It may be that I am impossibly defensive, but I’ve always struggled with the idea that ‘mental health’ means there’s a fixed state of normality, and any deviation from it is some kind of faulty wiring. There is suffering, and there are cures, yes. But the notion that panic, hallucinations, sadness or coping mechanisms all point to some fundamental brain imbalance has always irked me – indeed, this theory is being increasingly debunked. Sure, in times of crisis, I’ll lean on that model as a way of articulating who I am in language another person might understand. After all, it’s a lot more in the common parlance to say ‘I have a phobia of cliffs’ than to try and explain it in quasi-mythological, psychoanalytic or risk-averse terms.
But the suggestion that there is something wrong with me makes my ears prick up and my words come out with a hiss. I’ve never felt like there was anything wrong with me. I’ve suffered, yes, and I’d like to suffer less, but it has always felt as though these symptoms are articulating something of who I am. To think of them as inappropriate feels so moralistic; it stings. So, is there any logic in my resistance, or am I simply another self-sabotager?
The idea that mental health is bound to morality is one of the West’s oldest alliances. Aristotle spoke of eudaimonia(flourishing) as the ideal state, achievable only through virtue. In this frame, morality is the precondition for psychical harmony. If you are suffering, it is because you are not living in accordance with reason and virtue. Thus, the idea that inner harmony is the “natural” human condition and that symptoms signal its rupture runs deep.
In the Victorian era, deviation from the norm was often met with suspicion, whether it was emotional, sexual or melancholic.
We often like to think we’ve moved on, but recent events show how powerfully this religious morality still shapes the West. Those of us on the left might think we’ve evolved beyond it, but it resurfaces in our wellness complex, too. Instead of serving God, we serve the demand to “be our best selves!” The logic is the same: strive for purity, and if you deviate, you have failed. Journaling, boundary-setting, self-optimising: what was once sin is now self-sabotage. Either way, you’re to blame. And if none of that works, well, then there must be something really wrong with you.
The medical model did seem, for a while, to offer some reprieve. By referring to chemical imbalances, we shifted toward an ‘it’s not your fault, it’s just bad luck’ model of mental health, echoing how we once viewed physical health. But nowadays, those moral ideals have crept back in and colonised our physical health too: if you are unwell, it’s because you failed to eat cleanly, to manifest balance, to manage your stress. I find it so absolutely boring that not only does the demand for perfection remain intact, but now I have to pay €12.99 a month for its app.
Psychoanalysis, of course, offers a radically different account of the subject. Freud’s scandal was not only that he spoke of sex as fundamentally weird for all of us, but also that he took suffering seriously. From hysteria and obsession to phobia and anxiety, Freud saw these symptoms not as malfunctions nor signs of moral weakness but as formations of the unconscious, i.e., meaningful messages articulating something about ourselves, even when we have no idea what we are saying.
This is an uncomfortable thought, for me as much as anyone. The idea that a symptom is ‘speaking’ implies that instead of passively experiencing one’s brain chemistry, you are called to take a position toward your subjectivity, caught as it is in history, trauma, desire, and contradiction. But to be clear, this does not mean the symptom should be acted on or believed literally. In fact, it’s the exact opposite; it’s understood as a veiled and encrypted message to be interpreted, not a guide to behaviour.
The difficulty here is then that, against this moral backdrop, responsibility is almost always confused with blame. To say ‘your symptom speaks of you’ is easily misheard as ‘you are bad at your core.’ But Freud’s move was precisely the opposite. Psychoanalysis works to return agency to the subject. In that way, it argues that suffering is not a flaw, but an articulation of something that could underpin all the ways you are strange and weird and uniquely you.
So, in this logic, mental illness is not a sin, and healing is not a reward for virtue. The ‘point’ is not to try to find inner goodness (sold as a sense of wholeness), but to find a way to speak from where we diverge from those norms. Admittedly, several spaces do this beyond psychoanalysis. For instance, neurodiversity is quite exciting in this lens, as it posits that we are creatures trying to find a way to bear our contradictory desires and divided selves. And in my eyes, when we do, the symptom, far from being an enemy, may become the site of a truth about what we might consider a ‘good life’ beyond how others perceive our ‘goodness’.
Written by Molly Fitz