The brain is a problem-solving organ. It has created the modern world in all its technological complexity. But our hunger for tidy explanations and coherence in an infinitely complicated world can also be dangerous. These days, we are too often trying to solve the simple fact of being human.

Increasingly, we confuse enduring mental illness with the ordinary struggles of being alive. The lines have blurred to the point that many now expect most distress to be named, packaged and funneled into a treatment pathway. Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s decision this week to order an inquiry into mental health overdiagnosis suggests that even policymakers recognize we have drifted too far into treating ordinary unhappiness as illness.

A diagnosis may bring momentary relief, but it often carries the false promise of a solution and can lead to further problems in the long term. While careful diagnosis has its crucial place, treating even extreme heartache or misery as an illness makes us lose sight of our humanity. People need space to feel sorrow without being diagnosed with a disorder. Psychological pain is part of life, and challenges such as grief, loneliness or unrequited love cannot be resolved by a medical framework.

The 1964 film Zorba the Greek captured this when the titular character embraces the whole unruly sweep of existence. “Am I not a man?” he says. “Of course I have been married. Wife, house, children — the full catastrophe!” Art, philosophy, literature, music: it is all a response to the great catastrophe of life. When we rush to classify every feeling, we risk flattening the very experiences that make life remarkable.

If we genuinely want to help people, we need to move beyond a culture that reflexively diagnoses human suffering. This is why I found myself agreeing with most of Streeting’s recent remarks. What rarely gets acknowledged is that the reliability of many Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) categories is shaky at best, and anyone working in the field knows it. Whether the label is autism, ADHD or gender dysphoria, these diagnoses are only approximations, built from clusters of symptoms, yet we continue to treat them as though they offer scientific certainty.

Affirmation has become a fashionable approach in mental health. But this is shallow and only offers short-term comfort while embedding and normalizing certain behaviors. It implores people to wallow in their symptoms and define their identity through having a particular disorder. If someone believes they are autistic, the assumption follows that they should receive an autism diagnosis and the accommodations which come with it. This circular logic may feel compassionate, but it drifts far from clinical reality.

Some 4.4 million working-age adults in Britain now claim disability or incapacity benefits, an increase of 1.2 million since 2019, and record numbers of young people are stepping away from the workforce. If we want a glimpse of where this trend might lead, we only need to look to the United States.

This week in the Atlantic, Rose Horowitch charted the mental health crisis in American universities. At Stanford University, for example, nearly four in 10 undergraduates are registered as disabled. In the past 15 years, students claiming they have additional needs have secured extra time on exams, extensions for assignments or permission to miss classes at an astonishing rate.

Few of these students require wheelchair ramps or sign-language interpreters. The surge comes from rising diagnoses of autism, anxiety and depression, along with easier access to accommodations. At one American law school, 45% of students now receive adjustments, prompting a Stanford professor to ask what happens if that rises to 50% or 60%. When disability expands this quickly, resources for those with profound needs grow thin, and people who require lifelong support risk being overlooked.

The more we pathologize ordinary distress, the harder it becomes to identify those who are genuinely unwell. A system that labels everyone serves no one. Most people can navigate life’s difficulties with time, support and space. Sometimes the most compassionate response is to accept that suffering is part of being human and understanding that without some sense of meaning or direction, life can feel hollow. As the playwright Samuel Beckett put it: “You are on Earth. There is no cure for that.”

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Stella O’Malley is a psychotherapist and bestselling author. She is Founder-Director of Genspect, an international organisation that advocates for a healthy approach to sex and gender.

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