Today, we talk about mental health everywhere: diagnoses, disorders, resilience, stress management. On the surface, society has never seemed to care more about the individual.

Yet many people experience the opposite: the more they learn to describe themselves through these frameworks, the more their suffering becomes fixed.

The problem is not that psychology or psychiatry are useless.

It is that their logic primarily serves the smooth functioning of systems, not the lived experience of each individual.

A system needs predictability and efficiency. To achieve this, it transforms complex experiences into categories, locates causes within individuals, and defines “health” as the capacity to continue functioning. Being operational often matters more than being alive.

The individual, however, needs something very different:

to make sense of their suffering, to be seen in their singularity, to be able to question a harmful environment, and to live the full range of their emotions without being immediately corrected.

The shift is often the same:

at the first sign of distress, one tells oneself, “the problem comes from me.”

From that moment on, the real causes fade from view, self-exhaustion begins, and any possibility of change closes off.

Being lucid does not mean rejecting systems.

It means using them as tools, without granting them the right to define who we are.

Sometimes, real relief begins with a simple sentence:

“My suffering cannot be entirely reduced to your categories.”