Mental Health Professionals: Doing More Harm than Good

There, I said it, I believe many in my profession (the mental health profession), are doing more harm than good. The core concern centers around well-intentioned practices which unintentionally increase distress, dependency, and dysfunction rather than recovery and resilience. Counselors, therapists, psychiatrists, and other medical professionals over the past two or three decades (maybe longer) coddle and affirm rather than heal, equip, and train.

Below is a clear breakdown of what I believe is happening in the mental health field and the contamination we are seeing:

1. Over-Pathologizing Normal Human Feelings and Experiences

Normal emotions (sadness, anxiety, stress, grief, anger, embarrassment, discomfort) are increasingly framed as symptoms of disorders or diseases rather than appropriate and adaptive human responses. Normal life trials, normal losses, doing things for the first time, learning new skills and knowledge—all typically include these types of negative emotions. It is called being human not a mental health illness.

What is happening:

• Diagnostic criteria or a cluster of mental health symptoms have increased by literally being voted into existence by psychiatrists and inserted into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Health Disorders (DSM) as a mental disorder or illness.
• Nearly none of these diagnoses are supported by objective scientific evidence of physical disease, illness, or abnormality.
• People are encouraged to identify with a mental health diagnoses early and often usually by therapists, guidance counselors, teachers, psychiatrists, parents, and pediatricians. This is to satisfy the insurance companies who require a diagnosis to process and pay for a claim. No ‘certain’ diagnosis, no claim, no payment.
• Distress and normal struggles that used to be managed through parenting, socially, spiritually, or developmentally are now medicalized.
• These manufactured diseases and disorders for normal variability of mood and thought have a medical label and often a continual supply of medication for the label.
• The medical mental health business creates psychiatric categories of ‘disease,’ with a diagnostic code for the insurance claim, and a continuous supply of money and pills.

Why is this bad:

We are teaching people feeling bad means something is wrong with them rather than something meaningful happening worth experiencing and reflecting on – to see what to keep doing, what to stop doing, and what to start doing. (Yes, quote me on that, copy, paste, and share.) We have millions of people who believe they ‘have’ a mental health disorder or disease when they do not. We have millions of people unknowingly playing their part in the corruption of the allopathic medical model.

The resulting concern for people:

• Lower distress tolerance
• Lack of resilience
• Inability to regulate thoughts and emotions
• Reduced confidence or belief in self
• Increased identity fusion with diagnosis (“I am my anxiety” or “I have ADHD”)
• Belief they need a medication to solve their struggle

2. Reinforcing a Victim or Fragility Narrative

Some mental health messaging unintentionally teaches people they are fragile, easily harmed, and require professional intervention to cope. This fragility leads to students gaining accommodations at school rather than learning methods to manage and overcome their struggles. It is teaching to pursue ease rather than working hard and doing their best.

What is happening

• Therapy language emphasizes you “have ADHD,” you have “anxiety,” be “trauma informed,” dealing with “toxic people,” setting “boundaries,” providing “gender affirming care,” and understanding “microaggressions” and “triggers.”
• Thus, mental health sessions tend to hyper-focus on personal narratives around inabilities and offenses, sheltering from difficult people and circumstances, and emotional protection.
• Mental health professionals influence institutional and corporate policies to prioritize comfort over challenge and emotional safety over ability to manage conflict, disagreement, and demanding and/or problematic people.

Why is this bad:

Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff in their book Coddling of the American Mind (among others) argue this emphasis has led to:

• Avoidance of complexities in life instead of exposure to various circumstances
• Stress on emotional reasoning over cognitive flexibility and objectivity
• Reduced resilience, especially in adolescents and young adults
• Reduced confidence and self-efficacy
• Reduced ability to deal with normal difficulty
• Blaming others or circumstances instead of self-reflection and owning wrongdoing

The resulting concern for people:

We have generations of people who are mentally weak. They seek comfort, ease, and support rather than pushing through difficulty, building their mental strength and confidence towards productivity and achievement.

3. Overreliance on Labels and Identity-Based Diagnoses

Diagnostic labels become mental health identity anchorsrather than clinical tools. I can attest to this as over and again in my office, as mentioned above, people show up indicating “I have anxiety,” “I have ADHD,” “I am an alcoholic,” “I have an eating disorder.”

What is happening:

• Mental health diagnoses are often presented without equal emphasis on equipping, healing, recovery, and overcoming.
• The online mental health culture encourages self-diagnosis and diagnosis-sharing to discover the latest ways to stay in their disorder or “illness.”
• A mental illness diagnosis often leads to a perceived dependency on a psychotropic medication. Many times, people have been on 2, 3, or more types of medication to get the ‘right’ one to ‘work’.
• Labels can reduce motivation to change behavior (“This is just how my brain is”) as if there is nothing an individual can do to restore and cure.
• Often individuals, teachers, and parents seek out a diagnosis to get special accommodations and medication treatment to make things easier for the student-athlete and less trouble for the teacher and parents raising the child.

Why is this bad:

• Mental health labels should guide treatment for the behaviors, thoughts, and emotions—not define the person.
• Medication should be a last resort for the struggle not a first resort. Well-documented side effects of psychiatric drugs include mania, psychosis, hallucinations, depersonalization, suicidal ideation, heart attack, stroke, muscle breakdowns, and even sudden death.
• “I have” language reduces motivation and absolves responsibility to improve, overcome, and thrive.

The resulting concern for people:

We have millions of people walking around believing they are entitled to some sort of easy road when it comes to academics, work, and athletics. This is not the reality of the world. We now have young adults in their 30’s living at home with their parents. We have parents intervening for their adult children with their professors, with their coaches, and in their work. This leads to crippling the confidence and an abnormal dependency. Similarly, we have millions of people on psychotropic medications when it is not necessary. The chemical imbalance theory to mental health issues was debunked years ago, yet the medical community continues to shell out prescriptions for people based on this false narrative.

4. Excessive Focus on Insight Without Action

Therapy tends to prioritize insight, validation, and explanation at the expense of change, skill acquisition, and improvement. Therapists tend to keep clients stuck in learning the ‘why’ behind certain behaviors and patterns without the accountability to change their learned beliefs and improve their situations with better choices.

What is happening:

• Endless processing can unintentionally reinforce rumination leading to a client getting stuck and even deteriorating.
• Validation without accountability can stall growth, healing, and equipping a client for the reality of relationships, work, sport, and life.
• Some clients feel better in session understanding the ‘why’ but function worse outside it without the ‘what’ to correct and adjust.
• This describes how many mental health professionals coddle their clients rather than confront them, help them mend, and increase their ability to healthfully function in their circumstances.

Why is this bad:

Understanding why you feel bad and make bad decisions may be good for explaining your current struggle, but it does nothing to teach you how to prosper and show up your best in life going forward. (Yes, quote me on that, copy, paste, and share.)

This is especially relevant in gaining the life skills needed for academic performance, athletics, and leadership contexts. And, yes parents, you need to show up and role model the best for your child. Facts do not care about feelings.

The resulting concern for people:

Look, real life often does not give you ample time to ‘find yourself.’ Most of us do not have the luxury to do this. Real life involves pain and difficulty, facing trials, performing under pressure, paying bills, and holding down responsibility during struggles. You must show up your best at home, at school, in sport, and at work. Healing, support, accountability, and confrontation can come through therapy or coaching and doing what needs to be done. The mental health culture of therapy must change for this training to occur.

Part 2 coming next!