We have never talked more about mental health.
Yet sometimes it feels as if we have never considered ourselves more psychologically unwell.
Burnout. Depression. ADHD. Anxiety. Trauma.
Something important has changed. Much of it is progress. But I am no longer convinced that all of it is.
We have become much better at recognizing psychological suffering. I wonder whether we are also becoming worse at tolerating it.
I see the other extreme regularly in my work. Executives whose bodies have been telling them for months that something is seriously wrong. They barely sleep, have lost their joy, their relationships are eroding, and they still tell me: “I’m fine.”
High performers can become frighteningly good at overriding themselves. I have seen people turn the ability not to feel themselves into a professional competence.
But another pattern increasingly bothers me.
People listening to themselves so intensely that every difficult inner experience seems to need a psychological name.
Our psychological vocabulary has expanded enormously. That has helped people recognize real disorders, seek help and speak about suffering without shame.
But research is also beginning to explore the shadow side: whether greater mental-health awareness can sometimes lead us to interpret milder forms of distress as psychopathology, and what happens when diagnostic labels begin to influence how we understand ourselves.
It is an uncomfortable possibility.
Because a label can help us understand what we experience. It can open the door to treatment. It can be an enormous relief.
It can also become part of the story we tell ourselves about who we are and what we can tolerate.
Thirty years of meditation have made me more sensitive to suffering, not less. They have also made me skeptical of endless self-interpretation.
The deeper the practice goes, the less it is about analyzing yourself. You learn to experience thoughts and emotions more precisely while identifying with them less.
You can take an experience completely seriously without making an identity out of it.
That has changed how I look at both extremes.
The executive who feels terrible and tells himself to ignore it, and the person who experiences distress and immediately concludes that something must be wrong with them, seem to be doing opposite things.
I am no longer sure they are.
One overrides the experience. The other risks turning it into an identity.
We need to take mental illness seriously. We also need to stop pathologizing every difficult part of being human.
Grief hurts. Failure hurts. Rejection hurts. Uncertainty can be frightening. There are periods when life exhausts us, overwhelms us or simply feels terrible.
Some of that needs treatment.
Some of it is life.
And I worry that in our understandable desire to suffer less, we may be forgetting how much psychological maturity is required to live through what cannot, and should not, be diagnosed away.