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The human nervous system is a majestic, chaotic masterpiece, marinated for decades in survival, trauma, lost loves, and that one time there was a public speaking event. And what happens when this lump of adaptive jelly walks into a mental health institution?

It sits on a plastic chair and the clock starts ticking. Anything between 15 mins to an hour, that’s all the time the universe has allotted for this mystery of a life to be decoded.

This life, having decades of lived experience, is then expressed in the most boring but chaotic language imaginable. “My apartment has water leakage and my landlord won’t fix it… I lost my job and now I can’t focus on anything… My grandfather was always controlling and never loved me… It makes me angry when people treat me unfairly… I feel sad because my dog died… My girlfriend betrayed me… I have no energy to work or live… etc.”. A compressed version of the millions of things bothering the nervous system currently are conveyed.

But at this time, a separate process is happening in the clinician’s brain: a high-speed diagnostic drag race.

A long history of unstable living conditions, worries about further exploitation, past experiences causing fear for the future? Could be ANXIETY DISORDER. Tag! You’re it!

Too much jumping around in topics, fidgeting, lack of focus? Could be ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER.

Repeated anger or volatility in response to unfair treatment? Well these negative thoughts are obviously caused by EMOTIONAL DYSREGULATION.

Thinking about problems too much? That’s RUMINATION.

Your life is a chaotic mess and you have too big feelings about it? Could be BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER.

What was that? You have too many rage episodes and self harm tendencies? Well who cares about why, this looks like SCHIZOPHRENIA SPECTRUM stuff, even if no hallucinations have occured yet – better safe than sorry!

Of course, many cases are genuine and diagnosed correctly over time. But there are also too many cases where even perfectly sane responses to an abnormal environment can and do get translated out of the boring language of “life” and into the exciting, billable language of “pathology”. Because the system runs on diagnosis, not on fixing landlords.

And so, a chemical party begins with medication: these pills are tiny, powerful goblins that hijack the brain’s telegraph system.

Some pills are dopamine goblins which storm the brain’s reward center, a place previously interested in motivation and joy, and shout, “PARTY’S OVER, EVERYONE! NO MORE FUN FOR YOU!” and reduces drive.

Some are serotonin goblins. They try to manage the mood swings caused by, say, being bullied everyday by big bullies, by flattening all your emotions into a grey paste. Intense sadness about your dead dog? Gone! Intense joy at a sunset? Also gone! Perfectly smooth and stable now.

And then there are the chill pills, full of GABA goblins that just wrap the entire nervous system in a warm, wet blanket of apathy. Calm achieved! You’re still in the terrible apartment or the wrong job, but now you don’t care.

This is considered progress. You can now do your tax returns and social rituals quietly! You are stable! Your stability is measurable… your landlord’s toxicity is not.

But wait! Now the goblins are also affecting the rest of your body, because your brain is the boss of everything.

· Metabolism… Slower. New gravity!
· Weight… Double!
· Hormones… the thyroid and adrenals are sending angry letters. Insulin is now resistant. PCOS is now never-ending. The skin has turned into a coal-shade.
· Emotional range… It’s now just “meh”.

These new, exciting developments are not side effects. They are just new medical variables to manage! And so you now need more pills to manage the side effects of the first pills.

So, to recap:

1. A nervous system responds like a sane person to an insane environment.
2. This sane reaction is classified as a mental illness.
3. The “illness” is medicated into oblivion.
4. The medication creates real, physical illnesses.
5. These new illnesses are now medicated for a longer period or just… never get repaired.

Every single step is perfectly logical within the box of institutional medicine. It’s all because they just can’t prescribe you a new job, apartment, family, city, or social circle.

And so, the most complex object in the known universe, a human brain, is relentlessly poked, prodded, labeled with a dozen acronyms, and pumped full of goblins… all so it can better tolerate a certain social environment which was the real problem all along.

Sometimes I notice the contrast between how I treat my cat Miki and how I was treated growing up.

My parents didn’t view parenting as a relationship with a small human. They thought parenting was about managing a child, not relating to one. They saw it more as a role or duty, defined not by empathy, but by cultural conditioning, fear, control, and their own unresolved limitations. They provided resources, food, medicines and money – but left a void in place of real care and connection.

They didn’t think a child’s emotional distress needed to be responded to. They used fear-based methods like shouting, hitting, threats or “teaching a lesson” to fix perceived rebellion. They feared that letting a child be free to follow their own mind will lead to chaos. They tried to get blind agreement from the child, rather than helping the child trust themselves. They sometimes treated parenting like it was a 2v1 match, as if they were teaming up against the child.

They tried to mold the child into what they could manage, never wanting to know who the child really was.

Maybe these methods would work on children who were more like them. But my inner world was more like Miki’s than they realised.

When I am gentle and kind with Miki, when I don’t punish or control her, when I respond to signs of her distress, when I give importance to her needs over my own – sometimes I feel sad for never receiving what I now offer her, because I see myself in her.

Maybe I, too, needed to be protected, understood, supported, allowed to be myself, and treated kindly. By being nurtured as a person, and having my own choices respected, I would have felt a sense of safety and self-worth that I have struggled to find.

When I looked back on things as an adult, I felt disillusioned. I started to see that, while I was responsible for my own life, there are many things I carried from my upbringing into adulthood, which were affecting areas of my life like mental health, career or relationships.

Sometimes I think about how so many people today are healing from their childhood trauma. And yet, parenting continues the same way, in too many homes. It’s as if people have children without ever wanting to learn what parenting should be like, and it almost seems irresponsible.

Of course, not every child is like a cat. But what if parents at least tried to understand who their child actually is, before they start using methods that do more harm than help? What if they tried to check if there’s a misalignment between the real needs of the child and what the parents provide? What if they tried to think about how the family environment may affect the child?

Maybe these are idealistic questions, but I believe they are worth asking anyway. Maybe then, there would be one less child always wondering “what’s wrong with me”, or one less child turning to the dark side to cope with their early reality.

Growing up, I wondered if something was fundamentally wrong with me – if I was too emotional, too angry, too unstable, too wrong to exist. I didn’t have the language back then to understand what I was going through, but something always felt off. Like I was carrying weight that wasn’t mine, reacting to things that didn’t make sense on the surface, or shrinking myself to fit into some role that was never meant for me.

Growing up, I often felt invisible – not in the sense that I wasn’t noticed, but that I was only seen in the ways that served someone else’s idea of me. I didn’t feel like I was loved for who I was. It was more about playing the role assigned to me – meeting expectations, getting results, being impressive, talented or compliant. There wasn’t a lack of love or care in the sense of practical needs – there was an absence of nurturing and attunement, of being seen as a human with my own needs. What I thought, felt or wanted didn’t seem to matter unless it matched what was expected of me.

When I resisted, questioned, cried, or simply wanted to do what made sense to me – I was met with outrage, disapproval, control or punishment (verbal and physical). It felt like punishment for having a voice or a mind of my own. I was often treated with hostility and wondered what I did to cause it. The message seemed to be: don’t complain, don’t feel or need too much, be like everyone else, don’t be ungrateful; as if I was wrong to want to be treated kindly or with fairness.

I was often made to question reality – when I remembered an event a certain way, I was told that the opposite had happened, or that they never said what I heard them say. I was told my lived experience was invalid and I “should” feel what I was told to feel. I could sense that the words I heard didn’t match the actions I experienced. Sometimes, the conflicting messages and constant suppression of myself resulted in outbursts, which were only punished and never understood.

At some point, I started to believe the narrative they gave me and the more I tried to ‘fix’ myself, the more broken I felt. I kept wondering what was true while trying to be the high achiever, the people pleaser, the one who doesn’t question too much or cause trouble. I often felt tense, afraid, confused, angry and ashamed – always unsure whether my thoughts or feelings were real, or just signs of some flaw I couldn’t name.

The original fog created in my mind from my early experiences continued to grow in my adulthood. A few relationships which destabilised me made me look for explanations. Why did the people close to me behave this way with me? Why wouldn’t they understand who I was or what I was trying to say? Why did they say the truth was false and the false was truth? Why did they need to place unfair expectations on me, try to control me, or misjudge me? What did I do wrong and what should I have done instead? Why did I explode over things that weren’t a big deal to others? Why did other people get so bothered by things that weren’t a big deal to me? Why did I doubt myself even when I had valid reasons to trust my instincts?

Maybe I always preferred solitude over being with family or friends not because I liked being alone so much, but because it was lonelier in the presence of people who didn’t really see or value me, and didn’t truly care about my well being. Trying to connect with certain people had so often led to being dismissed, criticised, disbelieved, judged or manipulated – or attempts to fit me into the role they assigned me. Maybe that’s why I kept trying to prove my worth in adult relationships, or why I could never quite relax when I was around people.

It wasn’t until I got a lot of distance from those relationships that I started putting pieces together. That my early environment had distorted my reality, and told me that relationships only brought pain instead of understanding. Finding this familiar, in my adulthood I became involved with new people who mirrored those early dynamics.

After failed relations, years of burning anger, and attempts to explain things to those who hurt me but refused to understand, I shut down from those people to finally connect with myself – without anyone’s distortions or control. In this space, I wasn’t “crazy” after all. I wasn’t broken. I wasn’t who they said I was. My instincts were right when I felt like something was off about what those people did. And I started to unlearn the idea that I must earn respect, love or permission to exist.

These realisations didn’t come all at once – they unfolded slowly and painfully, after repeatedly going over events to find answers for why so many things had to happen this way. In the process I learned that many people’s beliefs and motivations can be totally different from mine, and that my ‘craziness’ and ‘flaws’ were trauma responses to my experiences with them. In my own small ways, I started to see the truth beneath the fog, and make sense of all the confusion that was a baseline for most of my life.

And it felt like putting on glasses.

I recently got the terrible news that someone I knew committed suicide.

As is common, most people are saying things like “If only she had gone out to meet friends and talked about her problems…”

If I had a rupee for each time someone has said to me that I should “just go out and meet people” and “just be happy”, I’d be a millionaire. It’s as if people think this is the ultimate remedy for any mental health issue. Sure, it can help to meet people, but let’s not pretend it’s the all-time-cure for deeper issues.

I feel like people who have never experienced depression are quick to believe that the person is just sad or lonely, or hasn’t gone out or met others enough. But people don’t know whether, or how much, the person may have already tried those things. Or that their mental health may not be allowing them to do those things anymore.

My depression has probably lasted several years because of not getting the right help at the right time. Because most people give such generic suggestions and refuse to acknowledge depression as a real problem, the person struggles to find any support or help when it is needed.

Maybe it’s not about just meeting a large number of people, but rather about meeting the right ones. Quality over quantity. And often, the person doesn’t find those right people who would truly listen, understand and support the person to get better.

Medical help can be necessary in some cases as well, but the same problem applies there – the right therapist or doctor may be hard to find, especially in India. And in the face of unhelpful people everywhere, the person may reach the point of no return.

I wish the environment here and everywhere in the world someday changes and the quick suggestion to “just go out and meet people” is replaced with something real and helpful.

Sometimes, there’s a kind of silence that follows you after a reaction… a silence not of peace, but of judgment. It’s the silence where some people make a quiet decision: that you are the problem, you are unreasonable, you are difficult. And once that image is locked in, everything you say or do is filtered through it.

Some people in my life seemed to view me with such a lens. Angry or emotional reactions I had to their behaviour were automatically considered “wrong” or viewed without context. I don’t deny that my reactions often got explosive due to build-up over long periods, and I continue working on managing their intensity. But I don’t believe the intensity itself should become a reason for erasing the cause behind the reaction.

But they only seemed shocked when I reacted. It was usually hard for me to identify the exact name for the behaviours, but over time I could recognise things like them invalidating my experiences or boundaries, trying to control or manipulate me, shaming who I was, or reframing real incidents into another version that felt unrecognisable. And when these actions caused me to have reactions, I was told that my feelings were baseless, my hurt was invalid, and the impact of their actions simply didn’t matter. They erased the context of my reactions and what led up to it, as if my response came out of nowhere and confirmed that something was wrong with me.

But I had already wondered all my life if something was wrong with me. It’s not surprising then, that in the face of such judgments, I repeatedly went over every incident, questioning the validity of my feelings – trying to find out if the way I felt was really as unreasonable as they said. After a long time of going over things from several angles, after questioning my own actions and comparing it to theirs, after reading materials on relational dynamics – in the end, I found that I did have real reasons to feel the way I did after all. It was just that they didn’t seem to think so.

I thought the reason why they didn’t acknowledge it was that there had been some ‘misunderstanding’. In a way, that gave me hope, because if it was just that they weren’t aware of their actions, or they had misunderstood my response to them – then surely, I thought, I could explain. That if I could just show them the cause-and-effect of events, they would finally come to see that my feelings were valid. That I was willing to work on my expression of those feelings, but also hoped that we could connect without hurting each other.

What I didn’t know was that this would become a trap. Each time I tried to explain what I was feeling or why something hurt, I was met with complete refusal. They either disengaged, or shifted the blame onto me, or turned it into an argument, or said there was no point in talking about it.

The more this happened, the more I began to over-explain, starting to feel as if I needed to build a complete case for it to finally get through. I started going into timelines, even walking through events step by step, trying to say: This is why I said that. This is why I felt that way. I kept thinking that if I could just convey everything clearly enough, they may finally see my attempts and meet me halfway, and this may be how we could resolve things.

Every time, I hoped: maybe now they’ll get it, maybe now it’ll stop. But the more carefully I explained, the more shocking the response became – as if my clarity somehow made things worse. As if the message was: “Your feelings, your experience, your struggle, your explanation — none of it matters. You’re still wrong.”

It deeply confused me.

They never felt the need to explain why they behaved in hurtful ways or why they judged my reactions; they just did. They never saw any reason to engage with what I said in good faith. Their judgments were final, and their behaviour would never change, no matter what I said. It started to seem like they refused to listen, not because that was the only option, but so that they could maintain the story they created about me… a story where they were always right and I was the problem.

I guess it finally shattered my illusion that these were all just misunderstandings. They just never wanted to understand. They never wanted to question or change how they treated me or how their actions affected my life. They weren’t people who were just missing some context; they were people interested in preserving their own version of the story, not in building a bridge.

And I guess I no longer care what their version says anymore.