The Mental Health Religion: Satan of the Soul

"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome" Charles Munger.

The Mental Health Industry is a fast-growing religion of Western civilisation. It has its priesthood (therapists), its sacraments (medication), its doctrines (trauma, identity, regulation), and its heresies (judgment, suffering, repentance). It claims scientific neutrality while exercising immense moral power: defining normality, authorising deviance, and prescribing acceptable ways of being human. At its core is a single axiom: the human being must remain comfortable, functional, and non-disruptive.

Healing is not the goal. Stability is.

Managed Sickness as a Business Model

The mental health industry operates on the allopathic logic of managed illness. Psychiatric diagnoses multiply not because truth is expanding, but because pathology is profitable.

Most conditions lack objective biomarkers and are, instead, codified by committee consensus on agreed subjective bases. The result is an endlessly renewable resource: the perpetually unwell subject.

A cured patient exits the system. A managed one sustains it. This is not conspiracy. It is the incentive.

Therapy as Soft Totalitarianism

Modern therapy presents itself as care while functioning as moral governance. Its aim is not transformation but adaptation—teaching individuals to cope with conditions they are never permitted to question.

Therapy affirms the ego, stabilises identity, and regulates affect. It rarely confronts communal and self-deception, rarely demands sacrifice, and never asks what a human being is "for".

Suffering is treated as malfunction rather than a summons to transformation. What emerges is the ideal therapeutic subject: one who is articulate, emotionally aware, endlessly self-referential—and spiritually inert.

The Chemistry of Compliance

Pharmacology completes the process.

Medication expertly suppresses intensity, flattens extremes, and neutralises existential unrest. While sometimes useful in acute crises, its civilisational function is unmistakable: emotional domestication.

A medicated population is easier to govern than an awakened one.

The anguish that once drove conversion, creativity, or revolt is now rendered inconvenient and subdued by the chemical castration of consciousness.

Christianity as Heresy

Classical Christianity—and Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way Christianity in particular—stands in open contradiction to this system.

Both begin with a scandal: the human being is not whole. Not well. Not “fine.” What therapy stabilises, Christianity crucifies. What mental health affirms, spiritual work dismantles.

Christ does not offer regulation. He demands death and resurrection.

Gurdjieff does not promise comfort. He offers the possibility of soul creation—through conscious suffering and voluntary effort.

From this vantage point, much of what is now diagnosed as “mental illness” is better understood as ontological revolt—the soul’s resistance to the conditions of life structured around false ends. To suppress that revolt chemically is not healing. It is spiritual anesthesia.

Why Real Healing Must Be Marginalised

True healing does not occur within the closed system of the psyche or institutional regulation. It requires alignment and integration with an intelligence, an energy, a force, higher than the ego—what Christianity and Gurdjieff call "God", through the operations of objective law.

Such healing produces human beings who are no longer governable by therapy, medication, or managed narratives of selfhood dictated by a self-interested industry. Therefore, it must be sidelined, rebranded as “wellness,” and stripped of metaphysical authority.

Choose Your Gospel

The mental health industry will continue to grow but a civilisation without a telos (purpose) cannot heal; it can only manage. The choice is critical:

• Managed sickness or dangerous transformation?

• Comfortable adaptation or conscious becoming?

• Submission to an externally regulated psyche—or pursuit of a life affirming soul?

You cannot have both.