A familiar scene unfolds in therapy offices every day.
Someone arrives exhausted. They feel anxious much of the time, lonely even when surrounded by people, and chronically uncertain about whether they are living the right life. They may be functioning—working, paying bills, meeting responsibilities—but doing so requires constant effort. They feel as if they must continually monitor themselves: their emotions, their productivity, their relationships, even their sense of identity.
Therapy usually begins by asking how this person might better regulate themselves. They may learn techniques for calming their nervous system, reframing thoughts, or managing emotional reactions. Often it explores more deeply, revealing self-defeating beliefs and attempting to change them. These strategies can help, and many people do experience relief. But sometimes, even if there is meaningful progress, something remains unresolved. The underlying strain never quite disappears.
It isn’t a leap to suggest that across large swaths of the population, there exists a persistent sense of wrongness—an irritant that abrades the psyche no matter how a person attempts to resolve it.
What if that irritant is the experience of a profound misunderstanding about what we believe we are? What if therapy doesn’t target optimal mental health but optimal function in a role people were never designed to occupy?
This article argues that much modern distress may not originate primarily within individuals at all, but from a deeper conflict between the kind of person modern society requires and the conditions human beings actually need in order to remain psychologically stable.
The Modern Model of the Self
Modern culture tends to imagine a healthy adult as someone who manages themselves internally.
A modern person primarily regulates their emotions privately, makes rational decisions, stays productive, and functions independently inside large institutions. Distress is usually framed as a problem of internal management: difficulty controlling thoughts, impulses, moods, or behaviors.
People often pride themselves on how well they manage these expectations. To handle one’s feelings, to keep it together, to choose responsibly, to contribute, to be in control. These are some of the highest goods in the modern world.
They may also be among the most destructive.
There’s a question which is rarely asked and when it’s asked, it’s often asked quietly, to people one already trusts to take it seriously. It isn’t “how does one live a happy life?” It isn’t “What am I doing wrong?” It sits below these questions. It asks about reality itself.
What if the very things we aspire to be are not natural but socially constructed? What if what we are proud of accomplishing is effectively warping our organic shape to fit a socially constructed notion of the self?
The question isn’t complex, but it hides in the background like the set on which we play out our lives. People rarely scrutinize the wooden planks of the stage or the curtain as it rises and falls. Yet the structure of the stage itself has not gone entirely unnoticed. Psychologist Philip Cushman famously argued that modern culture produces what he called an “empty self,” a person shaped by historical forces rather than by timeless human nature.
This article suggests that not only is that the right place to scrutinize, it may be the source of suffering people struggle to name and rarely escape.
To understand, it’s necessary to look back at the human design and how the idea of what we are changed until what we need and what we aspire to are in direct conflict.
Regulation Was Once Social
For most of human history, people lived in small, interdependent communities. Anthropologists such as Sarah Hrdy and Christopher Boehm describe these environments as high-feedback social worlds.
Individuals were embedded in daily relationships with people who knew them intimately. Emotional life unfolded within dense networks of kinship, shared labor, and collective ritual. The boundaries between one person’s internal state and another’s were not sharply defined.
Regulation did not occur privately inside isolated individuals. It occurred through interaction.
When someone felt overwhelmed, others were nearby to respond. When a person struggled, the community absorbed part of the emotional burden. Identity itself emerged through continuous feedback from others rather than through solitary self-definition. Meaning and purpose existed in supporting the group itself and were externalized through rituals, myths and ceremonies.
In such environments, emotional stability was not something each person had to maintain alone. It was distributed across the group.
Human nervous systems evolved within these relational conditions.
The Civilizational Shift
Over the past several thousand years, the organization of human life changed profoundly.
Agriculture allowed populations to grow. Surplus production enabled specialization of roles. Large societies emerged that had to coordinate the behavior of thousands or millions of people who would never know each other personally.
Bureaucracies, markets, and institutions replaced the intimate feedback systems of small communities.
This transformation did not simply change how people worked. It changed the psychological environment in which human beings lived.
In large societies, emotional expression must often be contained for systems to function predictably. Institutions rely on individuals who can regulate themselves privately, follow rules consistently, and maintain productivity regardless of internal state.
Over time, these demands encouraged a different cultural model of the self: the autonomous individual who manages their own emotional life and functions reliably within large systems.
Traits that made people effective participants in modern civilization gradually became redefined as psychological health.
The Narrowing of “Normal”
Modern psychology and psychiatry emerged within this civilizational framework. As a result, definitions of mental health often reflect the behavioral requirements of large institutions.
One way this appears is through the descriptive logic of diagnosis.
Modern societies tend to defines normal functioning as falling within a relatively narrow band of expression—there are only so many ways a person can behave, speak, or even feel which are considered appropriate or healthy. Falling outside this narrow slice of the full spectrum of ways of being has historically meant exclusion or treatment. So, the individual is highly motivated to behave within that narrow slice. When they find it difficult, individuals often self-select to seek out assistance. Why can’t I do it? Why am I unhappy? Why am I anxious? Why do I fail at being what I was taught to be? Recently, small increases in the space of acceptability have emerged under the banner of neurodiversity.
But human neurodiversity is far broader than what that term sanctions.
Throughout history, individuals with unusual perceptual, emotional, or cognitive patterns have played numerous distinct roles within their communities. To choose an obvious example: in some cultures, people with heightened sensitivity, visionary experiences, or altered states of consciousness were recognized as healers, shamans, or spiritual intermediaries.
In modern societies, the same traits are often interpreted through a diagnostic lens.
The point is not to discount legitimate psychological distress. Many forms of suffering are deeply painful and require compassionate care. But there is a wide and unacknowledged range of human neuro-phenotypes, the different kinds of minds that naturally occur because at some point in the distant past, they had real utility. Most of these would be considered deviant or problematic today because what modern culture recognizes as acceptable has become remarkably narrow. Psychology and the behavioral health field were not exempt.
The individuals who fall outside that central slice may not simply be malfunctioning. They may represent forms of mind that no longer fit easily within the demands of contemporary institutions.
Much more commonly, though, even those who are capable of meeting the expectations of the modern notion of self don’t avoid significant distress. Whether from existential anxiety, nervous system learning, attachment styles, beliefs and strategies which were useful in surviving an early environment but now persevere on their own, so many people who seek treatment are implicitly asking of the therapist: “I can’t resolve this on my own, can you partner with me, guide me, teach me?” They are asking for what never needed asking for throughout most of human history.
And they are not asking for just any kind of relief. They are asking for the relief which allows them to be the self-contained, rational actor who manages responsibilities primarily independently. They are not asking to be healthy humans, they are asking to be competently modern.
Psychology’s Cultural Inheritance
Because psychology developed within modern society, it often treats the autonomous, self-regulating individual as its basic unit of analysis.
When distress appears, the question becomes: what went wrong, and how can a single professional who provides a mere hour of support per week guide this person to relief? The assumption that a person can manage the solution with a bit of strategic coaching is rarely challenged. A person is supposed to be capable of re-alignment at the deepest levels or finding perspectives which liberate. At the same time, the therapist is supposed to be sufficient to facilitate that change. By extension, psychology itself is supposed to have the solutions and to provide clinicians with the means to execute them. Each participant must meet an expectation which has never been reviewed, weighed, or assessed on a cultural scale. This leaves each to protect what it should be able to do in order to protect its own status: as a capable person, a competent clinician, a legitimate framework.
Yet these expectations often run against how we were designed to operate. It places its own understanding above the simple wisdom of asking “What did evolution provide to handle this situation?”
For some time, cultural critics have been aware of how our notions of beauty, success, intelligence or morality are socially constructed. It’s no great insight to suggest that these notions are not inherently shaped as we see them.
However, this very observant insight seems to primarily look outwards, accepting the viewer without question. But turn that tool back onto oneself and the shape of the person who uses it can’t bear the scrutiny.
The Experience of Structural Mismatch
When human beings attempt to live as modern selves inside large, impersonal systems, a recognizable pattern of experience often emerges.
Many people report a pervasive sense that something is fundamentally off. They may feel chronically lonely even when surrounded by others. They monitor themselves constantly, trying to maintain emotional stability and a coherent identity.
Belonging becomes fragile—something that must be earned through productivity, achievement, or self-sufficiency. It also feels partial—parts of themselves aren’t shared, are considered private, perhaps only to be revealed in therapy.
To compensate, people search for substitutes that can recreate the regulatory functions once provided by close communities. They may immerse themselves in work, pursue intense belief systems, seek belonging in activity-specific communities or seek connection in online networks. Others turn toward substances, compulsive behaviors, or simple refusal to acknowledge the signals coming from within.
Each strategy attempts to restore a sense of stability.
Yet the underlying strain persists.
If human nervous systems evolved expecting relational regulation, asking individuals to maintain emotional equilibrium in isolation may place them under continuous pressure. Asking a clinician to resolve that strain may then set both participants up for frustration. Clinicians have been given an impossible task—to alleviate the distress produced by functioning as the modern self that both client and counselor are striving to become.
Stabilizing the System
There is no one to blame. The therapist, the field of clinical psychology and the individual all developed while steeped in this notion of what a person should be capable of: self-regulation, rational choice, agency, forward motion and a positive attitude. The field teaches how to do these things better, not how to break free of them. The therapist attempts to support the individual in successfully enacting these expectations by delivering on the models in the discipline. And the individual attempts to find a way to make these expectations feel right, even easy, because that’s how they were presented.
But if academic disciplines, clinicians, and the individual all reflect a construct of humanness which bears little resemblance to the shapes evolution molded us and our social ecology into, are we serving ourselves to continue to embrace that construct?
A Debate Already Underway
To be clear, these tensions are not entirely unknown within psychology.
Fields such as attachment theory, relational psychoanalysis, trauma studies, and community psychology have long emphasized the importance of social regulation. Researchers studying attachment and nervous system regulation—such as Allan Schore and Stephen Porges—recognize that feelings of safety arise through relationships rather than through purely internal processes.
But these perspectives still operate within a broader culture that treats the self-regulating individual as the normative model of adulthood.
As long as that assumption remains dominant, therapy will continue to focus primarily on helping individuals adapt to the environments that produce their distress.
Reopening the Question
If this tension is real, it changes what therapy is actually trying to accomplish.
If human regulation is fundamentally relational, then well-being cannot be reduced to insight, learning, growth, or individual coping strategies alone. It must also involve the conditions that allow people to experience meaningful connection, shared identity, and mutual support. And it must do this at the intensity and frequency which evolution designed people to need. Moving the notion of ordinary connection into the realm of what we might call intimacy—beyond the bounds of what feels socially safe, respectable, or appropriate—may be the direction holding the most promise.
For psychology, some clinicians are already moving in this direction. Approaches that emphasize relational repair, embodied experience, and community integration suggest that psychological healing may depend as much on social context as on individual insight. This is a beginning, but to avoid rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, the notions of what we are, what we need and what we are entitled to should face a thorough reconsideration through the lens of evolution. Natural selection built the system and how it operates. All we need to do is observe and accept what we see.
Many Americans do indeed feel that “there exists a persistent sense of wrongness.” They should not blame themselves but rather the country in which they live. It is very hard to be well while living in a society that is sick. America is a failed nation, as Wouter Kusters said in his Mad in America webinar. A sense of decay, decline and destruction pervades all of American society. There is no more forceful example of this than the man whom Americans chose to be their president. Please tell your children and grandchildren to learn foreign languages and consider emigration.
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Still, it is your personal responsibility, once you recognize how “sick” your society is, to do something about it. Simply blaming it will not make it go away.
And do you really think that other countries have escaped this fate? In most cases, they have simply fallen under attack earlier than we have.
Perhaps you have not considered the possibility that the U.S. has been singled out for attack because it is the most successful country on the planet. This would be a “logical” strategy for any criminal group.
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Would you mind explaining why you think the U.S. qualifies as the most “successful” country on the planet, given its grotesquely corrupt, inequitable, corporation-dominated political, legal, and economic system, its miserable healthcare, and its woeful educational standards, not to mention the widespread anomie and atomization?
No wonder the plethora of mental health “experts” find a vast market for their mind-numbing toxic substances and pseudo-scientific dogmas passed off as psychotherapy.
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Perception data can be found in a 2021 poll done by Gallup. According to one article: “The United States and Canada, not surprisingly, are among the countries people are most attracted to. Many of the other target countries are in Europe, while two are in the Middle East, two are in Asia, and two are in Australia/Oceania. Many are among the richest countries in the world, which tend to offer a relatively higher quality of life.”
We are talking about countries, not planets.
“…its grotesquely corrupt, inequitable, corporation-dominated political, legal, and economic system, its miserable healthcare, and its woeful educational standards, not to mention the widespread anomie and atomization…” describe most of this planet, not just the U.S. Still, certain countries, very much including the U.S., are seen as more desirable places to live in spite of the corruption, pollution, bad schools and social separation, I can sit in this room, look out my window, and see a scene presided over by a beautiful blue sky, that is relatively calm, unruined, and safe. Compared to some places on this planet, this place is a sort of heaven.
Further, we still benefit from a system of laws – not withstanding how under attack it is – that seeks to protect minority rights, give us fair trials, and not permit wanton destruction in our homes, streets and public places.
Further, our basically favorable environment here also attracts attacks from criminal elements, as they see us as potential rivals or enemies to their own activities. How many of our problems are the result of failures of our basic model, versus criminal attacks hoping to lower us to their level? The criminals, of course, will advocate for “revolution” rather than the suppression of their own activities. While, the honest – by and large – will advocate for the exact opposite.
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How nice that you have enough money to dwell in a bucolic bubble that is “relatively calm, unruined, and safe” with scenery presided over by “a beautiful blue sky.”
I myself, on the other hand, am moved by the fate of the countless millions of victims of an exploitative, rapacious economic system who have lost gainful employment as a result of outsourcing, who are forced to live from paycheck to paycheck if they are lucky even to hold a minimum-wage service job, who vegetate in cars and campers in shopping mall parking lots because they can’t find affordable decent housing, who barely subsist and die prematurely in polluted, crime-ridden sacrifice zones such as Camden, Detroit, Gary, and similar urban hellscapes, who have gone bankrupt for lack of medical insurance, who are unable to finance their children’s education without incurring an immense amount of debt, or who don’t have the wherewithal to hire a halfway competent lawyer to defend their consumer rights in a notoriously corrupt legal system that protects corporate interests.
To you such a society may be a “sort of heaven,” but the numerous people now fleeing from it in droves seem to think otherwise.
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I just think you are exaggerating the bad part of living in the U.S., Joel.
I live from paycheck to paycheck, too. But I am retired. Most of my life I volunteered for my church, so had no savings or pension as a result of my working life.
But my neighborhood is not getting bombed, there aren’t gangs of thieves roaming the streets, and a lot of people seem to be doing OK.
There are, of course, far too many people who are willing to accept deplorable behaviors among the professional classes. And this is particularly true of Medicine and even more true of Psychiatry.
But I would look to Psychiatry and the psychopathic mind for the source of our problems on Earth, not capitalism.
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Thinking the system is stable? Uniform acceleration as the speed of change? Or if unpacking the space by which one is experiencing the verb, across the engaged way of learning in therapy, then will the emergence of fresh understanding occur? What We, or I have been taught to be may not even resemble what I/We hope to become! Can there be time for understanding how and why better space is discovered, held by the various role players, even outside of the milieu?
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Mat
These are very important thoughts for all of us, not just those who are struggling. We are fighting a battle against capitalism, where we are all competing against each other and the capitalists are reducing us to commodities.
Mark Fischer writes in his excellent book “Capital Realism”,
“Capitalism promotes a culture of constant comparison, leading to feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt.”
“Capitalism thrives on our exhaustion and alienation, feeding off our insecurities and anxieties.”
“In capitalist society, the self is reduced to a commodity, just as all other aspects of life are commodified.”
“We are trapped in a cycle of work and consumption, constantly chasing after a fulfillment that capitalism promises but never delivers.”
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Choose your battles wisely!
What if the real enemy is criminality (psychopathy)? What if good capitalism could help you defeat it? It’s a long shot, but something to consider.
A lot of modern capitalists lament the corporate takeover, too. They know it is a lot more criminal than it is capitalist.
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I’d like to know exactly what you mean by “good capitalism.” How will it defeat “psychopathy,” which you also leave undefined?
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You can find decent definitions for psychopathy online. There is no need to re-define it here.
By “good” capitalism, I intend to convey the concept of business in all its activities carried out by decent honest people who care about their company, their co-workers, their customers, their investors (or people they owe money to) and the world and life at large.
I propose that the primary problem with all our “isms” is that they can be taken over and “practiced” by criminals (psychopaths). An honest economy and market system would force such people out of power, because they would run their businesses too poorly and destructively to gain support from honest people. We do not particularly have that situation currently. Even if honest people had the upper hand on Earth (which they still might), they need to be trained in how to handle criminals (psychopaths) when they run into them if they are going to be effective.
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There is no universally applicable definition of psychopathy, which, like all forms of so-called mental illness, is a culture-bound construct that evolves or disappears in accordance with changing mores. A cursory knowledge of cultural anthropology makes this fact abundantly clear.
As for the merits of capitalism and whether it can ever manifest in a “good form,” the manifold social, economic, psychological, and environmental harms arising from this exploitative system of wage slavery have been well documented by reputable scholars such as Richard Wolff, Harriet Fraad, Michael Hudson, and David Harvey.
Decent, honest, intelligent people can develop a far more humane alternative to the capitalist Moloch.
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Joel, I find this reply extremely unhelpful.
It doesn’t matter if the definitions of psychopathy are “universally applicable” or not. They exist and are usable. This requirement for totally acceptable and agreed-on definitions only prevents useful communication from occurring.
The definitions for “deceit” “stealing” “cheating” do not depend on mores. They only depend on a clear understanding of the words used. And these are the words used in describing psychopaths.
If you don’t really want to communicate about these things, then just don’t. But don’t hide behind a rejection of commonly accepted meanings for English words. Language is all we have to share our thoughts here. It is usable.
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Larry, if you think I’m exaggerating the plight of the precariat in the United States, I recommend a book that deals specifically with this subject:”Nickle and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich. Also worthwhile are podcasts by Ralph Nader and Michael Parenti, who shed light on the institutional, economic, and political structures that help maintain the status quo. Psychiatry, of course, is an integral part of this oppressive nexus, as is evident from the widespread drugging of schoolchildren in order to make them adjust more compliantly to the stultifying educational system.
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Absolutely! Your comment is beautiful. Gives me some hope in humanity. Everyone isn’t lost.
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Here we have another brave attempt to explain our problems with “regulation” as a distortion caused by the process of “civilization.”
Per the research I am aware of, the basic assumptions underlying this argument are incorrect.
That’s not to say that observed behaviors mentioned here don’t exist; they do.
But since this essay proposes a “long view” of the problem, I will propose the basics of my own “long view.”
Per certain research into Spiritual Memory (also known as past life recall), we did not evolve on Earth and in particular, our behavior patterns and personalities did not evolve here. If they did, it could be very valid to argue that our rapid “ascent” into organized, then industrialized, then technology-driven civilizations has left many of us behind.
But the research shows that most of us are from such civilizations. That in some ways explains why we were able to re-acquire the modern and “post-modern” patterns that are so common today. For those of us who arrived thousands of years ago, the long years of “tribal” life could be considered a sort of vacation, though it had its difficulties and frustrations. But those patterns were in no way innate or a product of “neurological evolution.” Though our bodies may not be optimum, they do come along for the ride. We “ride” through time with our minds – our memories – and return to bodies according to our desires, or the desires of our captors.
I would suggest that our biggest problem with “modern” life – much the same problem that brought many of us here (to Earth) in the first place – is that it is simply too oppressive. It does not allow us a sufficient degree of freedom. It does also tend to isolate us, so this is a factor. But tribal life could be very lonely, too. It’s just that modern life leans too hard on us, and demands too much uninspected obedience, which we know in our hearts is wrong. We knew it thousands of years ago, before we were sent here, and we know it now. We yearn for a world – a civilization – with a much better balance of barriers and freedoms. We yearn for a society that is free and just, not onerous and arbitrary.
The really “insane” in this piece are not ourselves. Sure we have mental and emotional problems. Sometimes they can be very great; overwhelming. But compared to the truly insane, our lives are picnics. Those ones are dominated by a spiritual sickness so deep and abiding that it has totally ruined their lives and set them on a steadfast path of punishing others into a similar sickness. We must learn to isolate those beings from us, and eventually to help them out of the pit they have fallen into. Meanwhile, one of the greatest and most frustrating hells has been to share this planet with them. Our captors don’t like them, either, which is why they are here. Here they serve a kind of purpose – to keep us endlessly distracted. We must rise above that distraction if we ever want to see stable improvement of life on Earth.
I know this story is unbelievable, but from what I can tell, it is true. So let’s stop chasing “solutions” that don’t work, and start exploring some that do.
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Larry, if psychiatry wants to be accepted as a legitimate branch of medical science, its terminology must have universal validity and applicability, otherwise it’s nothing but a jumble of wholly subjective, conflicting hypotheses.
As for the nature and definition of psychopathy, throughout history there have been numerous tribes and whole societies where stealing, deceit, exploitation, and overt violence were approved and widely practiced. Their concept of proper and laudable behavior certainly doesn’t mesh with yours.
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Tell me a little more about them, Joel. I’ve never heard of a society that could survive for any period of time without some sort of internal moral guidelines, even if they did not adhere to those guidelines outside of their group.
There have been several warrior-based societies. Or at least that’s how they are represented. But if they were biological societies, they had to make some sort of allowance for women and children. Such societies can survive based on their willingness to use extreme force externally. But internally? I’m not so sure.
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Several examples readily come to mind, including Nazi Germany, the USSR, and its satellite countries in Eastern Europe, where mass exploitation of the populace and both external and internal terror, coercion, and violence (in which the psychiatric establishment willingly took part) were integral features of the political and economic system.
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The concepts in this article aren’t new, but they remain timely. I did appreciate this piece.
Centuries ago, my profession of psychotherapy wouldn’t even have existed among my ancestors. It was occupied by elders and holistic healers that were part of the community. Now we labor more than we live. We buy more than we care for each other. We compete more than we communicate.
This is why I choose to be a leftist-liberationist psychotherapist; I base my work with clients in liberationist psychology and critical theory. I use these as my overarching philosophical frameworks. Everything else I use in treatment (CBT, Psychodynamic, Existential, Solution Focused models, etc.) is underpinned in questioning the capitalist/productivity -driven system we’re living in, as well as all of the demons that it feeds (sexism, racism, and all manner of bigotry).
Insofar as my clients, one of my new favorite questions to ask them is, “what do you long for?” I frequently ask myself this question, too. It’s a broad and telling question. If forces us to remember what it was that we wanted for ourselves as humans, before we were told that it wouldn’t be possible.
Are all psychotherapists “bad” for our mental health? I don’t think so. Are many of us brainwashed into to obediently condoning this realm by helping to metaphorically suture and duct tape clients minds into being just functional enough to get them back to work and coloring within the lines” of a system that is destroying our collective mental health as well as our collective consciousness? Damn right.
That said, we’re not all the same. Many of us are waking up, especially those of us who specialize in work with QTPOC populations. We’re highly aware of what whiteness and it’s systems of power-over, and ownership and productivity have done and continue to do to us.
Don’t blame (every) player, blame the game.
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You want to “liberate” us back into tribalism?
That isn’t our game, either. But I suppose it should be one valid choice.
I posit that our problems come from an imbalance of game conditions in favor of barriers, and an unawareness of who we really are and why we are here (on Earth). My big beef with Critical Theory is that it thinks we evolved here – same as the suppressive materialists tell us. And I’m afraid to tell you that that isn’t true.
Have you seen lately who is making real gains in the world of psychotherapy (for people who can afford it)? Steve Burgess and his group. And they practice past life recall techniques. And that puts them half way closer to the real answer than all the “compassionate” or instructive “therapies” that are around today.
Of course, there are a lot of people who shouldn’t really be in the system. And that’s the suppression part of life on Earth. People who have retained more spiritual beliefs are being targeted to be wiped out. But what is anyone doing trying to protect them with neo-Marxism? That’s not what they need. They need real support for the validity of their ancient beliefs, and better ways to make that work in the face of this corporate takeover.
I’m afraid that we find ourselves in Rome (to turn a phrase). So we need to learn how to play the games of Rome. If we can, we can make a space for ourselves to work against the criminality that has always been with us, though today it might seem shiny and new. That criminality brought us here to this prison planet, and we will have to defeat it if we ever want to be free again.
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“ Of course, there are a lot of people who shouldn’t really be in the system.”
It must really suck (for a lot of people) to be born into, and indoctrinated to live within, a system they really shouldn’t be in.
Our systems of governance are backwards. Conceptually. They’re backward-thinking, not forward-thinking.
They were set up by people long ago to carry forward—so the systems endure.
But the people who established these systems long ago didn’t have the benefit of the knowledge of history and nature and complex systems that has developed since.
The people with the best ideas of how it should be in 100 years haven’t yet been born. But those ideas will take a back seat to the ignorant, selfish ideas that were codified into our systems of governance established by people long ago who literally didn’t know what they were doing.
Our systems don’t produce better results because they can’t. They’re producing exactly the results they were effectively designed to produce—whether intentionally or not.
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I was referring to the Mental Health System, Dan.
Sorry if that didn’t come across clearly.
There are a LOT of people who should NOT be in the “mental health” system. They would do fine with no “treatment” of any kind.
They are being pushed into the “mental health” system with the assistance of the criminals who run that system, and who run this planet. If we could kick those criminals out, I propose, the conversation would change a lot.
The most mentally unhealthy people I am aware of on this planet are running what they call “mental health” today. If THEY were the patients, as they properly should be, then the conversation would become: What do we do with these fools? Is there some way to rehabilitate them? Would that be worth the effort?
Instead we waste all our energy trying to figure out how to “treat” people who don’t even belong in the system. They are feeling bad because they just got robbed or assaulted by someone who WAS really crazy. They don’t need “mental health treatment.” They need the crazy people off the streets and adequately restrained from doing further harm.
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I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t think it’s just a problem within the psych system. I think it reflects something deeper about how we’ve organized life. The criminality you’re pointing to is a systemic result.
Systemically, we’re inside out and backwards. Is it because we’re inside out that we’re backwards, or are we backwards because we’re inside out?
Our systems of governance are coercive and self-preserving, yet we look to “leadership” within those systems to lead us out of oppression.
Then we look to a “mental health” system to fix distress that arises from the oppressive, loveless conditions people are living in.
If our way of living were cooperative and guided by a shared sense of fairness—something closer to love—each person would be the “leader” of their own actions.
Instead, people are conditioned to look outside themselves for guidance. As followers, they do what their leaders tell them. What should arise from internal, natural motivations gets redirected and managed externally.
The systems of concentrated power that govern human life are rooted in the past. They look backward, not forward. They were set up to endure, and so they carry forward ways of thinking and organizing that don’t reflect what we now understand about the world, human beings, relationships, or complex systems.
What we are becoming is shaped by those systems, rather than by natural ones. We were designed for one, but forced to live in the other.
You can see the effects in something as basic as community. The idea has become diffused. It used to mean people who lived together, shared life together, and—if things were working—shared values.
Now, to find “your people,” you often have to look outside the place where you actually live. People go online to find support and connection that don’t exist in the communities they inhabit.
Our identities are naturally formed in relation to the people around us—the ones we live with and are known by. When that grounding disappears, and we’re instead asked to identify with something abstract—like a system, a category, or a vacuous national identity—we’re left trying to form a sense of self around something that doesn’t actually know us.
We’re systemically left to individually struggle with an unnatural identity crisis.
So when people end up in the “mental health” system, I don’t think the first question is whether they belong there or not. I think the deeper question is: what kind of system is so upside down, inside out, and backwards that it produces so much distress in the first place?
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Dan, who is “we?”
I have not fully researched the origins of the psychopathic personality.
But I know it did not originate on Earth, and therefore is not a result of any Earth “system.”
Come out of theory for a minute if you can, and give me some examples of what your are talking about.
You can find some examples of what I am talking about in the videos of Steve Burgess. I have even posted one of the chapters from his recent book on my blog, as he gave me permission.
I am not myself a researcher but only a student of some who are. Where do you get your ideas? What research supports them?
We are talking here about real problems that we would like to actually solve some day. So we need to look for results that indicate this is possible. The people I follow have gotten such results. Is that also true of the people you follow?
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Larry, you asked who I mean by “we.” I mean people living within these systems—anyone whose life is shaped by them, whether they recognize it or not. The broader systems governing life, but also including the psych system, which operates more as damage control necessitated by the effects of those larger systems.
When you say, “We are talking here about real problems that we would like to actually solve some day. So we need to look for results that indicate this is possible,” I’m curious: who you mean by “we”? The same people?
You ask about “the people I follow”—and that’s where I think we may be approaching this differently.
If the goal is real change, I’m not sure following others is the path to it. That’s actually part of what I’m getting at. People are conditioned to look outside themselves for answers—for leaders, experts, or authorities to tell them what’s true and how to live.
But if change is the objective, it seems like it would have to come from people thinking, observing, and understanding for themselves—not just adopting the views of others, no matter how compelling they may seem.
I’m not really drawing from any one person or school of thought. I’m looking at patterns—how systems function at scale, how people behave within them, and what kinds of outcomes they consistently produce.
When large systems consistently produce distress, disconnection, and a need for intervention, that suggests something structural—not something external to the system or imported from somewhere else.
So I’m less interested in who to follow, and more interested in understanding the conditions that produce the outcomes we’re seeing.
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Dan, my “we” in this case are the people who come here to this website; the people who care about this issue and would like to do something about it.
I follow people who are doing original research in various areas. Their work interests me. I don’t “follow” them in the sense of obeying their commands or something. Almost all of them remind us that in the end we have to make up our own minds about these things.
Unless you are all-seeing and all-knowing, you are “following” someone whether you like it or not. Otherwise, how can you get a viewpoint that is expansive enough to enable you to understand anything in a big-picture way?
I’m not saying you are, but some people are fixated in coming up with their own answers. They won’t even bother to learn from people who have obviously been active in this area, and perhaps produced unique material based on careful research. But I am very aware of my own limitations in what I can personally experience, so I don’t try to block others out if they seem serious and honest. There aren’t really very many of them, it seems.
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Larry, I understand what you’re saying about learning from others, and I don’t disagree with that. No one is all-seeing or all-knowing, and we’re all exposed to ideas that shape how we think.
But I think there’s a distinction between being influenced by ideas, accepting them as being true, and following people.
My perspective isn’t coming from any one source or authority. If it were, maybe I’d then be a follower of somebody.
My worldview has been shaped over time through experience, observation, and exposure to a wide range of thinkers—philosophers, scientists, and others who have tried to understand how the world works and how people think and behave.
I can appreciate insights from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Locke, Descartes, Marx, Popper, Russell, Chomsky, Dennett—even the teachings attributed to Jesus—without considering myself a “follower” of any of them.
To me, calling that “following” blurs something important. It suggests alignment with a person, rather than engagement with ideas. It suggests I understand and hold their thoughts and beliefs—perhaps in their entirety. And if not, I’m a partial follower?
A physicist who accepts E=mc² isn’t a “follower” of Einstein, and someone who understands gravity isn’t a “follower” of Newton. They’re working with ideas that have proven useful in understanding the world and explaining phenomena.
But even when someone has spent years researching a topic, that doesn’t mean they have an exclusive grasp on truth. Lived experience has a way of imparting knowledge, too. Researchers have developed valuable perspectives, but their conclusions are still open to interpretation, limitation, and error.
That’s why I’m less interested in who to follow, and more interested in understanding patterns—how people and systems behave, and what kinds of outcomes they consistently produce. I was a management systems consultant for decades, so I know something (not everything) about systems.
For me, the goal isn’t to adopt someone else’s conclusions. If there were a single answer that was clear and acceptable to everyone, wouldn’t we all already know it?
It makes me wonder whether the constant search for a definitive, one-size-fits-all answer is part of the problem. Not because truth doesn’t exist, but because in some important ways, what we take to be true is shaped by perspective, experience, and context.
So in that sense, at least in some matters, truth has a relative aspect—reasonable people can look at the same situation and come to different conclusions. In some ways, what’s true depends on where you’re standing. Or where you’re coming from.
That might naturally vary from community to community were our nation not smeared with that thick layer of uniform, industrially-produced Velveeta that we call freedom.
Kierkegaard said truth is subjective. Or else we arrive at objective uncertainty. Are we willing to explore what this unresearched idea means, or do we dismiss it because we “don’t follow”?
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Sometimes what we call truth isn’t a property of reality, but a matter of convention. For example, in some countries, it’s “true” that you drive on the right side of the road; in others, it’s “true” that you drive on the left.
Both are true within their systems, even though they contradict each other. The difference isn’t in reality itself, but in the social agreement people operate under.
It makes me wonder how often something similar is happening in other areas—where what’s taken to be “true” about a person or a situation or a “reality” is less a direct reflection of reality, and more a product of the system of beliefs, assumptions, and interpretations surrounding it.
Once a certain interpretation takes hold, it becomes the framework through which everything is seen. And within that framework, it feels like truth—even if it began as just one way of looking at things.
Debating the one universal truth about which side of the road to drive a car, for example, may seem like an argument that once settled would arrive at “truth”. But in reality, it’s just a pissing contest. There is no universal truth to the matter, it’s a matter of convention.
None of the governing “isms”—capitalism, communism, socialism, fascism—are “true” in the way a law of nature is true. They’re frameworks—systems people create to organize life. Personally, I think they’re all bad ideas—overgrown systems of centralized, concentrated power. Designed to control/govern people as masses.
We can analyze them, measure their outcomes, and argue about which “is best”. But that doesn’t make any of them universally “true.” It just means they’re different conventions, built on different assumptions about how people should live together.
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Larry, about problem-solving:
The WHO and UN recognize that social, cultural, and systemic conditions play a major role in producing what are labeled as mental health problems.
I’m glad researchers are beginning to recognize that a major cause of mental distress lies in broader social and systemic conditions. It’s a conclusion I’ve been arriving at for decades.
Systemic problems won’t be solved as long as people stay stuck asking whether the problems are systemic. Still looking for causes other than systemic ones (like biomedical ones), the question leaves room to keep addressing symptoms without ever confronting their cause.
That’s why so many solutions fail—they don’t actually address what’s producing the results.
If people want to solve systemic problems, the question has to change. They need to turn the corner from asking “Are these results systemic?” or “Is the system producing these results?” to “How is the system producing these results?” or “What about our system is causing these results?”
It seems to me that our (human-made) systems of governance conflict with the natural biological systems within each person. Instead of working with how people are wired to relate, cooperate, and respond, they impose structures that override those internal processes. As if those establishing systems of concentrated power governance think they know better than Mother Nature.
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OK, Dan. This is just too much think-think for me.
I follow these people’s research. I study Hubbard and have not finished that yet. The others are still actively producing material. So I need to follow them or I will miss their newest discoveries. You don’t need to follow someone who is dead and gone, you just have to study their writings if they seem interesting to you.
And that’s all. No more complicated than that.
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Hi Dinandrea,
I appreciated your reply. I just wanted to say that I tried my best to make a structural argument, not a moral one. I don’t blame anyone. I don’t think anyone deliberately chose where our culture went or what an accurate definition of “human” is. So I agree with your observations, I just wanted to draw a distinction between a “right” vs “wrong” claim and a structural claim in which we’ve all been passively influenced, whether it’s the influence on the field of psychology, the role of the therapist or the individual. I don’t see intention anywhere in the process. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t see harm. There’s plenty of harm. I would just argue that blame is unproductive and a misreading of causation. Rather than choice, I think a better framing is forces acting within a complex open dynamic system which we are all influenced by and then become part of the influencing in turn.
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I agree there’s a great deal of harm in how things currently operate.
My intent in the piece was to stay away from moral or political critique and instead describe the underlying structure that produces these outcomes. From that view, clinicians, clients, and the system itself are all shaped by the same developmental and cultural forces, rather than acting as fully independent agents.
Because of that, I see blame as a misreading of the process. Taking action to reduce harm is still essential, but understanding the forces at work provides a more useful map for where and how to intervene.
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-Mat, to my mind this is a vital contribution to the systematic negation (of some) of the social factors that can and often do compromise one’s mental health. Unfortunately, I feel the need to take you to task surrounding the premise, as intimated in the title and otherwise averted throughout, that “therapy treats the individual”. First off…if one’s “therapy” is effectively relegating a client to a social construct-viz. a plethora of overt and covert processes that usurp the client’s awareness of these myriad forms of “objectification”, thereby foreclosing a more “conscious relationship” between our shared socio-political and other structural dictates, with that of their respective stuck and variously alienated inner world, then it seems to me therapy is not treating the individual. And though this may very well be the thrust of your article, no mention of the DSM, specifically its enormous reach to “systematically” foreclose ‘any substantive consideration’ of the structural-social factors you’ve elucidated well here-as praxis in the vast majority of “therapeutic settings”, is a curious omission for me.
And maybe fields such as “attachment theory”, relational psychoanalysis, trauma studies, and community and critical psychology, etc., are making an occasional appearance in the therapy room-at least for those who can “afford” such rarified therapist? But overall I see no evidence to suggest todays therapist have either been educated, trained, or otherwise have made a personal counter-educational effort to utilize these and other modes of therapeutic processes; ergo they rarely, rarely occur. Because, lets face it, the sine qua non role of the credentialed PMC is to manage State systems of power and corporate wealth, mental health clinicians but the “downstream managing system” to keep the wheels of our collective political unconscious moving forward in illusion, corruption, exploitation, and variously refined violation and violence. And there will never be a shortage of mental health professionals either willing or obtusely relegated to subordinate their thinking-moral-person to the demands of State and corporate power.
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A very clear assessment.
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Hi Kevin,
I think we’re largely aligned on the structural tension.
My aim was to stay at the level of system dynamics rather than move into moral or political critique. The argument is that these are outputs of a shared developmental and cultural system shaping all participants, not intentional positioning.
From that perspective, things like the DSM and clinical power dynamics are downstream expressions, not the level I was focusing on here.
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Hey Mat,
Yea…my comment was a little heavy handed, and failed miserably to convey my appreciation for your many important observations and insights. I should have just written that “if every clinician availed these social and existential factors in their therapeutic praxis, it would make for a perceptibly improved world”, and left it there. I apologize if I intimated that you were somehow supposed to cover all these bases in a 2000-word article! Sometimes I get a little stuck in my disillusionment, and thus, off-track with my responses; and this was definitely one of those times!
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Natural selection is misunderstood and misconstrued.
Every generation has its Zeitgeist.
Take money (item numbers, benefits , insurance; and greed and opportunism) out of the equation and the common denominator becomes that nobody would bother to help for the simple sake of being helpful.
Governments, Experts, Intellectuals, Tertiary educated elites, govern and rule the lesser folk.
Aside from the words themselves, there is no true, genuine, authentic, honest equity and or equality.
Government Ministers are handing out hundreds of millions of dollars as encouragement for people to behave in civil and courteous ways and to stop bullying. Imagine that. No need. It’s a fact.
If we are not paid, we won’t do it. Societies created and engineered by the well-heeled to suit their desires of us and them, superior and inferior, capable and incapable, welcome and excluded, and so on.
The right premise has to lead the right thinking for the right way.
If an advantage can be gained, why not drug your child. Fee relief. Accommodations. Extra assistance. Special considerations. Exemptions. Extra payments. Why not? What’s the harm? Right?
Departments and institutions of and for Health and Education are rife with bullying. All good – just don’t get caught.
Keep changing Policies, keep changing Regulations, keep updating and or changing Laws. Shuffle those words, shuffle the language, rearrange those metaphorical deck chairs. A sinking ship is a sinking ship regardless of how it is delayed or prolonged.
Evolution is the now. Trauma is history (without any denial) and does not need to be told about attachment and abuse and neglect and it certainly doesn’t need a therapist as a substitute parent or substitute anything else. That’s just another form of abuse. One that makes a financial living from pseudo-help.
Not-for-profits are greedy.
Charities are greedy.
Corporations and Institutions are greedy.
Cavemen, sabre-toothed tigers, survival of the fittest, are not relevant any more.
Pretty much everything on the face of the planet (and now add outer space), has been bastardised (modern meaning) by fads and trends and innovations and dishonest and deceit.
Who plays it straight any more? Maybe newborns for a very short while.
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Very interesting article. I think it sums up a lot of profound ideas about our culture, our sense of self, of attachment and community, and care.
It’s still baffles me how most people are blind to this point of view, this critical lens.
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When you start worrying that someone might have a mental illness or a breakdown, it affects how you treat them. That alone can be enough to create the very reaction you’re afraid of. Sometimes the breakdown isn’t coming from the person—it’s coming from how they’re being treated.
When the person goes to therapy, is this dynamic alleviated? Or is it reinforced?
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It is bad.
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