This piece will be slightly longer than my typical rant. As I have quite a few thoughts to express and no clear vision for how they will be paced, I have decided the best means of cohesively organizing them is to introduce subheadings, which is something I’ve never done before.
I. The Price of Death
For anyone who has seen the film (or read the original book), Me Before You, you’ll understand when I say the ending strikes me as peculiar (skip this section to avoid spoilers). Our main character Lou falls in love with her paralyzed patient Will, melancholic and resigned to his disability, and finds out that Will intends to undergo assisted suicide. And around the ending of the film, one would expect Lou to go through the traditional Hollywood routine of agonized pleading, which initially would not dissuade Will (for the sake of audience suspense), but ultimately would result in our deuteragonist pulling back from the brink and settling down with his newfound lover. It comes as a surprise for the first-time viewer when Will, despite conceding that Lou is a source of happiness for him, remains committed to his euthanization.
The ending of the film depicts Lou visiting Will in the clinic before his death. I always found the setting a bit uncanny, how calm and beautiful the room seems as we count down on the film’s and Will’s final moments. If it were not for the dread knowledge that this is the prelude to a suicide, it would almost seem like a positive conclusion to their romance. From a narrative perspective I never was able to develop a positive opinion of this ending. For one, the film suggests that Will’s condition isn’t physically painful, at least not to an unbearable degree; secondly, Will lives in relative luxury and his care does not pose a significant burden to those around him. Ultimately, we as the audience are forced to accept that Will ended his life primarily out of depression and his unwillingness to live as a quadriplegic. And I think that is what I find reprehensible about Will and perhaps the narrative overall. Despite having a supportive family, resources, a lover whom he openly admits has reinjected flavor into his life, he discards what ultimately would be a far better life than what many quadriplegics experience; and moreover, dies in a very privileged manner. The film/novel is ostensibly anti-suicide and the framing is that of a romantic tragedy, but I find it difficult not to read the film as something of a macabre endorsement.
A simple google search will reveal that the assisted-suicide service employed by Will and his family costs upwards of 10,000 USD. This price makes a certain amount of sense when one considers the costs of end-of-term medical care, dignified and hygienic body disposal, funeral arrangements, the considerable legal defenses, etc. However, a high quality of Life is inundated by all sorts of paid goods and services, many of which are allegedly optional but effectively mandatory and costly. I find it rather absurd that the market price of Death is determined by the same logics as the market price of Life. One can’t help but cynically wonder what options are left if both treatment and assisted suicide are prohibitively expensive. Nevertheless, I do not dare take my criticism further since I have fortunately never had any encounters with assisted-suicide, and I’m sure my view would change if this were not the case. I will stand by my concerns of suicide being buyable in this fashion, and that it can potentially be interpreted not only as a solution for physical pain, but also for affective pain. The phenomenon known as Suicide Tourism (traveling to countries with lenient right-to-die policies) has increased in recent times, and the data suggests at a worrying trend of people with mental health disorders engaging in the practice.1
II. Neurodivergence and Therapy
“What is not named, remains in the body.” This quote was handed to me by a professor, although I can’t recall who it originally came from. It stands that this is the basic premise behind therapy. To name something is to make it known, make it comprehensible, and through this process reduce the distress it causes. The method is tried and tested, and historically successful. I would assume most people in 2026 understand it’s usually more rewarding to communicate one’s struggles as opposed to bottling them up. However, modern therapy fails in a few observable ways.
I’ll start by stating the obvious, therapy is not a democratic good. It remains questionable how much societal good therapy actually does when many if not most cannot afford it.2 Not to mention, their model is technically based on the level of discontent in society. Secondly, it’s worth noting that many prominent forms of therapy (and general mental health advertising) are not so much focused on expression, but on instruction. This might resonate to some, or it might not, but such an approach teaches practical breathing techniques to mitigate anger or other impulses; basic organizational structure for executive dysfunction, labeling “thought errors”. I won’t deny this approach is certainly needed, especially for those with compulsive disorders or uncontrollable urges, but it most certainly must be complemented by therapy of expression. How much can a person learn about and accept their disorders if their recovery is framed as a constant war of mitigation on themselves? The theme of instruction extends past therapy, to broader spheres of the mental health discourse. I refer to yoga classes, mindfulness, Sweetgreen, book clubs, all the California-esque things we are encouraged to do to contain our insanity. Once again, I won’t deny these can be of some assistance (I myself started practicing yoga after years of skepticism), but they reflect a broader market philosophy alleging that consuming the right products will result in happiness.
And this brings us to another structural flaw, it’s all on you. Therapy, is an incredibly individual process. No doubt we all would prefer it as such, as a therapist is obligated not to breach confidentiality while your shifty friend of questionable repute has no such constraints. Yet, the primary implication of therapy is that your disorder is localized to you, and your recovery is also on you. For instance, the typical characterization of depression as bio-chemical imbalances in the patient’s mind. If depression is something exclusively caused by the patient’s mind, it becomes a matter of controlling the actual sensation of it, rather than getting at the underlying systemic causes (or acknowledging that there are any systemic causes at all). Confronted with the consistent upward trend in depression diagnoses3, it seems unreasonable to claim we are simply seeing more occurrences of chemical imbalancing, nor is it plausible to claim that clinicians are simply more open-handed in their diagnoses. Depression is on the rise, and this is fundamentally inseparable from the exacerbating pace of work, growing wealth inequality, unregulated social media, and other modern pathologies. The connections are clearly legible, there is no use in insisting that mental health is apolitical.
III. Prescribed Resilience and Prescribed Narcotics
Before discussing anything else about therapy and its flaws, I need to introduce the final and most consequential element of our mental health apparatus: the heaps and heaps of drugs. The opiate train of pills and sensations and mood swings the neurodivergent experience to keep pace with reality is always turbulent. We’ve had widespread Adderall shortages in the last 3 years alone, revealing that not only are exacerbating social conditions leading to increased consumption of stimulants, but that the current supply chain is incapable of meeting current/future demand.4 Adderall for certain is a prescription drug, as are Concerta, Wellbutrin, etc. But that does not hinder the undiagnosed from consuming it wherever they find access for the sake of not falling behind. The unprescribed sale of adderall on college campuses is a well-known phenomenon, as is the exaggerated stereotype of the coked up Wall-Street Crusader. Beyond adderall, the increase prevalence of coffee, glucose packets, and other casual stimulants paints a picture of a society (both neurotypical and neurodivergent) that cannot physically keep pace without biochemical bodily transformations.
And what of the supply chain itself? We have tried with limited success to rein in the excesses of Big Pharma, yet the age of AI and accelerating economies are the ideal landscape for Pharmaceutical growth. As the demand for new stimulants and cognitive enhancers increases, the more extractive the industry may become. Developing countries, upon being presented with narcotics made from their own raw resources, may hear the assertion that stimulants are a necessary good required to improve their economy. New forms of unequal exchange could emerge, in the form of finding loosely regulated populations in likely the Global South to test new-age productivity products. Overall, there is much to warrant concern.
And now I come to the central tension of both therapy and narcotic treatment: it’s all based on a metric of productivity. This is obviously borne out of practical concern, work is the cornerstone of survival and if mental health impedes executive functioning this will eventually lead to further suffering. However, it is also a manifestation of what political scientist Ajay Chaudhary calls “resilience science”.5 The concept of resilience science is essentially the philosophy of determining the maximum strain an object can take without breaking, or rather the minimum quantity of resources required to maintain an object’s integrity. He identifies resilience science in risk modeling, economic production models, policymaking, and disaster relief efforts. He acutely identifies it in therapy, prescription-drug treatment, and the modern philosophy of mental health overall: if the human body is beset by melancholia and misery, what is the optimal allocation required not necessarily to cure it, but to render it functional again? This may seem like a cold-hearted interpretation of therapy, and I would not level accusations at any individual therapist who works in the best interest of their patient while setting rational/feasible goals; yet Chaudhary’s point is compelling and very much tracks at an institutional level. In merely the everyday rhythms of American culture one finds this ethos of endurance and perseverance, very much individualist and celebratory of hardship.
In any case, I find that the mental health system of today is unsustainable. We typically only associate unsustainability with environmental issues (and it would still apply to the mental health industry in that context), but it tracks here. The data is plain: ADHD and depression diagnoses have increased over the last decade and the two show significant comorbidity. Yes, we can account for the increased societal attention to these conditions and the effects of the pandemic, but that doesn’t alter the overall trend. More and more kids are growing up out of step with the world, overwhelmed by world events, bogged down by the pace of AI and unregulated economic growth, and exposed to the darkest vices of social media. I haven’t yet seen Into the Manosphere, but what does that signal if not an egregious systemic failure of mental health. The pharmaceutical and therapeutical industry will continue to prosper while they struggle to meet increased demand. The societal discourse around mental health remains full of tensions and half-solutions, promising happiness through correct consumption (although this is hardly new, it’s merely taken on a new context).
These signs flow very much in tandem with other social, political, and economic signifiers of failing late-stage capitalism. Mark Fisher’s insistence that mental health must be politicized and move past enclosed spaces seems more pressing by the day. It seems absolutely insane that we should discount these clear trends and simply put more kids (those who can afford it) on drugs. There’s only so much resilience science we can employ to staunch the wounds responsible for such discontent. Frantz Fanon makes a similar point in Black Skin White Masks, where he demonstrates that individual psychic analysis inevitably fails to individualize traumas that are rooted in the system (specifically he talks about racial traumas).6
I won’t claim that the system is wholly devoid of utility, I’m sure many have greatly benefited from a good therapist and a well-tailored medication regimen. And many of the pathologies targeted, on an existential level don’t really have a cure per se. Perhaps even good insurance bargains exist where those things are more accessible than I made them out to be. But all the same, it’s clearly not enough.
Gauthier, S., Mausbach, J., Reisch, T., & Bartsch, C. (2015). Suicide tourism: A pilot study on the Swiss phenomenon. Journal of Medical Ethics, 41(8), 611–617. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2014-102091
There exist certain branches of therapy which unapologetically do not claim any utilitarian high ground. Conventional therapy is always too caught up in contradictions to make a determination on this point.
Inoue, K., Liu, M., Koh, K. A., Aggarwal, R., Marinacci, L. X., & Wadhera, R. K. (2025). Depressive Symptoms Among US Adults. JAMA Internal Medicine, 185(7), 893. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.0993
Inoue, K., Liu, M., Koh, K. A., Aggarwal, R., Marinacci, L. X., & Wadhera, R. K. (2025). Depressive Symptoms Among US Adults. JAMA Internal Medicine, 185(7), 893. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.0993
Chaudhary, A. S. (2024). The exhausted of the earth: Politics in a burning world. Repeater.
Fanon, F. (2021). Black skin, white masks (R. Philcox, Trans.). Penguin books.
Heirs to the Wreckage 
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