there's really no such thing as mental illness as we understand it.

A very interesting statement, but difficult to analyze because of exactly the lack of precision you are pointing out: "as we understand it". "Mental illness" is a free-for-all term. I myself have been using it far too freely in my comments recently in just this fuzzy way that your comment is correctly skewering.

What I see in our society is the "educated" class throwing themselves headfirst - and hard - against the wall of reality on a range of issues. Their ideals are turning out not to be in alignment with human behavior, but rather than adjust their ideals accordingly, they double, triple, quadruple down on the mandates to conform to concepts that manifestly don't work. This is causing, no surprise, tremendous stress, especially among the younger generations, as they try to wrap their heads around the fact that everything they are being taught is "right" cannot actually happen because people are not who they think we are. They seek relief from this stress through medication, because that's also what their teaching is telling them: mental distress is caused by their own wiring; it cannot be that their ideals are wrong, so they must have something wrong with them. The chemical alteration then makes things even worse.

The "mental illness" crisis that so many are talking about (including, I am embarrassed to admit, me) is actually a behavioral culture crisis being amplified by poorly understood and utilized psychoactive medications. It doesn't help that the medical profession is one of the most profoundly affected communities when it comes to this mismatch of ideals versus the reality of human behavior.

Thanks for a great comment.