In the present society, mental health is being elevated to the new key currency of individual functionality. What appears to be progress – the destigmatisation of depression, burnout, and anxiety disorders – is increasingly developing into a double-edged phenomenon: The constant emphasis on mental vulnerability paradoxically produces a collective psychological fragility.
Psychological robustness (that is, the ability to endure internal tensions, ambivalences, and emotional crises) is systematically being replaced by a mindset that labels any deviation from the mental ideal state as a disorder requiring treatment. This leads to a culture of hyperdiagnosis, where the question is no longer whether one is mentally suffering, but what from.
This medicalisation of everyday life is reinforced by an economically driven health system that thrives on diagnoses rather than on tolerance of ambivalence. The normalisation of psychological discomfort, for instance, as a result of meaninglessness, social conflicts, or existential fears, gives way to an ideological notion of permanent mental hygiene.
Those who are sad are considered depressed.
Those who are exhausted become a burnout case.
Those who doubt need coaching.
As a result, the ability for mental self-regulation (once central to maturing) is externalised.
Therapy replaces self-responsibility.
Trigger warnings replace resilience.
Self-care becomes a moralising substitute action, while the competence to constructively transform inner conflicts withers away.
Empirically, it is also evident: The number of diagnosed mental disorders is rising rapidly, without the actual environmental conditions worsening to the same extent. What increases is the sensitivity to stress and the expectation to “function” – always, everywhere, under all circumstances. The psychological target state becomes an authoritarian ideal.
The result: A society with more and more therapeutic offerings, but ever less inner stability. A culture where psychological terms circulate inflationarily, while the ability to live with pain, failure, and ambiguity is systematically unlearned. Idealising mental health produces psychological fragility.
Because: Mental health is not a goal, but a by-product of psychological maturation.
And maturation means: Being able to suffer without breaking from it.
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