The phenomenon of “mental health disorder” has become so influential that, according to recent studies, every second person has—or will have—at least one diagnosed mental illness in their lifetime. This figure presents an existential and statistical impossibility: when more than half of the population is inflicted with psychological abnormality, the norm has become abnormal.
How can it be that the majority of us are sick? To answer this troubling question, some point to modern realities—social media, social isolation, environmental doom—while urging for societal change.
Others see an aggravating factor. Maybe, they argue, there isn’t a true rise in mental illness, but that one distinctive force is inflating what is a relatively stable emotional landscape—no worse or better than before.
In such a scenario, the seeming escalation of mental illness is largely due to an increase in the identification of psychiatric disorder, and not a rise in genuine illness. That is, people are not suffering more, but rather, normal suffering is, more and more, being called “sickness.”
