I was once told that life was a juggling act, every component of your life a different ball in the air. If that is true, then your mental health would be an egg. Fragile, significant, and something you definitely cannot afford to drop at the risk of making a mess.
Sanity is a social construct, weaponised by systems of power riddled with cracks to silence dissent, discipline bodies, and demand conformity. Psychology, while a field with liberatory potential, has often been complicit in defining resistance as illness, regulating behaviour through diagnostic authority, and medicalising suffering instead of contextualising it. Mental illness is real, but so is the violence of being manipulated by a culture that calls survival a ‘symptom’. Meanwhile, the system is selling healing as a product while not providing access to care. True psychological freedom requires not just individual recovery, but a collective reckoning with broken systems that deem us unwell. In an already overstretched and underfunded sector, mental health becomes precarious as the structures meant to support us are institutionally scrambled.
Why is burnout medicalised instead of understood as a response to systemic stress? Why is numbness treated as a symptom while the social environments that cause it remain unexamined?
Modern psychology often focuses on aiding individuals' adaptation to the current systems that are fundamentally harmful, capitalist, racist, and ableist. Rather than questioning those systems and why people are struggling, we rely on a 72-year-old manual that categorises human experience into neat boxes, forcing complex pain and resistance into medical diagnoses, disregarding culture and nuanced experiences. The American Psychology Association developed the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), first published in 1952, the product of committees composed largely of Western psychiatrists who debate, vote, and negotiate what counts as ‘disorder’, rather than being purely objective. It acts as a time capsule of the dated ideologies from the era in which it was written, embedded in cultural and political contexts, and reflecting dominant societal values as opposed to universal truths. The DSM is grounded in Euro-American norms of motion, behaviour and functioning. What is considered ‘disordered’ is simply what deviates from Western standards. Non-Western expressions of distress, such as spiritual experiences, collectivist grief, and bodily or somatic expressions of trauma are often pathologised and misunderstood. In many cultures, particularly Indigenous, African, Asian, and Pacific Islander communities, mental distress is often understood through spiritual, relational or ancestral frameworks. Hearing voices, engaging with ancestors, or experiencing visions may be seen as a calling, a gift, or a rite of passage;’ in the DSM, these same experiences are frequently pathologised as hallucinations, delusions or symptoms of schizophrenia. Such fractures in the system erase entire cosmologies and undermine non-Western ways of knowing and healing. It forces people to interpret their experiences through a biomedical lens or potentially be misdiagnosed. When psychology ignores the fragility of culture, it doesn’t just fail to heal, it becomes colonial oppression dressed up in clinical language.
Western psychiatric frameworks such as the DSM does not merely describe suffering; it polices it. It decides which forms of pain are valid, and which must be silenced, sedated or institutionalised. For decades, the LGBTQIA+ community itself was pathologised. Homosexuality was only removed from the DSM in 1973, not because of new science, but due to relentless activism. The sickness, it turns out, was never in the people—it was in the system incapable of accepting difference. Historically, this is more important now than ever as transgender and gender diverse individuals continue to be formally pathologised and are faced, in many cases, with extreme barriers to accessing gender-affirming care. In regard to professional competency, very few psychologists report any training for clinical practice with transgender and gender diverse individuals, with a study of clinical psychologists finding that only 6.6% of these psychologists agreed that they felt competent to work with transgender clients (Johnson & Federman, 2014). Since 2021, a wave of legislation targeting transgender health care has been implemented across the United States, with 25 states enacting bans on gender-affirming care for transgender youth as of March 2025. These bans are not only vague and sweeping, but have disrupted healthcare access for over 100,000 transgender youth, and imposed emotional, financial and geographical burdens on their families. Within Australia, transgender individuals are being turned away from psychologists and GPs. It is important to note that rates of self-harm and suicide attempts among trans Australians are disturbingly high, with rates exceeding the 3.3% lifetime prevalence seen in the rest of the population. Moreover, this Australian data mirrors findings from the U.S. National Transgender Discrimination Survey, which reported that 41% of trans Americans had attempted suicide, a rate over 25 times higher than the general population. Evidence proves that gender-affirming care significantly reduces the risk of suicide and provides lasting-long term benefits. Without culturally competent, affirming, and accessible services, the system isn’t just under-resourced, it’s complicit in maintaining preventable suffering.
Psychiatry claims neutrality, but it categorises between ‘sick’ and ‘healthy’, and between those who deserve support and those deemed too complicated to help. What we call ‘disordered’ is not objective; it is a social construct shaped by the social norms of the society in which we live, and decides who is allowed to exist outside of them without being deemed too hard to work with.
Right now, the system profits from exhaustion. Healing is deemed a luxury product, with proper access to care becoming increasingly difficult to attain. Public health services within Australia are underfunded, with waitlists stretched for months, and yet the private mental health industry booms. Public mental health services remain underfunded and overwhelmed, leaving those who manage to be heard unable to receive adequate care. The Better Access Initiative, designed to provide subsidised therapy sessions through Medicare, caps therapy at a limited number of sessions, usually 10, per year. This limited number is not nearly enough for those living with complex trauma, economic disadvantage or chronic mental illness. For those without money and private health insurance or a GP who takes mental health seriously, care can feel completely out of reach. Meanwhile, the private mental health sector grows, offering boutique clinics and luxury inpatient care for a price. Basic medical care becomes classist and a privilege. The booming wellness industry capitalises on pain and suffering, repackaging survival into mindfulness apps, gratitude journals, and a quick TikTok diagnosis. Workplaces offer resilience training, not safer conditions. Schools run wellbeing weeks while ignoring the structural pressures that cause student burnout. Rather than ask why so many of us are suffering, Australian mental health systems often respond by diagnosing individuals and medicating their pain, while leaving the social and political causes of distress untouched. You are considered ‘well’ if you can keep showing up employed and quiet. You are too ‘ill’ if you drop out or speak up. In a country where the public system is crashing under the weight of unmet need, there is a deeper truth: that mental health is being treated as an individual failure rather than a collective responsibility.
It is one thing to critique the DSM as a current psychology student. But as someone who has had to sit in a psychiatrist's office and watch my pain get translated into numbers and categories, it is more than concerning. When you're the one being diagnosed, your story gets sliced into symptoms, and your survival strategies developed in the face of violence and trauma become evidence of dysfunction. You start to question your reality. ‘Maybe it's not the world that's cruel, maybe it's me’, you think. There is a deep loneliness in being told that what hurts is not political, not collective, not real, but a chemical imbalance in your brain. And yet a diagnosis is the only way to access help. Imagine a world where mental health wasn't about making people ‘normal’ but about helping them heal. If care did not begin with “what's wrong with you?” but with “what happened to you and what's wrong with the world that hurt you?” True liberation requires cracking the shell of outdated psychology, letting the light in and allowing healing to emerge not as confinement, but as freedom. Liberatory mental health means shifting from individual pathology to the collective. Real healing cannot happen in isolation, behind closed doors, or within systems that perpetuate harm. We need community care networks, culturally safe spaces, access without diagnosis and psychiatrists and therapists who honour your worldview instead of flattening it. Liberation doesn't look like functioning in a broken system. It looks like naming the system and building something kinder in its place.
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