You wouldn't tell a cancer patient to just get over it, but for many types of mental illness that is society's attitude. Of course, because we understand how c

You wouldn't tell a cancer patient to just get over it, but for many types of mental illness that is society's attitude. Of course, because we understand how cancer works, enough to know that wishing it away, or meditating, is unlikely to address the problem, and has not been scientifically demonstrated to fight cancer. There's a spectrum of severity and causes of mental illness. In some cases a patient needs to be medicated just to be able to get through a therapy session; in slightly less severe cases therapy can be tried first, but perhaps without medication the patient will never be normal. In a lot of cases, I think probably the majority, patients on psychotropic drugs could improve well into the normal range through therapy alone without meds. And there are cases where a particular social environment—like a middle class urban lifestyle, trying to make ends meet—may cause certain psychological disorders even when the same people in a different environment would be perfectly happy. Especially in that latter case, can that be called a "disease"? If psychological intervention or environmental change is enough to turn someone normal, what does it mean to label them "diseased" before the intervention... particularly if the "disease" was due to bad prior psychosocial development (bad parenting and/or bad school/peer environments, generally), rather than genetics or something in the air or water? In other words, if the same person had grown up in a different social environment, or in a different culture, and failed to develop the psychological illness, can it be called a disease or illness at all? (Of course, availability of professional therapy, or peers or parents who know how to intervene productively, may not exist in many cases. That's a separate issue.) Psychiatry does not really distinguish the forms of psychological disease based on their likely cause, nor on whether they can be treated to acceptable norms without medication. I think that's what frustrates a lot of people who either object to, or are uncomfortable labeling DSM diagnoses as illnesses or diseases.