How Casual Diagnoses of "Love Addiction" and Other "Disorders Du Jour" Are Eroding Our Mental Health

Is there a way of quantifying just how much psychotherapy is too much psychotherapy? The battlefield lines have been drawn, and what is at stake is the mental stability of a nation. The argument raging is: are we empowering ourselves by keeping abreast of the pioneering advances in the mental health field, or is the overabundance of pop-labels for all of our "ills" crippling us to the point of impotence in our daily lives?

When pharmaceutical companies began pedaling their wares through well-placed television and magazine ads, there was a general outcry from physicians who protested the direct-to-consumer "diagnoses" these publicity spots were able to achieve. Almost overnight, people were sauntering into the offices of their GP with the assuredness of a first-year medical student, demanding the good doctor sign off on the prescriptions that were being touted as the cure of their self-diagnosed ailments.

Some argued that the entrance or Drs. Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline into the medical arena empowered people to become more active participants in their health care decisions, while others held it simply put a generation of consumers on the fast-track to the worst case of hypochondria the world has ever seen. This frenzy has succeeded in trapping the mental health industry in a vice grip: it benefits from the economic boon created through the perpetuation of the stigma that we all have something "wrong" that needs to be "fixed", while simultaneously making a gallant attempt to convince those struggling with various mental health issues that they are just as "normal" as the next person. It's a perilous tightrope on which to balance, but so far it has worked.

The average mental health consumer believes less in the relief from symptoms the correct medication can bring them, and more in what havoc the cessation of the medication could possibly wreak upon their lives. Rising health care costs have not lessened the line at the pharmacy counter or forced us to reevaluate the need we may or may not have for the various pharmaceuticals we are consuming. Being denied, for any reason, the medicine that we are convinced would make us better would indeed be a bitter pill to swallow.

The legitimate (and unavoidable) issue, of course, is that mental illness is a real and paralyzing problem that often times requires dual therapy made up of chemical intervention coupled with a proactive approach to relearning essential life skills. Where it starts to get out of hand, though, is when self-help books begin to read like a choose-your-own-adventure in which the storyline you follow is determined by what has been decided, as dictated at the end of each chapter, to be your major mental health issues. Before you know it, you keep retracing your steps, and any chance you had of feeling like a healthy, sane person has gone right out the window.

Take, for instance, the newest diagnosis in the world of psychotherapy: "Love Addiction". We've all heard the saying that you "marry your father/mother", but the idea of "Love Addiction" takes the quaint idea of the human tendency to take comfort in the familiar and magnifies it one hundred fold.

The intention here isn't to discredit the concept of "Love Addiction"; rather it is to simply use it as an example of an area of psychotherapy that can be easily manipulated to apply to the life of any given person at any given time. Although the enigmatic nature of love, itself, spurs us to sometimes act differently, or to tolerate things we wouldn't otherwise, the idea of Love Addiction is that we compromise ourselves to the point of self-detriment in the name of our "love" or relationship.

While we believe we are engaging in selfless acts as we share ourselves, our knowledge, and our life experiences with our partner, what we are really doing, instead, is presenting those aspects of our lives as if they were offerings to be accepted as a confirmation of our self-worth. This confirmation is necessary because we are engaging in the most vulnerable of life's acts: the exchange of love. We do for our partner what we hope they would do for us, and that is to confirm their desire that we engage in their lives.

Where it becomes unbalanced is when we require our partner to confirm our self-worth because we are unable to do it ourselves. At that point the task shifts from asking them to confirm our self-worth to become our self-worth. This psychological surrender takes its cue from the playbook of learned behaviors that you've been toting around since childhood, and it colors every decision you make. From everyday tasks to the way that you and your partner fight with one another, scenarios are often acted out which may actually be more of a reflection of the way you have seen similar situations handled in your past, rather than a constructive and measured reaction to the situation at hand.

These situations can repeat themselves throughout entire relationships, through cycles of a relationship, or sometimes just every once-in-awhile. A lifetime of what can be destructive behavior is one thing. Finding yourself guilty of this behavior as you enter into a new relationship, or while you are going through a difficult period in your life, is another. Some of your "symptoms" might fit a "Love Addiction" diagnosis, but the likelihood that you are truly suffering the ailment is doubtful.

The self-help section of any bookstore teems with a colossal amount of mental health material, the purpose of which is to assist you in compartmentalizing the infinite facets of your life, and this newly pragmatic approach to investigating what used to be just dismissed as "life as usual" is seductively soothing. Here, now, you have been given the tools to "fix" what is wrong, if only you can take that very first step cherished by recovering addicts everywhere: admitting you have a problem.

New labels like "Love Addiction" could be, and often are, carelessly offered up as the reasons for the choices we make. This haphazard application begs the question, "At what point in our adult relationships do we stop trying to make recompense for the trials and tribulations of our childhoods?" As long as each day brings new issues to the fore, the likelihood of our completely quashing the knee-jerk reactions of our subconscious is pretty slim.

What we have here, then, isn't a problem. It is life as faced by us all.

So, it's back to the battlefield, where we are caught threading our way down the path of healthy introspection while being bombarded on all sides by industries whose job it is to convince us that we are a flawed and needy people. What has emerged from the chaos is a society that defines itself by its foibles, instead of one that maintains a holistic sense of self coupled with the humility to learn from its mistakes.

Somewhere along the line, we started to allow our knocks and bruises to determine who we were and this new outlook has allowed us to define ourselves, while simultaneously eroding our self-confidence. We have allowed ourselves to be cowed into believing that any self-introspection must result in the rooting out of a "problem", which would allow us to be automatically "tagged" as suffering from X or Y, labeled for life.

The medical field continues to be corrupted by a consumer mentality that demands to know not if there is a problem, but what that problem is. Without definition, there is no solution, and being told that you might just need to be a little bit more aware of your actions isn't as fulfilling as getting a diagnosis or filling a prescription. Somehow "mental health" now means "being aware of all of the things from which you suffer" and how well your current drug cocktail is allowing you to keep them in check.

Prescriptions are being filled at an alarming rate, and for an ever-younger age group. Medicine absolutely has its place in treating mental illness, but the craze to over-medicate without following through with the requisite therapy is bordering on ridiculous. We latch onto a medication as if it was our saving grace, and become afraid of the day when we might not need it anymore…because that couldn't possibly be true! Life becomes experienced as a series of symptoms instead of as a continual cycle of shared emotions and events. Something is always wrong. If it's not depression, than it's anxiety, or separation angst, or Love Addiction, or…

Now we no longer look at Timmy and Janey and think, "Ohh, what a cute couple!" unless it is immediately followed by, "Now, I wonder if he is making up for the lack of stability in his parent's relationship by settling down with such a straight-laced girl? Oh well. I'm sure he's gone over all of that in therapy! At least they look happy!"

And as amusing as that may seem, there is no reason to make light of the situation. Overzealous (or overworked) therapists are marching arm-in-arm with pharmaceutical companies who want to satisfy our need to make sense of it all by handing us a prepackaged problem and cure, demeaning those who are struggling to overcome legitimate barriers because, well, who isn't trying to get over that?

We live in a culture of fear that allows us to function only if something is amiss, and the ease with which we portray our everyday lives in a negative light ("I screwed up again!" instead of, "Oh, well - made another mistake!") allows us to keep reliving over and over again the choose-your-own-adventure of our mental woes.

This type of thinking makes it easy to substitute (what can come down to) the psychobabble of the mental health industry for the continual presence of an honest self-dialogue and a healthy sense of personal responsibility. In reality, though, it isn't about pitting one against the other. It's about appreciating the advances in mental health medicine, and the necessary role it plays in all of our lives, while at the same time being able to say, "You know what? Enough is enough. It's time I lived my life as determined by me instead of as defined by someone else."

Giving a name to the various issues we experience can help us to pinpoint underdeveloped areas in our lives where there is room for personal growth that would benefit from the guidance and support of others. Willed into existence, however, from popular culture's obsession with a "diagnose-and-medicate-it" mental health system can end up being more detrimental to our state of mind than the purported cure.