A series on something we prefer not to look at
This is the first installment of a series by psychologist Aitor Jaén Sánchez (“Psicotar”) dedicated to an uncomfortable subject: suffering. Not the acute pain of a specific tragedy, but that underlying distress that contemporary culture has begun to treat as a manufacturing defect—something a good citizen should be able to eliminate from their life if they try hard enough. The starting thesis is simple and unapologetic: perhaps the problem isn’t that we suffer, but the idea that we never should.
A warning is in order from the start. What follows is educational and cultural criticism, not a treatment guide or a substitute for professional care. If you are going through a moment of intense suffering or thoughts of self-harm, seeking specialized help is not giving up: it is the sensible choice.
Distress as a political commodity
There is a subtext that the original text pointed out bluntly: for years, we have been asked to accept “sacrifices” in the name of a vague sense of wellness, and fear has become a convenient tool of governance. Fear paralyzes, drains energy, and makes those who feel it more manageable. You don’t have to share the entire political reading to recognize the mechanism: when individual distress is presented as a personal flaw to be corrected, it stops being read as what it often is—a reasonable response to a difficult environment.
To what extent can we trust labels?
Clinical psychology works with classification manuals—the American DSM is the best known—that organize disorders into categories. They are useful tools for professionals to understand one another and for research, but it is worth remembering that their criteria do not emerge from a laboratory, but from consensus among experts that changes over time and across cultures.
The classic example is the depathologization of homosexuality. The American Psychiatric Association removed it from its manual in the 1970s after an internal process of deliberation and voting, not based on a new biological discovery. What was once listed as a “disease” ceased to be one by collective decision. The conclusion is not that diagnosis is useless, but that it is historical: a category is a revisable convention, not a truth of nature. Treating it as such—with respect and critical distance—is more honest than either venerating the manual or despising it.
Suffering is part of being alive
Suffering has accompanied living beings long before us. Grief behaviors have been documented in other primates, and even in non-primate species that maintain close bonds; anyone who has lived with a dog senses this. Pain in the face of loss is not a system error: it is part of the price of being connected to something.
What has changed is not the suffering, but our relationship with it. We have become accustomed to pursuing a state of permanent wellness, so when distress appears, we treat it as an intruder to be gotten rid of at all costs. The problem is that this flight usually bites back: the more you struggle not to feel something, the more space it ends up occupying.
Here, the text distinguishes two planes worth preserving. There is a natural reality, with its laws—if you trip, you fall—and a subjective reality, which the mind constructs with expectations, assumptions, and imagined futures. Both can make us suffer, but confusing them is a source of problems: when we react to a bad imagined future as if it were already present, we stop acting effectively in the here and now.
Maslow’s pyramid and the “must be well” trap
Decades ago, Abraham Maslow proposed his famous hierarchy of needs. In its most widespread reading, it functions like a ladder: first the basics, then the elaborate.
The first rung is bodily needs—eating, sleeping, resting—today reasonably covered for a good portion of the population, though not for everyone. The second is safety, not just physical but mental: the need to imagine a stable future. It is precisely here that the subjective mind begins to overflow the natural one, living in a “there-then” that steals presence from the “here-now.” The third is bonds: we are a social species and no one becomes fully human outside of others. The fourth is self-esteem and self-concept—which should not be confused: self-concept is the photo we have of ourselves; self-esteem is how we value that photo. And at the top, self-actualization, the supposed maximum unfolding of human potential.
The unsettling detail is this: we have more resources, more options, and more freedom than any previous generation, and yet the figures for psychological distress keep growing. Something does not fit the promise. Perhaps because we have elevated “being well” to a moral obligation, so that not being able to be well is experienced as a personal failure, and even a reason for exclusion. And the fear of being left out generates, paradoxically, more distress.
The “grief mind” as realism training
We take for granted that feeling good is normal and feeling bad is an anomaly. But we arrive in a world where loss is certain and death is inevitable. Building an identity on the premise that we will be happy without ever going through suffering is building on sand.
The text recovers an aphorism attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti that serves as a compass: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Seen this way, certain distress is not a symptom to be suppressed, but a signal to be heard.
Pain throughout life will be inevitable, and often necessary. Anesthetizing it in a sustained way—with a substance, a compulsive behavior, a permanent distraction—usually works in the short term and proves costly in the long term: the remedy can end up weighing more than the ailment. From a harm reduction perspective, the idea is clear: a substance can accompany or alleviate, but using it as the only lid on underlying distress tends to postpone the problem, not solve it, and add another one on top.
The “grief mind”—that state in which we assume that something or someone is no longer there—is described here as a curious training in realism. Whoever goes through it anchors themselves to what is truly there, revises their beliefs about the world, and becomes aware of how brief and relentless life is. It is a painful realism, yes, and lived in the present, without an easy escape. But whoever learns to hold their attention in that present, instead of fleeing, usually comes out with something valuable: a more sober and freer way of inhabiting whatever comes next. Because, as the original concludes, you cannot leave a place until you have arrived at it.
Critical reading
Some cautions for reading this text with discernment. First: it is an opinion essay, not a clinical paper; its claims about the “epidemic” of mental disorders should be contrasted with updated epidemiological data, which nuance both the figures and their causes. Second: the account of the depathologization of homosexuality is essentially correct historically—it was an institutional decision, not a laboratory discovery—but it does not follow that the entire diagnostic system lacks value; it is best to avoid the leap from healthy skepticism to total rejection. Third: the idea of “accepting pain” is valuable in the face of the culture of mandatory wellness, but it should not be confused with resigning oneself to avoidable suffering or neglecting distress that requires professional help. Among the references the author cites by name are General History of Drugs by Antonio Escohotado and the thought of Jiddu Krishnamurti, useful as context, not as proof.
