[zwkrt]

Chicken and egg, I think. I am a firm believer that people don't have much better or worse mental health now over-all. But I do think that in the past mental health was something that was more intuitive and that people got more support for from their immediate social circle. Now that society is further isolated, people both have more time to ruminate about the specifics of their mental health, and the solution to having bad mental health is more frequently to talk to a therapist.

Even this would not by itself cause the increased medicalization of totally normal human problems. However, therapists need to bill insurance and it is not really possible to bill insurance for general malaise. Additionally, more people are expected to be rational economic agents more of the time, and rational economic agents don't have any emotions. So people that fall outside of the narrow bounds of what is considered acceptable and exhibit behavior outside of the narrowing band of that which allows for gainful employment means that more people are categorized as having specific ailments.

People that /are/ able to crush themselves into the little boxes that are required of them to not end up on the streets have their own mental health problems as spill-over.

TL;DR: society optimized for money causes people to feel crazy.

[ixtli]

There's a lot i could say but tbh i agree with most of what you say here.