My spontaneous answer to this question is “no”. Not for most people. It’s a symptom. Other so called illnesses or disorders are also too common to hold individuals responsible and nothing else. It serves two interests:
- Society and politics don’t need to care
- Especially in the United States it benefits the pharmaceutical industrial complex. It creates a legalised form of drug abuse and drug addiction.
I am very much with Erich Fromm:
The adaptation theory is based on the following assumptions: 1. Every society as such is normal; 2. mentally ill, who deviates from the personality type favored by society; 3. Psychiatry in the field of psychiatry and psychotherapy has the goal of bringing the individual to the level of the average human, regardless of whether he is blind or not blind. Erich Fromm, The Pathology of Normalcy
In the Anatomy of Human Destructiveness he points out:
The „pathology of normalcy“ rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranges the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society-and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.
While you are advised to leave a destructive family or relationship, nobody can give you the advice to leave a destructive society. Where to go to? It’s sink or swim!
The Wonder Called Me 