Could Our Preoccupation With Mental Health Be Part of the Problem?
Key Takeaways
- •Greater attention to mental health has reduced stigma and increased access to professional help for some people.
- •The article warns that constant focus on mental health can make people more sensitive to ordinary emotional experiences.
- •It says clinical language is increasingly being applied to normal feelings such as grief, burnout, and loneliness.
- •The broader definition of disorder described as “concept creep” may cause people to pathologize everyday life.
- •The boundary between serious illness and normal difficulty can influence self-understanding and the use of mental-health language in workplaces, schools, and social settings.
Could our preoccupation with mental health be part of the problem? In some ways, encouraging people to think and talk more about their mental health is a good thing. There is now less stigma around mental illness, and more people who can benefit from professional help are getting it. But there is also reason to believe that efforts to bring attention to mental health struggles are inadvertently making us more vulnerable to psychological distress.
Start with our expanding conception of mental illness. The more fixated we are on mental health, the more sensitive we become to anything that might qualify as a symptom, and the more we use clinical language to describe normal emotional experiences like grief, burnout, and loneliness. This broadening of what we think counts as a disorder — known as concept creep — encourages us to pathologize ordinary life and see ourselves as mentally unhealthy. That matters because the boundary between serious illness and everyday difficulty helps shape how people interpret their own feelings, when they seek help, and how widely mental-health language is applied in workplaces, schools, and social settings.
Here is more from Clay Routledge at the NYT.
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