Editor:

One of the issues that looms large in the field of medicine and has disturbed me is the definition of “healthy.” We are not sure what it is except for an average of what everyone in the population is with no tolerance for healthy being outside narrow norms.

In the field of mental health, the definition of healthy is the major driving force behind treatment. In mental health we even more narrowly define health as mediocre or average, with little tolerance for people who are on the edges of or outside the norms.

In the profit-driven and “problem-solving” oriented world of modern medicine, we constantly search for a “philosopher’s stone” that solves our problems and makes us feel good about being ourselves.

Ultimately, this is a drug-fueled, “data-driven” system in which the pharmaceutical companies exploit people’s fears of not being “normal” into billions of dollars in profits.

Perhaps, especially in mental health, we should be taking a different approach that tries to understand the purpose of a mental health condition and work with it before “solving” it.

Maybe an ecological perspective is needed to understand where a piece fits, before destroying a person.

Richard Gardner

Upper Bern Township

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Originally Appeared Here