The Treatment Trap: When More Help Makes Us Sicker

Imagine trying to fix a flooded basement by bringing in more buckets and mops while ignoring the burst pipe causing the flood. That's exactly what we're doing with mental health in modern society: throwing more treatments, pills, and therapies at an overflowing crisis of human suffering, while steadfastly ignoring its source.

The result?

A bloated $435 billion mental health industry that keeps expanding while mental health problems continue to soar.

We're caught in what I call the treatment trap - the collective delusion that if we just offer more antidepressants, more counseling, more diagnoses, and earlier interventions, we'll somehow stem the rising tide of anxiety, depression, and emotional distress.

It's a comforting fantasy, marketed aggressively by pharmaceutical companies and therapy providers alike. It suggests there's a clean, clinical solution to our collective anguish - just one more pill, one more session, one more breakthrough treatment away.

But what if this very approach - turning human suffering into something to be "treated" - is actually making things worse?

Consider this paradox: As mental health treatments have become more accessible and sophisticated since the 1980s, mental health problems haven't decreased - they've exploded. A 2020 study from New Zealand reported that 86% of people will be eligible for a psychiatric diagnosis by the time they’re 45 years old, with about half of the population having met the criteria for a ‘disorder’ by the age of 18

We've medicalized normal human responses to an abnormal world. The pharmaceutical industry has convinced us that our brain chemistry needs "correcting," while the therapy industry insists that our natural reactions to stress, trauma, poor health, social isolation & a sick care culture that undermines natural resilience are symptoms of individual disorders requiring professional intervention. Together, they've created a self-perpetuating cycle: the more we treat mental health as a medical problem, the more people see themselves as broken, and the more "treatment" they consume.

But what if we've been asking the wrong question all along? Instead of asking how to provide more treatments or which new wonder drug or brain stimulation device to develop, perhaps we should be asking why so many people are suffering in the first place. What if the answer isn't in more interventions, but in fundamentally rethinking our approach to human suffering?

Your Brain Isn't Broken – Your Environment Is Toxic

Want to create the perfect mental health crisis? Here's the recipe: Take a human body designed for movement, feed it processed junk, bathe it in artificial light, marinate it in environmental toxins, and keep it sitting still for 10+ hours a day. When the inevitable symptoms appear, slap on a psychiatric label and prescribe some pills. Voilà!

You've got yourself a lifetime customer of both Big Food and Big Pharma.

When a child can't focus in a fluorescent-lit classroom after a breakfast of sugary cereal and a night of disrupted sleep, we don't question the environment – we diagnose them with ADHD and medicate them into compliance.

When an adult feels anxious and depressed after spending 60 hours a week in a windowless office, eating lunch from plastic containers, and staring at screens until midnight, we don't question their lifestyle – we label them mentally ill and prescribe antidepressants.

Here's a radical thought: Maybe your brain isn't broken.

Maybe it's functioning exactly as it should, desperately trying to tell you that your body is under assault from an environment that's about as natural as a plastic plant. But acknowledging that would require admitting that our entire modern lifestyle is the problem. Much easier to pop a pill and soldier on.

The food industry creates products designed to hijack your brain chemistry, then the pharmaceutical industry sells you drugs to "fix" your brain chemistry. The tech industry disrupts your sleep with addictive screens, then the sleep aid industry sells you pills to knock yourself out. Corporate offices chain you to a desk all day, then the healthcare industry sells you treatments for the resulting physical and mental health problems.

See the pattern?

We've built a society that's fundamentally incompatible with human biology, then labeled the inevitable fallout as individual mental illness. It's like removing all the soil from a garden, replacing it with concrete, and then diagnosing the withering plants with a growth disorder. Sure, you could drip-feed them chemicals to keep them barely alive – or you could admit that plants need soil to thrive.

Your anxiety, depression, and attention problems aren't just in your head – they're in your body, your environment, and the unnatural way we're forced to live. But don't expect to hear that from industries making billions by treating symptoms while selling you the causes.

Want better mental health?

Start by giving your body what it actually needs: real food, natural movement, genuine rest, and an environment free from industrial toxins. But that's not nearly as profitable as convincing you that your brain is broken and only their products can fix it.

The Death of Meaning in Digital Culture

Once upon a time, humans knew how to suffer. That's not a romantic notion – it's a lost survival skill. Our ancestors understood that pain, struggle, and darkness were not disorders to be medicated away, but inevitable passages in the human journey. They had elders who carried wisdom, communities that held space for grief, and cultural practices that gave meaning to suffering.

Today?

We have TikTok therapists selling us five-step solutions to existential pain and pharmaceutical companies promising to correct our "chemical imbalances."

We've replaced the village elder with the Instagram influencer, ancestral wisdom with pharmaceutical propaganda, and genuine human connection with carefully curated digital performances. When suffering arrives – as it always has and always will – we no longer have the language to make sense of it. Instead, we're told our pain is a malfunction, our struggle is a disorder, and our only hope lies in professional intervention and chemical correction.

Welcome to the spiritual wasteland of modern life, where meaning has been reduced to material success, purpose has been replaced by productivity, and wisdom has been outsourced to "experts" who coincidentally always have something to sell you.

Feel empty inside?

Here's a new iPhone.

Struggling with your purpose?

Try this productivity app.

Feeling disconnected? Scroll through more social media.

The machine keeps you just satisfied enough to keep consuming, but empty enough to never stop.

The Hollywood-industrial complex bombards you with impossible standards of beauty, success, and happiness, while social media turns your entire existence into a performance to be liked, shared, and judged. Your body becomes a project to be optimized, your face a filter to be perfected, your life a highlight reel to be envied. Meanwhile, your soul starves for something real.

We're living in a pornified culture that has commodified every aspect of human experience. Sex has been stripped of intimacy, beauty reduced to artificial standards, and relationships turned into transactions. Even our attention has been pornified – we jump from dopamine hit to dopamine hit, unable to focus on anything that doesn't provide instant gratification.

The result?

A generation of humans who are more connected than ever digitally, yet profoundly alone. We're drowning in information but starved for wisdom. We have thousands of online "friends" but no one to sit with us in our darkness. We're experts at presenting our lives but have lost the ability to actually live them.

The tech giants tell us they're "bringing the world closer together" while their algorithms drive us apart, fragmenting our attention and fracturing our sense of self. We're not using social media – it's using us, turning our anxiety, insecurity, and loneliness into quarterly profits. Every time you check your phone, you're voting for a world with less depth, less wisdom, and less genuine human connection.

The cruel joke is that this system diagnoses the pain it creates as mental illness, then sells you treatments that keep you just functional enough to keep consuming. Your depression isn't a disease – it's a rational response to a culture that has stripped life of its meaning. Your anxiety isn't a chemical imbalance – it's your soul's protest against a world that treats you like a digital commodity rather than a human being.

Want real mental health?

Start by reclaiming your humanity from those who've commodified it. Rediscover the wisdom traditions that taught humans how to make meaning from suffering. Build real communities that can hold both your joy and your pain. Because no amount of therapy or medication can heal what's fundamentally a crisis of culture and connection.

The Patient Factory: Manufacturing Mental Illness One Diagnosis at a Time

Your great-grandmother didn't have a therapist. And before you jump in with "Well, actually, people were just suffering in silence back then," let's look at the inconvenient data:

Despite all our "awareness," diagnoses, and treatments, mental health statistics have gotten dramatically worse with each generation. In her seminal 1968 work, "The Epidemiology of Depression," Charlotte Silverman unveiled a startling fact: community surveys from the 1930s and 1940s had found that fewer than 1 in 1,000 adults experienced an episode of clinical depression annually.

This figure, almost unbelievable by today's standards, paints a dramatically different picture of mental health in mid-20th century America. Most striking? Clinical depression in young people, at the time, almost unheard of.

Our great-grandparents weren't hiding their mental illness – we're manufacturing it on an industrial scale.

When life got hard, your great-grandmother didn't have a diagnosis, a treatment plan, or a mental health awareness hashtag. Yet somehow, that generation survived wars, depressions, losses, and hardships that would send most of us running for our therapy apps.

What did they have that we've lost?

Simple: they didn't have the luxury of viewing themselves as broken, and more importantly, they weren't surrounded by a billion-dollar industry determined to convince them they were. Their attention was directed toward life itself - not endless self-examination and pathology-hunting. They understood that challenges and dark emotions weren't symptoms of mental illness but essential threads in the tapestry of human experience. The very idea of medicalizing their natural responses to life would have been laughable. Their struggles had context, their pain had purpose, their darkness had meaning - not diagnostic codes.

Today's treatment culture isn't just failing to fix our mental health crisis – it's actively manufacturing it by creating an army of professional patients. Where your attention goes, your energy flows, and modern therapy keeps your attention firmly fixed on your "issues," your "diagnoses," and your perpetual need for "treatment."

If our great-grandparents' generation was so full of untreated mental illness, why are we the ones breaking down in record numbers despite unprecedented access to treatment?

The therapeutic machine wants you to believe that previous generations were just suffering in silence, that we're simply "detecting" mental illness that was always there. But the data tells a different story. Each new generation, despite more treatment, more medication, and more "awareness," reports worse mental health than the last. We're not detecting pre-existing illness – we're creating it through a culture that teaches people to view themselves as fundamentally broken.

Want actual mental health? Start by rejecting the identity of the perpetual patient. Stop letting the therapeutic industrial complex convince you that your natural responses to an insane world are symptoms of a disorder. Because sometimes the most mentally healthy thing you can do is refuse to believe you're mentally ill.

Remember: Where your attention goes, your energy flows. And if your attention is constantly flowing toward your "brokenness," don't be surprised when that's exactly what you become. Our great-grandparents understood something we've forgotten: human resilience isn't built through treatment – it's built through living.

The Real Prescription: Less Treatment, More Humanity

Imagine telling someone from 1924 about our "advanced" approach to mental health:

"So we sit in offices talking about our feelings with strangers we pay $200 an hour, take pills to change our brain chemistry, and spend our days staring at screens while avoiding real human contact. Oh, and 86% of us will be diagnosed with a mental illness by middle age."

They'd think we were the ones who needed help. And they'd be right.

We've created a world so disconnected from basic human needs that we need professionals to teach us how to be human. We've got meditation apps to help us breathe, therapy apps to help us feel, and medication to help us sleep – all while wondering why we're more anxious and depressed than ever.

Want real mental health? Here's the inconvenient truth: Your “depression” doesn't need more therapy – it needs more purpose. Your “anxiety” doesn't need better coping skills – it needs you to stop fearing fear. Your child's ADHD doesn't need more meth – it needs more movement, more nature, and less time staring at screens.

The solution isn't complicated, but it is uncomfortable:

• Stop treating your body like a fast-food dumpster and expecting your brain to function like a luxury car

• Start moving like your ancestors (who mysteriously managed to survive without Peloton)

• Build real communities (Sorry, your Instagram followers don't count)

• Face challenges instead of avoiding them (Yes, this means feeling uncomfortable sometimes)

• Create meaning through action, not introspection (Your purpose isn't hiding in a therapist's office)

But here's the part that really matters: Stop trying to adjust to a sick culture. When 86% of us are supposedly"mentally ill," maybe the illness isn't in our brains – it's in our society. Maybe we don't need better treatments. Maybe we need:

• Communities that share more than just WiFi passwords

• Education that builds humans, not test-taking machines

• Lives that have meaning beyond weekend Netflix binges

Your great-grandparents weren't superhuman. They just understood something we've forgotten: Humans need purpose, community, challenge, and connection like we need air and water. No amount of therapy can replace these fundamentals.

And here's the deeper truth: We're not just facing a mental health crisis – we're facing a spiritual crisis. Whether you believe in God, the Universe, or something greater than your Instagram feed, your ancestors understood that life's difficulties weren't symptoms to be medicated but opportunities for soul expansion. They knew that love – not "mental health awareness" – was the ultimate healer.

Think about it: What's more likely to heal your soul – a trending hashtag about mental health, or a genuine connection to something greater than yourself?

What's more powerful – a DSM diagnosis, or the understanding that your struggles have meaning?

Your "mental illness" might just be the last sane response left in a world that's lost its soul. Your healing won't come from learning to adapt to madness – it will come from having the courage to name it, reject it, and create something real instead. Stop paying someone to help you cope with the flooding while ignoring the broken pipes. True healing isn't found in adjusting to insanity – it's found in reconnecting with something greater than yourself and daring to believe your pain might be pointing toward purpose, not pathology.

Choose wisely.

Your soul, not just your mind, depends on it.