The Glory of Psychiatry and the Overpathologization of Emotion
- Adriane Barroso
- Sep 25
- 1 min read
Updated: Sep 28
There is a particular kind of reassurance in diagnosis. To be handed a name, a definition, a framework, can feel like being given a map in the middle of the desert. Psychiatry has given us words for suffering, and they have allowed people to recognize their pain in others, to find treatments that bring stability, and to be saved.
Yet, what brings clarity can also impose limits. What might otherwise be understood as part of the ordinary and difficult texture of living gets filed under disorder, and the messiness of our world is rearranged into a rigid order. Alongside its triumphs, psychiatric diagnosis bring the suggestion that all strong emotion must be subdued.
Human life does not unfold neatly. Sorrow, dread, and despair may be signals that something essential is stirring beneath the surface. They may be telling us about a loss we have not yet mourned, a desire we have not yet named, or a truth we are still resisting. To rush past them in the hope of quick relief is to miss what they are trying to show.
Therapy, at its best, resists this rush. It is less about extinguishing pain than about making space for it, about staying with the feeling long enough to learn what it contains.
To overpathologize emotion is, in a way, to silence it. But emotions, in their imperfect forms, are the most human truths we have.
