In a therapeutic culture, every personality trait becomes a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling too strong—has to be labelled and explained

Some say young people are making their disorders their whole personality. No; it’s worse than that. Now they are being taught that their normal personality “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.”said that a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72% of Gen Z girls is

We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.

You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does, but autism. You are the way you are not because you have a soul but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events. Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorised. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalised. The pieces of us once written into wedding vows, read out in eulogies, remembered with a smile, now live on doctors’ notes and mental health assessments and BetterHelp applications. We are not people anymore. We have been products for a long time, and these are our labels.

They are souls; we are symptoms. Of course there were people in the past who needed real help and never received any sort of understanding, but that is not the full story; many were also happier, less self-conscious, actually able to forget themselves.

repressed, being boxed in by medical labels.lessI find it strange that we think this is freeing, this brutal knowing. That this self-surveillance is the liberated way to live. That we are somehow

There are young people spending the most carefree years of their lives mapping themselves out, categorising themselves for companies and advertisers. So much of their thinking is consumed by this.

They don’t have memories anymore; only evidence, explanations, timelines of trauma. They don’t have relationships; only attachment figures, caregivers and co-regulators. And I think this is it, the cause of so much misery. We taught a generation that the meaning of life is not found outside in the world but inside their own heads.