Posted on 05/02/2026 5:28:27 AM PDT by MtnClimber
For decades, the mental health industry and its allies in media, government, and education have operated on a simple assumption: the more mental health awareness we spread, through campaigns, school programs, social media, and public service announcements, the better. Raise awareness, reduce stigma, encourage help-seeking, and mental health will surely improve.
New evidence shows the opposite is happening. Well-intentioned awareness efforts are actively backfiring, manufacturing distress, inflating diagnoses, and turning normal human emotions into chronic “disorders.” The shocking result is that these campaigns are turning mentally fit people into self-diagnosed mentally ill patients, with symptoms effectively “contracted” from the awareness messages themselves.
A major new review in Nature Reviews Psychology (March 2026) confirms what many conservatives have long suspected: well-meaning mental health awareness efforts can harm more than they help. Titled “The psychological consequences of mental health awareness efforts,” the paper, led by Oxford psychologist Lucy Foulkes, synthesizes experimental evidence showing these campaigns lower the bar for what counts as a “disorder,” train people to pathologize normal emotions, and lock in self-fulfilling “illness identities.”
The authors aren’t anti-awareness radicals: they acknowledge real benefits from such campaigns, such as reduced stigma in some cases and modest increases in help-seeking. Nonetheless, the actual data on harms is damning and growing.
Three Mechanisms of Harm
The review identifies three converging pathways, drawn from previously disparate literatures on concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling:
1. Lowering the threshold for disorder.
Awareness materials serve to broaden definitions of mental illness. Normal feelings, such as loneliness, stress, and sadness, get “reframed” as pathology. Experiments show people exposed to awareness content are far more likely to self-diagnose with conditions they simply don’t clinically meet.
2. Symptom-scanning and reinterpretation.
Campaigns teach hypervigilance, demanding that you constantly assess your inner life.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Ha!
EEK! I’m nuts. I’mnuts! I’m still nuts!
So many mentally ill ,that aren’t, also lowers the care level. Practitioners are always treating surface level. People with real problems never get the depth of care.
Just like “restless leg syndrome”.
Big Pill’s most effective market-growing campaigns are through “nonprofits”.
Because they get incentives for prescribing RX by Pharma.
Take a quick read on Operation Sea Spray. Not only have governments suppressed treatment, they've intentionally spread diseases. Operation Sea Spray is just one that they'll admit to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray
I have a friend who at 59 had a calcium score of zero given a clean bill of health by his MD prior to retirement. 4 mos later he suffered a heart attack and cardiac arrest. He had three coronary arteries that were nearly 100% blocked as discovered in the cath that took place after he was resuscitated. He had been on statins and triglyceride Rx for years.
I have problems with mental illness, I’m surrounded by crazy people!
When someone asks me how I made it to 60 without ever spending a single day or night in the hospital, I tell them it’s because I never spent a single day or night in the hospital.
I have absolutely believe this to be true. When people who have a vested interest in the spread of an illness, this can be done by advocating the changing of diagnosis standards.
If the goalposts are changed to make the field bigger and include more people in a diagnostic pool (for example, to purportedly “improve” society by making more people believe they have psychiatric or physical problems, who then clamor for solutions involving government mandates or money) then you get a lot of people who are inclined to find an excuse to “seek help”.
I have always felt that there are many people classified fraudulently with mental or physical disabilities because that opens doors, both financial and emotional to get government supplied funds or resources, or to explain personal shortcomings.
That does not mean that there are no people who have real “learning disabilities” or “hyperactivity” because there are. It does mean that there are a portion of people who DO claim those things, but do not have them because it provides them with a psychological crutch.
“Restless Leg” is real, I can tell you. 100%. And nothing seems to really help at all short of opioids. And if you don’t want to be debilitated by opioids, there are few to no good options, even if you might stumble across some combination of drugs that seem to help even peripherally.
I understand why you might use that as an example, and this post is not meant to chasten you.
But I do feel that if you knew directly someone who has it, you might have a different take on including that as an example. It is very real and can be debilitating. I have a person close to me who can no longer travel by plane or distances of more than an hour or two by car, and sleeps only a few hours at night. She has tried every remedy and every drug regimen except opioids, which have been offered but which she has denied.
Just saying. That isn’t saying that there are people out there who need a condition like that to use as an emotional crutch (just as there are indeed people who claim a “learning disability” or any other mental conditions to explain away their own behavior) but keep in mind that there are people who do have this condition.
Believe me, if you knew someone intimately who battled this condition on a daily basis for decades, you would think (as I do, on a daily basis) “Thank God I do not have whatever causes that.”
As you can see from my post at #30 BTW, I do agree largely with your premise, but also illustrates that point that people are suffering from various things that while exploited by drug companies, do absolutely exist.
And not only are “experts” creating more problems with “helpful” campaigns, they are also making our national mental health crisis much much worse by ignoring true mental health problems like transgenderism.
It is a feature of their “communities”. Both the gay and mentally ill communities need sympathetic comrades.
Intriguing statement, but I can't grasp your point. Could you explain?
But with mental illness you actually can make yourself ill.
Not necessarily a big deal conspiracy as such, just a lot of folks who want there to be more craziness and get some sort of advantage by hopping on board the crazy train.
The whole medical system works by hyping doom and getting people on more and more prescription drugs. You go to the doctor to get depressed.
I just stumbled across this guy recently.....
Neurosurgeon says Scripture Helped Heal His Mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmoU1NEWGLM
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