February 10, 2026

SUCK IT UP, BUTTERCUP:

February 10, 2026

‘What I see in clinic is never a set of labels’: are we in danger of overdiagnosing mental illness? (Gavin Francis, 10 Feb 2026, The Guardian)

Research tells us that the human brain hasn’t changed much in the past 300,000 years, and mental suffering has surely been with us for as long as we have experienced mental life. We are all vessels for thoughts, feelings and desires that wash through our minds, influencing our mental state. Some patterns of feeling are recognisable across the millennia, but the labels we use to make sense of the mind and of mental health are always changing – which means there’s always scope to change them for the better.

The subject is important, because according to modern psychiatric definitions, the 21st century is seeing an epidemic of mental illness. The line between health and ill-health of the mind has never been more blurred. A survey in 2019 found that two-thirds of young people in the UK felt they have had a mental disorder. We are broadening the criteria for what counts as illness at the same time as lowering the thresholds for diagnosis. This is not a bad thing if it helps us feel better, but evidence is gathering that as a society it may be making us feel worse.

We have developed a tendency to categorise mild to moderate mental and emotional distress as a necessarily clinical problem rather than an integral part of being human – a tendency that is new in our own culture, and not widely shared with others. Psychiatrists who work across different cultures point out that, in many non-western societies, low mood, anxiety and delusional states are seen more as spiritual, relational or religious problems – not psychiatric ones. By making sense of states of mind through terms that are embedded in community and tradition, they may even have more success at incorporating our crises of mind into the stories of our lives.

Pretend illness beats personal responsibility.

Immigration

Trade, Immigration, and the Forces of Political Culture: America was founded as a “society of equals.” Technological or demographic changes that threaten that ideal have long provoked sharp political responses. (Stephen Haber, February 9, 2026, Freedom Frequency)

It was not long before another technological change—the fall in transport costs induced by improvements in passenger steamships—created a new challenge to America’s society of equals. Immigrants from Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, China, and Japan, who would work for wages well below those of native-born workers, began arriving in large numbers.

The political response to technologically induced demographic change was sharp.

In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act, which effectively banned the immigration of Chinese women to the United States. It was followed in 1882 by the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers and denied Chinese already in the United States the right to become naturalized citizens. In 1905, the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League was established in California to expand the Chinese Exclusion Act to immigrants from those countries. The result was the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, in which the Japanese government agreed not to issue passports for Japanese citizens wishing to work in the United States.

Restrictions on Southern and Eastern European immigration soon followed. A 1917 law required immigrants to pass a literacy test. In 1921 an Emergency Quota Act limited the number of immigrants from any country outside the Western Hemisphere to 3 percent of the foreign-born persons of that nationality living in the United States in 1910. It therefore sharply curtailed what had been virtually unlimited European immigration and at the same time favored Northern and Western Europeans, who were numerically dominant in the United States in the 1910 census, over poorer immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.

It was followed by the even more restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, which prevented immigration from Asia, capped total immigration at 165,000, and set quotas for Europeans at 2 percent of their US population in the 1890 census (when Eastern and Southern Europeans were an even smaller minority than in the 1910 census, thereby further curtailing their numbers).

America’s restrictive immigration policies endured for decades. The Chinese Exclusion Act remained on the books until 1943, when the United States and China were allied against Japan during World War II. The quotas of the 1924 Immigration Act remained until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which established a preference system based on attracting highly skilled workers and reunifying families.

February 10, 2026

SUCK IT UP, BUTTERCUP:

A LEGACY OF RACISM:

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