Mental health was never meant to absolve you of responsibility.
Somewhere along the way, we decided it does.

We live in a culture where mental health has become a universal shield, an overall explanation for behavior that would otherwise be called what it is: inconsiderate, lazy, or harmful. Treat someone badly? It’s your mental health. Miss deadlines repeatedly? Mental health. Disappear on people? Mental health. And society nods along, terrified that questioning any of it might land you on the wrong side of moral outrage.

Let’s be clear: struggling does not give you permission to treat other people like collateral damage. Everyone has bad days. Everyone feels low. Everyone has moments where getting out of bed feels heavy. Yet most people still manage not to lash out, ghost responsibilities, or make their emotions someone else’s problem. Feeling unwell explains behavior, it does not excuse it.

What we’ve done is weaponize the language of therapy. Mental health has shifted from something to be worked through into something to hide behind. Instead of accountability, we offer explanations. Instead of effort, we offer labels. And instead of asking how someone is coping, we accept disengagement as inevitable.

The result? A culture where showing up is optional, but being validated is mandatory.

We’ve normalized opting out of life at the first sign of discomfort. A bad day becomes a day off. Sadness becomes a deadline extension. Discomfort becomes a reason to disengage entirely. At some point, support quietly turned into permission, and no one wants to be the person who draws that line, because saying “this isn’t okay” risks being branded insensitive, ignorant, or worse.

So no one says it.

There’s also a deep fear behind this: being cancelled. A loud, hyper-online moral class of performative activists and self-appointed arbiters of correctness have made honest discussion feel dangerous. Disagreeing is framed as harm. Questioning is framed as violence or a personal attack. And so institutions, workplaces, and individuals cave, not out of care, but out of fear.

But avoiding the conversation doesn’t make the problem go away. It makes it rot.

In many Eastern European cultures, mental health has never been divorced from responsibility. Not because people are tougher or better, but because coping looks different. Work, sport, art, and routine are not seen as distractions from healing, but part of it. You show up. You move your body. You create. You work through things while participating in life, not by stepping away from it entirely.

It’s a form of tough love. Imperfect, sometimes extreme, and not universally applicable, but grounded in one principle: your struggles are real, but they do not erase your obligations to others.

You don’t feel great? You go for a walk. You go to the gym. You talk to someone. You clear your head. And then you do what needs to be done. Not because it’s easy, but because withdrawing completely only deepens the spiral.

Western societies, despite their economic and institutional advantages, are missing this balance. Support has replaced resilience. Validation has replaced responsibility. And in trying to be compassionate, we’ve quietly lowered expectations, expectations for ourselves and for each other.

Mental health matters. Deeply.
But it is not a free pass.

It is not a justification for cruelty. It is not an excuse for disengagement. And it is not a reason to stop showing up.

At some point, caring also means saying this: your feelings and emotions are valid, but your behavior is still your responsibility.

And the longer we pretend otherwise, the worse this crisis becomes.