Mental Health vs Mental Illness: Not the same thing
“Struggling with mental health”
“Working in mental health”
“Raising awareness for mental health”But most of the time, what people really mean is mental illnessAnd that confusion isn’t just semantics – it changes everything about how we see ourselves, how we treat others, and how whole systems of care are built
Because mental health isn’t the absence of illness, it isn’t a diagnosis, it isn’t a pathology
– It’s resilience
– It’s connection
– It’s the innate wholeness we’re all born with, before labels and conditions ever entered the pictureBut when we collapse “mental health” into “mental illness” we turn health into a checklist of symptoms. We reduce human beings to acronymsWe give people identities that sound permanent – depression, PTSD, BPD, ADHD
And slowly, people stop relating to themselves as alive, evolving, whole, they start relating to themselves as broken
That’s not care, that’s conditioning, it’s indoctrination,
I know this, because I lived it
By the age of ten I was medicated and diagnosed, over the years I collected more than 15 labels, each one felt like it explained me, each one also trapped me
Because when someone in authority tells you, “This is who you are” it doesn’t just shape your treatment plan, it shapes your identity, it’s a natural part of our social conditioning
So the more I believed those labels, the more the symptoms seemed to prove them true
It took me decades to realise – none of those diagnoses described who I really was, they described survival responses, they described pain, they described what happened to me
But they didn’t describe ME
That’s the crucial distinction
Mental illness is real – but it’s not who you are
Mental health is not something you “achieve” by fixing all your symptoms.
It’s something you uncover when you stop believing you are only your symptoms
It’s the ground underneath the chaos, it’s the presence that can hold both joy and grief. It’s what remains when the story of being broken begins to dissolve
So here’s the challenge to all of us:
Are we building systems that reinforce the belief “you are ill”?
Or are we creating spaces that point people back to the health that’s already in them?
Are we equipping professionals to manage disorders?
Or to meet humans?
Because the language we use matters, the frame we hold matters.
If we keep confusing health with illness, we’ll keep producing services that pathologise people instead of liberating them.
and If we reclaim mental health for what it really is – our baseline, our inner resource – then recovery no longer looks like a lifetime of managing damage
It looks like coming home to yourself