By Vikrant Sentis

 

Whose Pathology Exactly?

What happens to a society when its foundational premise about human nature is wrong – when its parenting, its education, its religion, and its psychology all conspire to produce, generation after generation, human beings who are systematically disconnected from their own aliveness, their own feelings, their own authentic being?

The answer is visible in the epidemic of emotional suffering that defines contemporary Western society, and in the peculiar response that civilization has developed to that suffering: its medicalization.

Approximately one in ten Americans aged twelve and above currently takes antidepressant medication—roughly thirty million people. This figure demands not merely a medical explanation but a civilizational one.

The question is not why these individuals are suffering, but why the response to their suffering is the pharmacological management of their pain rather than any serious examination of the conditions that produce it.

The answer lies in a fundamental confusion between symptom and problem.

The medical model of mental health, as it has developed in contemporary psychiatry, treats emotional pain as a pathological deviation from a normal baseline – a dysfunction to be diagnosed and corrected.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, in its successive editions from the first publication in 1952 through to the current DSM-5-TR, has proliferated to encompass over three hundred distinct diagnostic categories, effectively transforming the entire spectrum of human emotional experience into medical problems requiring clinical intervention.

What was once understood as the ordinary challenges one faces in life is now classified, coded, and treated. The implicit message of this diagnostic proliferation is unmistakable:

The way you feel is a disease.

That is not to say that medicalization per se should be totally discarded. In the most severe of cases, for those experiencing acute psychiatric disorders and depression, the damage is such that medication, together with therapy, will be of great help in restoring homeostasis and health.

Medicalization as a panacea to all the ills represents a profound ideological sleight of hand. Emotional pain is not a malfunction.

It is, in the vast majority of cases, an intelligent response to conditions that are genuinely damaging.

These conditions are rooted in the early relational betrayal and produced by an educational system and social structure built upon a flawed foundational premise.

The entire system is the real pathology, not the child.

The child inevitably develops into an adult suffering from depression, anxiety, low self-worth, or existential emptiness.

It is not a malfunction. It is an appropriate response to a genuinely malfunctioning societal structure.

The danger resides in the normalization of the use of medication as shortcuts, chemically induced bypasses that may work well as a way to silence the pain, but fail to address the emotional and existential angst that underlie the symptoms.

 

Therapy For the Normally Ill

The response to this chronic state of mis-alignment with life’s natural flow has been adjustment therapy, or “therapy for the normally ill,” as Osho calls it.

It never questions the premise beneath the symptoms. It accepts the patient’s sense of unworthiness as given and attempts to manage or minimize it through better coping strategies, cognitive reframing, or pharmacological numbing.

Osho:

“Mind is a disease. This is a basic truth the East has discovered. The West says mind can become ill, can be healthy. Western psychology depends on this: the mind can be healthy or ill. But the East says mind as such is the disease, it cannot be healthy. No psychiatry will help, at the most you can make it normally ill.

“So there are two types of illness with mind: normally ill – that means you have the same illness as others around you; or abnormally ill – that means you are something unique. Your disease is not ordinary, exceptional. Your disease is individual, not of the crowd; that’s the only difference. Normally ill or abnormally ill, but mind cannot be healthy.”¹

Therefore, the fundamental question we should ask is: what if the sense of unworthiness itself is the lie?

What if the patient is not broken, but has been broken? And what if that brokenness is not a disease to be managed but an injustice to be recognized and undone?

This failure to address root causes is not accidental.

An educational, social, and economic system that depends on the production of compliant, self-doubting, competitive individuals has every structural incentive to medicalize the suffering that system produces rather than to examine the system itself.

 

Psychiatry as Political Instrument of Compliance

Psychiatry has become essentially political in its diagnostic processes is performing exactly this function: redirecting attention from the civilizational conditions that produce suffering to the individual organism that experiences it.

The majority of today’s “sick people” are the socially worthless, while individuals with power manias typically succeed in society.

The DSM, viewed through this lens, is less a map of mental illness than a catalogue of the adaptations and maladjustments produced by an unnatural upbringing.

This upbringing, we must not forget, is designed, consciously or unconsciously, to produce obedient servants of the existing social order rather than free, alive, authentic human beings.

Emotional pain, from this perspective, is not produced by events themselves but by the organism’s attitude of rejection toward those events.

Pain becomes manifest in the gap between what is and what the conditioned mind insists should be.

The organism’s limbic system compares incoming experience with stored cultural conditioning, producing either an attitude of acceptance in which the organism expands and experiences wellbeing – or rejection, in which the body contracts and experiences pain.

This means that suffering is the consequence of resistance rather than circumstance, of saying no to what is rather than of the event itself.

There is no event that has the power in itself to make one feel good or bad, but it is the way in which the human being unconsciously relates himself to the event that determines their emotional response.

The end result is a world that manufactures suffering on an industrial scale, then sells the cure back to those it has broken.

A world that gives us pharmaceutical products, endless cycles of talk therapy, and an ever-expanding taxonomy of disorders that locate the problem within the individual rather than within the cultural environment that produced the individual’s pain.

The lucrative business of analysis and talk therapy, the medicalization of everything that deviates from social norms, and the homogenization of human experience that strips away the uniqueness of each person—all of this is the logical endpoint of a civilization founded on the premise that human beings are born defective and only under society’s tutelage can we become.

 

Essential Human Needs: The Missing Link

If emotional suffering is the downstream consequence of early relational conditions that could not accommodate the child’s natural being, then a rigorous framework must identify, as precisely as possible, what conditions were actually required and what conditions were actually withheld.

This is the function of what can be described as the Essential Human Needs – not an abstract philosophical ideal, but the developmental requirements of the human organism, the relational nutrients without which healthy psychological and emotional growth cannot occur:

• The most foundational is the need to feel wanted and received in love. Not conditional love that depends on performance or compliance, but the unconditional welcome of the child’s very existence. Love.
• Closely related is the need to feel special and respected as a unique person, to have one’s irreducible individuality recognized and celebrated rather than flattened into conformity. As Osho consistently emphasizes, each human being is utterly unique: “There has never been any individual like you before and there will never be again,”² and this uniqueness is not a problem to be managed but existence’s most fundamental gift, a blessing to be honored from the first moments of life.
• The need for one’s basic natural feelings to be validated and supported. Sadness, anger, fear, pain, and insecurity are not pathological deviations from wellbeing—they are the organism’s intelligent responses to its experience, and they require acknowledgment and containment rather than suppression or punishment.
• The need to have one’s unique energy validated and supported. Passion, sexuality, creativity, power, joy, resourcefulness, and the capacity for silence and solitude are expressions of authentic nature rather than shamed as dangerous or inappropriate. This need speaks directly to the original crime described earlier: the systematic suppression of the child’s vital, creative, sexual flowering and aliveness in the service of social compliance.
• The need for safety, security, and protection. Genuine exploration and growth require a secure relational base from which the child can venture outward and to which it can return – what attachment theory identifies as the foundational condition for healthy development.
• The need for physical touch with loving presence. It acknowledges the fundamental somatic dimension of relational experience: the body requires the same quality of welcome that the mind and emotions require, and the quality of physical contact through which the infant is held, fed, and soothed lays down patterns in the nervous system that will shape the individual’s experience of reality for the remainder of their life.
• The need to be supported, inspired and motivated to develop one’s own natural gifts and a healthy sense of self. It points to the profound difference between an education that builds on the child’s inherent curiosity and an education organized around competitive performance and external validation.
• The need to know that it is safe to make mistakes and to learn from them. A culture built on the premise of original sinfulness treats error as evidence of unworthiness, as confirmation of the fundamental defectiveness of the human creature. A genuinely developmental environment treats mistakes as the natural medium through which learning occurs, as the inevitable and welcome companions of genuine growth.

The epidemic of depression, anxiety, and existential emptiness is not mysterious when viewed through this lens: it is the entirely predictable consequence of the systematic deprivation of these fundamental developmental needs across an entire civilization, generation after generation, from the very first days of life.

END OF PART 2

This article is part 2 of the three-part series: “From Original Sin to Original Innocence – A Framework for Understanding and Healing Human Suffering.”

Part 1: A Fallacious Premise: Born in Sin
Part 2: Pain and Trauma – The Medicalization of Sadness
Part 3: Healing: Osho’s Non-Freudian Primal Therapy and the Return to Original Innocence – coming soon

1 – Osho, Hsin Hsin Ming: The Book of Nothing, Talk #1 – The Great Way Is Not Difficult
2 – Osho, Guida Spirituale, Talk #5 – The Essential