While the layperson considers “more mental health services” to be a kind of objective good, people who have experienced—and left— the mental health system know that mental health treatment is not about helping people.

It’s about control.

The western approach to mental health is fundamentally flawed and rooted in carcerality. Individuals who are struggling, who seek out help, typically experience similar outcomes: a doctor decides they have a disorder or “mental illness”— a medical affliction—and prescribes them drugs. Therapists typically guide the person to see what they are feeling as irrational, and practice tools to invalidate or override what they are feeling. When someone starts psychiatric medication, they typically “feel better,” but gradually become worse and worse. Doctors see this as “progressive mental illness” and prescribe more drugs.

So often, when mental health workers think they see “progressive mental illness” or “serious mental illness,” they are often seeing the consequences of their own prescribing behavior and of a system that prevents individuals from getting to the underlying environmental root of why they are struggling, ensuring that the underlying problem metastasizes.

When an individual reaches their breaking point, they are locked up in emergency departments and psychiatric facilities that are typically filthy, uncomfortable, and staffed by violent individuals attracted to punitive medical environments where “first, do no harm” does not apply.

Sound familiar?

In an era of “mental health awareness,” anti-stigma campaigns exist to create a public comfort level with taking psychiatric drugs for an “illness.” Language like “If you would take medication for diabetes, it’s okay to take medication for a mental health condition” exists to nudge people to take psychiatric drugs.

There’s a high comfort level with pathologizing and medicalizing unpleasant feelings and periods of struggle. But there’s great public discomfort with speaking freely about the consequences of abuse, trauma, grief, patriarchy, racism, poverty, homophobia, transphobia, and capitalism— the real reasons why most people are struggling.

This is at the heart of the problem with our mental health system: individuals are encouraged to take drugs for an illness, but our culture is heartily opposed to conversations about the root causes of struggle. One might argue the mental health system is a tool of population control.

Our mental health system isn’t broken. It’s an outgrowth of psychiatry’s sinister origins, and it’s functioning exactly as it was designed to.