Mental illness: a hypothesis about them, and why I think they're comparable to allergies

I hear people complaining about how "everyone has a mental illness these days" and people try to explain why this is the case. (For the curious - you might know this statistic, but from what I understand, 25% of the adult population lives with a diagnosable mental illness. So now you know what is meant by "everyone".)

People want to explain this fact, why everyone has mental illnesses, and why they have it now, as opposed to how it was in previous times, where mental illness was often seen as a horrible, inherently life-crushing thing, for which there wasn't much information or treatment. Some people want to think it's because "the modern life" is making people insane. Because of computers and technology and our busy lives, we're getting bipolar disorder and depression and schizophrenia and stuff.

I honestly don't think that's a very convincing argument. While "the modern life" does have its drawbacks and can cause legitimate stress (and worsen disorders that people already had), it seems highly improbable if not impossible that it's causing people's brains to resemble a certain way so that the parts that "should" work simply don't. It's not giving us actual legitimate medical problems. Unless it's capable of actually rewriting your DNA so that your brain's structure is different and that, in some cases, it's possibly developed differently for your entire life, I don't think anything can "give" people mental illnesses.

As technology gets better, our sphere of knowledge gets bigger, and our ignorance as a culture grows smaller, we find out that some things are more common than we previously thought they were, and we can better understand what some things are. What I'm trying to say is that I think people are just realizing that mental illnesses have always been this common but we didn't have the tools to understand it or the tolerance to accept it.

"But wait," you might say. "Mental illnesses are really that common? No, that's absurd. I am unwilling to believe that that many people really have these things."

As though mental illness were something you could reserve for a select few people who are (un)lucky enough to be cursed? blessed? burdened? somethinged with them. As if there was only so much crazy to distribute throughout the human race.


I think it's like allergies. I really think it's like allergies. Lots of people are allergic to things (milk, latex, cats); lots of people have mental health problems that make them unable to cope with certain parts of life. There exist allergies to all sorts of things; there are all sorts of ways that mental illness can interfere with or just alter someone's life. Some allergies are more severe than others, with effects ranging from mild irritation to death; mental illnesses come in all ranges of severity, and this doesn't mean that any of them are "less real" or "less valid" than others. Sometimes, you can find ways to cope with or treat allergies; since mental illness is biological in nature, you can treat it medically, too.

It's not that mental illness has suddenly become "more common". Likely it's always been this common. Like the commonness of allergies, so is mental illness an oddly common thing. And since we're slowly becoming better at diagnosing and accepting mental illness, we're coming closer to understanding that mental illness is common and ultimately not that big of a deal. Certainly not as big or bad of a deal as some people make of it.