http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-tyranny-of-mental-health/20066#.WWi7s3WQzVM

The tyranny of mental health

Bruce Scott
Psychoanalyst

The concept of mental illness turns problems into conditions.

Mental health’ is a phrase everybody uses without thinking. Yet when we subject it to critical analysis, we can see just how slippery a term it really is. It is a term that reduces and reifies human experience to simple categories of good and ill health.
Before criticising the idea of mental health, it’s important to state that to do so is not to diminish or denigrate the mental distress that many people do indeed experience. My aim, rather, is to show how the use of the category of mental health actually detracts from the real suffering of people.