Emotions vs Pathologising

There are seasons within us – monsoons, summers, winters and brief brilliant springs. To live is to weather them. Yet in a hurried age, we are urged to flatten the climate, to medicate every storm, to label the sky ‘disordered’ when clouds gather. This is not a dismissal of medicine. Some storms are cyclones and require shelter, care and sometimes pharmacology. It is an invitation to remember that feeling is not a fault. It is the original language of the bodymind and the compass of a truthful life.

“ The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists.” – Japanese proverb

Normal Emotions as True Medicine

A Human Story

Consider Anna, a 42-year-old teacher. After losing her mother, she was prescribed antidepressants within minutes of describing her grief. For years, she functioned – quiet, efficient and numbed. But something within her longed to speak. A therapist encouraged her to keep a paintbrush near her kitchen table. At first, her canvases were nothing but storms of grey and black. Slowly, colours re-emerged: ochre, violets, flashes of green. The day she painted a bright sunflower, she wept – not from sadness, but from recognition. Her emotions had never been her enemy; they were her teachers. Today, she still takes a small dose of medication but more importantly, she paints, she journals, she breathes. Her healing came not from silencing her emotions but from listening to them.

When Medicine is a Tool – Not an Identity

Medication can be lifesaving. It is a tool, not a tomb. Problems arise when pills are asked to do the full work of meaning, when we outsource the long apprenticeship of self- understanding to a quick swallow. Emotions – grief, anger, fear and awe – are not contaniments but currencies of information. Suppress them indiscriminately and we bankrupt our intuition.

Self-expression is not indulgence; it is physiology. Tears regulate, breath recalibrates, voice reorganises the nervous system and movement discharges what talk cannot carry. Silencing this orchestra may yield short-term quiet but long-term numbness – a life without colour. The antidote is not chaos; it is skilful expression: knowing how to breathe, speak, write, move, pray, sing, or sit still until the truth stops hiding.

“ No mud, no lotus.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

The Rising Tide of Sickness: What the Numbers Say

Across the UK and much of the West, sickness has shaped the last five years. In Britain, sickness absence peaked in 2022, eased in 2023 and fell in 2024 – yet it remains slightly above pre-pandemic levels. The office for National Statistics reports that in 2024, 2.0% of working hours were lost to sickness or injury (about 148 million days, averaging 4.4 days per worker). The most common response: minor illness, musculoskeletal pain and mental health conditions.

But another curve rose in parallel: economic inactivity due to long-term sickness. In early 2024, the UK reached a record 2.83 million people out of the labour market primarily because of long-term ill health.

Looking beyond Britain, the signal is familiar. In the United States, the absence rate among full-time workers in 2024 was 3.2% (with illness and injury accounting for 2.2%).

Alongside this, antidepressant consumption has risen sharply across OECD countries – up nearly 50% between 2011 and 2021. Some of this reflects better recognition and access, but it also warns of a culture leaning ever more quickly toward the prescription pad. The lesson is balance: medication plus meaning, chemistry plus context, symptom relief plus skill-building.

Encouragingly, research in England suggests that with planned support from GPs and guided helplines, many long-term antidepressant users can taper successfully – not as a rebuke to medicine but as a call to active, supported, person-led care.

The Economics of Listening

The numbers matter because people matter. Absence rates and prescription trends tell real stories: over-stretched services, aching backs from care work, grief that had no witnesses, teenagers carrying a digitised loneliness. If we answer, purely with sedation or sick notes, we stabilise but do not restore. A wiser society funds clinical care and community care: mentoring, moving, arts, green spaces, fair work and warm homes. Biology is social; neurons listen to neighbourhoods.

Cross-Cultural Healing Practices

Across the world, societies have long known that emotions must be moved, not muted:

Native American traditions hold talking circles where one voice at a time is honoured, allowing grief, anger or joy to be spoken into community.
In Yoruba culture, drumming is not entertainment – it is emotional release, a sacred pulse aligning body, earth and spirit.
The Sufi mystics whirl in spirals, turning sorrow and longing into prayerful ecstasy.
In Japanese Naikan practice, people reflect daily on three questions: What have I received? What have I given? What troubles have I caused? – an antidote to isolation and resentment.
In Ayurveda, grief is understood to lodge in the lungs, anger in the liver and joy on the heart, guiding holistic treatment.

These practices remind us: emotions are not medical errors but messengers. Suppressing them universally risks severing humanity from its oldest medicine- expression, ritual, rhythm and belonging.

“ However long the night, the dawn will break.” – African proverb

Culture as a Pharmacy

Every culture holds pharmacy unit language. The Irish offer wit against despair; Persians teach poetry as oxygen; in Japan, forest bathing is medicine; in the Caribbean, a warm kitchen can overcome a cold diagnosis. Western biomedicine is powerful. So are story, ritual, song and solidarity. When we braid them together, suddenly outcomes improve – not just in symptom scores but in the felt quality of a life.

Your Sovereign Path

Liberation is not the absence of pain; it is the presence of inner agency. To be emotionally literate is to reclaim that agency – to feel fully, express cleanly, choose wisely and consent to the work of healing. The Psychologistics way is not anti-medicine. It is pro-wholeness. It says: use every honest tool, honour your rhythms, distrust quick sand when you need bedrock and above all become fluent in your own feelings.

The Dignity of Feeling

To feel is to belong to life. Pathologising normal emotions – turning sadness into ‘disorder,’ worry into ‘diagnosis,’ anger into ‘danger’ – teaches people to fear their own depths. In therapy rooms, classrooms, kitchens and quiet bedrooms after midnight, I have witnessed a humbler truth: emotions are adaptive attempts. They point to needs unmet, boundaries crossed, values betrayed, or grief unspoken. If we listen, they complete their arc; if we gag them, they fossilise.

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” – Rumi

From suppression to expression: practices that change the weather

Breathe before you believe. A long exhale lowers the body’s alarm and returns you to choice.
Put ink to it. Ten minutes of uncensored writing – “What is the feeling trying to do for me?” – transforms heat into insight.
Move the story. Walk briskly, stretch, shake, dance. Let muscles metabolise what the mind cannot.
Speak to be heard, not to be right. One honest conversation can spare a hundred ruminations.
Touch the wider field. Nature, prayer, meditation – choose a door. The point is not performance but belonging.
Review medicines wisely. If you take medication, treat it as one instrument in your orchestra. Work with your prescriber on regular reviews, side-effect checks and if appropriate, supported tapering. (Nothing here replaces medical advice.)

Poetic Closing Invocation

Do not apologise for your tears; they are rivers carrying you home.

Do not fear your anger; it is fire that can cook your bread.

Do not despise your sorrow; it is the shadow that teaches the value of light.

To live fully is to feel deeply.

To feel deeply is to heal truly.

To heal truly is to set your spirit free.