The Myth of Mental Illness

We are told that mental illness is a medical reality, something you “have” in the same way you might have diabetes or asthma. But what if much of what we call mental illness is actually a myth? Not a myth in the sense of being false, but a myth in the sense of being a story society tells to make sense of human struggle.

The story goes like this:

• A person suffers.

• Their suffering is named.

• The name becomes an illness.

• The illness makes the person a patient.

It’s a tidy loop. But life isn’t tidy.

When someone grieves, when someone breaks under pressure, when someone hears voices or falls into despair, are they sick — or are they human? When we say “mental illness,” we turn complex experiences into diagnostic boxes. We medicalise what may be existential, relational, or spiritual.

The myth is not that suffering exists. It clearly does. The myth is that suffering must always be explained as illness.

Myth has power. It offers a framework, a sense of order. It allows professionals to feel they know what they are dealing with. It offers families a way to cope. And sometimes it even brings relief: medication, rest, a structure to hold chaos.

But myth has a shadow. It can strip people of agency. It can reduce the meaning of their experience to “symptoms.” It can turn survival strategies into pathology, and silence the deeper truth of what a person has lived.

Maybe we need a different story. One that recognises suffering as part of being human, not proof of defect. One that allows space for transformation, not just treatment. One that doesn’t confuse metaphor with medicine.

Because when we step outside the myth of mental illness, we find something older and truer: the knowledge that pain can be a teacher, that madness can carry meaning, that breakdown can be the beginning of breakthrough.

And maybe then we stop asking, “What illness is this?” and start asking, “What is life trying to show here?”