There is something deeply detestable about the way politicians and sections of the media now talk about mental health. Not because the subject is discussed too much, but because it is discussed dishonestly. The language of “over-medicalisation” has become a convenient alibi — a way to moralise withdrawal of support, to reframe austerity as realism, and to cast suffering as excess. What is presented as concern for diagnostic precision often masks a far cruder agenda: making cruelty sound responsible.
Anxiety, once a word describing a state of heightened alertness, has been flattened into a catch-all diagnosis. Nervousness before an appointment, stress from insecure work, unease about the future — all now drift under the same clinical banner. This collapse of meaning is routinely framed as progress. It isn’t. It is confusion dressed up as compassion, and it serves those eager to argue that distress is everywhere, manageable, and therefore undeserving of material support.
The distinction matters because anxiety disorders are not an extension of everyday discomfort. They are not “more stress” or “deeper nerves”. They are qualitatively different states — persistent, self-reinforcing, physiologically hijacking conditions that can dismantle agency, cognition, and function. Anyone who has lived inside severe anxiety or major depression knows this instantly. There is no ambiguity from the inside. The ambiguity exists only in public discourse, where it is cultivated.
Yet media and political narratives increasingly insist that “we all have anxiety now”. The statement sounds inclusive. In practice, it erases reality. When ordinary distress is elevated to the status of illness, genuine illness is quietly demoted to inconvenience. The result is not destigmatisation, but dilution — and dilution always precedes disbelief. That disbelief is not incidental. It is useful.
This shift is not occurring in a vacuum. It unfolds inside a society that is psychologically hostile by design. Precarity is normalised. Work is moralised. Worth is measured through output and visibility. Validation is scarce, comparison relentless, rest suspicious. The rat race is no longer a metaphor but an organising principle. In such an environment, widespread distress is not surprising — it is rational.
But rather than interrogating the system that produces this strain, public discourse pathologises the individual. Distress becomes a nervous system failure instead of a social signal. Mindfulness replaces material security. Resilience replaces stability. Therapy replaces reform. The problem is relocated from structures to skulls. Neoliberalism, conveniently, remains innocent — and austerity remains justified.
This is where the language becomes actively dangerous. As diagnostic terms bleed into everyday speech, self-diagnosis proliferates. People who are stressed but broadly functional begin to speak the same language as those who are genuinely disabled. Over time, this reshapes the public prototype of mental illness. Anxiety comes to mean “coping, but uncomfortably”. Depression becomes “low mood with insight”. Severe cases — the ones involving collapse, avoidance, cognitive fog, disappearance — no longer fit the story.
And when they don’t fit the story, they lose credibility.
Bureaucracies run on averages, and politicians exploit that fact. When anxiety is framed as common, mild, and compatible with work, those who cannot function are no longer seen as categorically different. They are seen as insufficiently resilient. Welfare systems harden. Assessments grow sceptical. Support becomes conditional. The unspoken accusation emerges: if everyone feels like this and still works, why can’t you?
This is not a misunderstanding. It is a manoeuvre. The language of “over-medicalisation” becomes a shield — protecting punitive policy from moral scrutiny while recasting abandonment as responsibility.
This is how awareness curdles into re-stigmatisation. The old stigma said mental illness wasn’t real. The new stigma says it’s real — but not serious. The outcome is the same: disbelief, suspicion, punishment. Only now it arrives wrapped in therapeutic language and fiscal restraint.
None of this denies that society is causing harm. On the contrary, it insists on naming that harm correctly. Not all distress is illness — and that does not make it trivial. But not all anxiety is contextual either — and pretending otherwise actively harms those whose lives are periodically unliveable. These truths are not in competition. They are mutually necessary — and politically inconvenient.
A society that cannot distinguish discomfort from disability will always default to cruelty when resources tighten. Ambiguity favours power. Precision threatens it.
The task, then, is not to talk less about mental health, but to talk more accurately — and more honestly about who benefits from misrepresentation. To defend the boundary between emotion and disorder. To reject the lie that coping is a moral obligation, that work is a measure of worth, and that illness must be universal to be legitimate.
If anxiety is everywhere, it is because the conditions that produce it are everywhere. But when anxiety becomes disabling, it is not a lifestyle problem. It is not a mindset issue. It is not a failure to try harder.
And any society that pretends otherwise is not merely confused. It is choosing austerity over care — and calling it virtue.
