It is said that the great philosopher Aristotle once observed, “No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”
Perhaps a touch of madness isn’t limited to those with great minds. In this materialistic and scientifically arrogant era, there is an obsession with discovering, dissecting, and pathologizing our quirks and idiosyncrasies. However, this quest to answer every question has driven people mad.
As freelance writer Freya India recently wrote in The Free Press, “Therapy-speak has taken over our language. It is ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and now, we are losing the words for who we are.”
Personality is being reduced to therapeutic boxes. A woman is no longer shy if she avoids first-meeting eye contact; she’s autistic. A man is no longer a jack of all trades; he’s ADHD. A child is not particular and organized but instead has OCD. The first descriptors — the euphemisms given to family members for their quirks — are loving. The second are cold and sterile.
Members of this generation are being inundated with diagnoses and paralyzed with trying to figure out what’s wrong with them. India believes that Big Pharma is at least partly behind this push to constantly label what might be unique or unusual about a person. Once it’s labeled, it’s pathologized, used as a crutch, and medicated into oblivion. That push also diminishes honest-to-goodness issues that need medication.
Clinical psychologist Lisa Damour was interviewed by The Washington Post about the anxious and troubled Gen Z. “We’re raising the best-behaved generation of teenagers on record,” she says. “They drive with seat belts, they smoke less, they have less sex, they wear helmets. They do all these things that we did not do.” And yet, they are having a meltdown.
Jonathan Haidt, author and professor at New York University Stern School of Business, theorizes that this generation has been specifically taught to self-destruct. It’s almost as if some evil genius psychologist has decided to turn some powerful therapy tool on its head to keep our kids trapped in their crippled psychological state. Kids today are being told that disagreements are equivalent to hate, that their emotions are the best guides in a situation, and that words can literally kill. These thinking patterns, when nurtured, send them deeper into depression.
Haidt and his colleagues began noticing this distinct trend in teens and college students around 2013, but there were several other cultural advents that laid the groundwork. Andrew Culper of our Pop Culture Contrarian podcast opined the following regarding how personality became a disorder:
In 1973, we eliminated the draft, signaling to all men that their purpose in life is not to protect their home, family, and women (which has been the purpose of all men in all civilizations since basically forever). Weeks later, Roe v. Wade happened, signaling to all women that their purpose in life is not to bring forth life as mothers (also a social norm since basically forever). In the decades to follow, the narrative became “you do you,” spurring a deep introspection in society. People now have to “figure out who they are” — alone — as society has unmoored them and abandoned them. You don’t have to be a pillar of your community; you can move anywhere and do whatever you want. The narrative is no longer that suffering for your life’s purpose anchors you but rather that suffering is bad and must be eradicated. And so generations of the self-serving, unmoored, naval-gazing, eliminate-all-suffering mindset finds us where we are. We have no purpose and are obsessed with ourselves. We’re looking inside and seeing all the problems instead of looking around us and finding where we can step up and serve.
In contrast to the navel-gazers, there are a fair number of people — albeit much fewer than society realizes — with serious disorders who need clinical help. However, psychiatry is facing a credibility crisis, particularly on issues like transgenderism. As academic psychiatrist Andrew Amos recently noted:
Psychiatry’s reliance on what patients say instead of what doctors see makes it uniquely vulnerable to strategic manipulation by social and political movements. Every major progressive cause now tries to leverage mental health as a tool to achieve its ends. Climate change, racial and ethnic justice, gender equity, immigration, LGBT+…all have claimed impacts on mental health to promote their goals. …
If psychiatry as a profession accepts its role as an identity stamp confirming the virtuous self-image of the university educated, it will have destroyed what little credibility it currently retains.
If patients can demand the psychiatric diagnosis of gender dysphoria based on subjective self-report, then psychiatric diagnosis is meaningless, and the psychiatrist is no longer needed.
That, in essence, is the inherent failure of a materialist society. If we as humans have allowed ourselves to become divorced from our purpose, dissected into categories of problematic behaviors, and arrogant enough to believe we know better than previous generations, then of course we’re going to be miserable and confused. Mental illness isn’t an identity, and reducing people to the segmented and “undesirable” parts isn’t kindness or clarity.
We don’t, and simply can’t, know and understand everything, particularly not about ourselves. Each season of life shapes you like clay in the hands of a potter. When we sterilize the human experience, it drains our life, mystery, and miracle. Perhaps what we see as flaws and defects — because they deviate from the elusive “norms” — are qualities and traits that were shaped to serve and love those around you. Maybe thinking about ourselves less is the path that Gen Z needs to be shown.
