap in 'mental health' experiences. Maybe you will relate to some of the experiences of people with "serious", for lack of better term, 'mental illnesses'. But if those people are alien, maybe even dangerous, and are incoherent, then what does that make you? So people surveil, monitoring themselves for any indication of mind disease, then cover it and ignore it, then if one struggles it can be protected under 'mental health'. Without the means to discuss 'mental health' and the associated experiences, as well as the willingness to learn, we'll be trapped forever in the mush indescribable 'mental health' without any want to understand ourselves or the complicated reality of human minds – as well as the responsibility to respect that I and you have to one another.

As 'mental health' is used, I do not find it a compelling term or idea. It wants to care about peoples' emotional wellbeing without caring to understand their experience, without compassion in this modern society, that leaves two mainstream options; monetisation or policing. The people whose 'mental illness' results in experiences below the 'socially acceptable threshold', i.e. people with acute anxiety, are sold the product to fix their life. Whereas, those over if, i.e. someone with schizophrenia, cannot be fixed with product, so they are not useful to our society based on consumption and must be policed to ensure they do not disrupt the fabric of this society.

So now, what are you? Healthy? Or are you ill? Are you monetisable? Or are you a danger?