In the current society, mental health is elevated to the new leading currency of individual functionality. What appears to be progress — the de-stigmatization of depression, burnout, and anxiety disorders — is increasingly evolving into a double-edged phenomenon: The constant emphasis on mental vulnerability paradoxically produces a collective psychological fragility.
Psychological robustness (that ability to endure inner tensions, ambivalences, and emotional crises) is systematically replaced by a mindset that marks any deviation from the ideal mental state as a disorder requiring treatment. Thus arises a culture of hyper-diagnosis, where the question is no longer whether one suffers mentally, but from what.
This medicalization of everyday life is intensified by a health system driven by economic motives, which thrives on diagnoses rather than tolerance of ambivalence. The normalization of mental discomfort, stemming from emptiness of meaning, social conflicts, or existential fears, gives way to an ideological concept of permanent psychological hygiene.
Those who are sad are considered depressed.
Those who are exhausted become burnout cases.
Those who doubt require coaching.
As a consequence, the ability for mental self-regulation (once the core of growing into adulthood) is externalized.
Therapy replaces self-responsibility.
Trigger warnings substitute resilience.
Self-care becomes a moralizing substitute action, while the skill to constructively transform inner conflicts diminishes.
Empirically, it is also evident: The number of diagnosed mental disorders is rising rapidly, without the actual environmental conditions deteriorating to the same extent. What increases is the sensitivity to stress and the expectation to
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