The Term ‘Mental Health’ Makes No Sense to Me

What is ‘health’ when it comes to the mind, anyway?

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When people in the modern world refer to “mental health” it always sounds like they just mean happiness. But since when did “health” equate to being happy? What if it’s healthy to be unhappy sometimes? What if the goal is to strike a balance between the light and the dark?

To me, sadness is healing. Allowing sadness to be in the forefront of your mind is not a weakness. It’s necessary to exist as a human.

Sadness is an expression of human life. When we undergo trauma, we must process it. Periods of grief and unhappiness are as important as periods of happiness and light. It should be the goal to let the light win more than the darkness, but a balance must be struck. We can’t ignore the dark side.

Ironically, when we ignore and suppress sadness, it ends up winning.

So, when we talk about the importance of “mental health” in our communities, it makes no sense to talk about it as if everyone needs to be happy all the time. Society likes it when the majority of us are functional so that we can have “progress” and a generally operational system. It scares us as a collective when a lot of us are unhappy. Our knee-jerk reaction is to call depressed people “unhealthy” and make up all kinds of ways to force them to become happy again.

The whole idea of therapy thrives on this concept. People need to be happy, and money will be spent to make sure they go back to work. They must work for the greater good and they can’t be allowed to face the darkness within — that would be counter-productive to capitalistic society.

So, society gaslights us into thinking we’re mentally ill when we’re down. And yet, the majority of us modern people are truly drowning in this thing called life.

Don’t tell anyone you’re feeling sad. Don’t reveal your mental unrest. People will start to worry. They don’t know how to handle sadness because our society has swept it under the rug — we hide people from the public who aren’t able to face life. We ignore them and present an idea to the world that being happy-go-lucky is normal.