We keep hearing that the mental health system is “broken.” But what if it’s working exactly as designed, It’s not a healing system, it’s a containment system, designed to keep people functioning just enough to fit back into a world that won’t adapt for them.

Throughout history, the way society has treated mental health and disability has evolved, but the underlying beliefs about difference have often stayed the same.

In the Medieval period (roughly 1050–1485), people described as “dumbe,” “deaff,” “natural fools,”, “lame,” or “lunaticks” were a visible part of everyday life. There was no clear divide between “madness” and “sickness,” and conditions were often seen as divine punishment or cosmic imbalance.

By the 17th and 18th centuries (1660–1823), new understandings began to challenge the idea that madness or disability came from God or the stars. “Madness” was reframed as a loss of reason, something that could, in theory, be restored through the right treatment. Disability was seen less as a curse and more as a misfortune, something deserving of charity, not condemnation.

After 1945, our understanding of disability, mental health, and now neurodiversity expanded rapidly. Rights movements, deinstitutionalisation, and the shift to “community care” seemed like progress. But beneath these changes, the same scepticism about difference remained just dressed up in bureaucracy and medical language.

The systems built to support us were designed around control, compliance, and cost-efficiency — not around care, dignity, or empowerment. In other words: the system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as it was built to.

Today’s mental health system still carries those old values — just in subtler, more administrative ways. Where asylums once locked people away, now long waiting lists and eligibility criteria keep them out. Care has been replaced with crisis management. You’re not offered help until you’re at breaking point — and even then, it’s often a six-session course of CBT and a leaflet on mindfulness.

A few years ago after graduating I found myself really struggling with my mental health and after a long invasive telephone call about my anxiety, I was told I had high levels of anxiety which came as no shock to me at the time. But the support I was offered was online learning, not a follow up call or regular meetings with a trained professional.

For many of us, that “community care” promise never really arrived. Services are stretched so thin that people are bounced between departments, assessed, discharged, and referred again like parcels in the post. If your needs don’t fit neatly into their categories too complex, too stable, too neurodivergent, too traumatised — you risk falling through the cracks completely.

And now we have politicians from all sides claiming that people with so-called “mild” mental health conditions like anxiety or depression shouldn’t qualify for benefits like PIP — even though many rely on that support to access private therapy or simply survive while they wait for NHS care.

This isn’t an accident. It’s the result of decades of policies designed to ration care, prioritise cost over compassion, and measure “success” by how fast people return to work — not whether they’re actually well. The language has changed, the buildings are different, but the logic is the same: keep people moving, keep the system stable, and call it progress.