For decades, Western mental health systems have been built on a single dominant idea: that mental distress is a medical problem, best treated with diagnosis and medication. This framework — known as the medical model — has shaped everything from public policy to personal identity. But for many people, it doesn’t heal. It harms.
It pathologizes normal human pain, sidelines personal agency, and reduces people to a set of symptoms — instead of seeing them as complex, capable human beings trying to survive in often chaotic, unjust environments.
Let’s look at why this model so often fails — and what we can do instead.
1. It Reduces People to Diagnoses
The medical model sees mental health struggles as disorders, primarily caused by brain chemistry or biology. While biology plays a role, this narrow view overlooks trauma, environment, social injustice, and learned behaviour patterns (Johnstone & Boyle, 2018). People become “disordered” rather than understood in context.
Labeling someone with a diagnosis like depression or borderline personality disorder can carry stigma, reinforce self-blame, and limit belief in recovery — even when those labels are based on subjective and inconsistent criteria (Frances, 2013).
➡ What to do instead: Focus on your story, not your label. Ask, “What happened to me?” not just “What’s wrong with me?” This shift is the beginning of healing.
2. It Treats Symptoms, Not Root Causes
Under the medical model, the goal is to reduce or eliminate symptoms — usually through medication or cognitive tools. But this approach often misses the deeper pain beneath the surface: attachment wounds, grief, systemic oppression, loneliness, or existential crisis.
Medications can help some people, but research shows that for many, the long-term outcomes are no better — and sometimes worse — than non-medicated approaches (Moncrieff et al., 2022; Whitaker, 2010).
➡ What to do instead: Work with someone who helps you process, not just manage. Healing often comes not from symptom control, but from deeper emotional integration, values-based living, and building a life worth showing up for.
3. It Ignores the Power of Neuroplasticity
The brain is not fixed. It changes with experience. This truth — known as neuroplasticity — means that healing is possible, even after years of struggle (Doidge, 2007). But the medical model rarely teaches this. It often gives the impression that if you have a mental illness, you’ll always have it — as though your brain is broken.
➡ What to do instead: Learn how your brain responds to emotion, habit, connection, and meaning. Practice small, consistent actions that reshape the nervous system — like mindfulness, movement, gratitude, breathwork, and aligned decision-making.
4. It Treats the Individual, But Ignores Systems
The medical model places all responsibility inside the individual. But what about the systems that harm us? Poverty, racism, family dysfunction, institutional abuse, isolation, climate grief — these are not mental illnesses. They are social realities.
To treat a person’s pain without acknowledging the systems they live in is like treating smoke without acknowledging fire (Mills, 2014).
➡ What to do instead: Surround yourself with people and practices that see the whole you — your history, your context, your community. Healing happens in relationship, not just in a clinic.
5. It Overlooks Meaning and Purpose
You are not just a brain or a diagnosis — you are a meaning-making being. One of the most overlooked truths in mental well-being is that people need purpose. Viktor Frankl wrote that when people have “a why,” they can endure almost any “how” (Frankl, 1959). The medical model doesn’t teach people how to live a meaningful life. It teaches them how to survive symptoms.
➡ What to do instead: Clarify your values. Discover your “why.” Build your life around what matters most, even if your emotions don’t cooperate right away.
The Bottom Line
The medical model isn’t all bad — but it’s incomplete. It can be useful in a crisis, but it is not a full map for healing. Real transformation requires education, choice, values, emotional safety, and consistent practice — the very things often left out of the system.
At Practice Makes Permanent, we use brain-based coaching to help people move from survival to self-leadership. We don’t treat disorders — we build skills. We don’t diagnose — we educate, equip, and empower. You are not broken. You are becoming.
References
- Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. Viking.
- Frances, A. (2013). Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life. William Morrow.
- Frankl, V. E. (1959). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.
- Johnstone, L., & Boyle, M. (2018). The Power Threat Meaning Framework: Towards the identification of patterns in emotional distress, unusual experiences and troubled or troubling behaviour, as an alternative to functional psychiatric diagnosis. British Psychological Society.
- Mills, C. (2014). Decolonizing Global Mental Health: The Psychiatrization of the Majority World. Routledge.
- Moncrieff, J., Horowitz, M. A., & Deacon, B. J. (2022). The serotonin theory of depression: A systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Molecular Psychiatry, 27, 2401–2413. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0
- Whitaker, R. (2010). Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Crown Publishing.