By Ozodi Osuji
For some reason, some people have it in their minds that they have to change themselves to become mentally healthy. This is not true.
Your entire experience with your body and society produced who you are. The universe made you who you are and did not make a mistake in doing so; it wants you to be who you are. There is no other person in the entire universe who is you or can replace you or is better than you. Every human being is incredibly unique and irreplaceable. He is the handiwork of the entire universe.
However, like most people, you have adaptive and maladaptive aspects. All you have to do is understand the whole of you, work on your maladaptive issues, and correct them so that you can adapt more effectively to your world.
For example, if you are afraid or have anxiety or anger issues, you can study and understand those and improve them while retaining their positive aspects.
The goal is not to become totally fearless and angerless or to never know sadness; anyone who is totally fearless and angerless will not survive in this world, not as we know this world to be. But if your level of fear, anxiety, anger, and sadness is excessive, they may impede your interpersonal relationships and cause other problems for you.
The goal is to change what you can change, know what you cannot change, and live with what you cannot change without putting yourself down; the universe did not make a mistake in creating you as you are.
If a person or people desire to seem superior to other people, say, because they feel inferior, let them do so, but as Alfred Adler observed, let them put the drive to superiority to benefiting society as a whole, not just the individual.
The person or group seeking superiority will always do so, but he/they can redirect the goal of superiority from only personal pride to improving the people and society around them.
The person/group with a high drive for goal accomplishments will probably always do so, but they can put it to more productive social uses. They are probably not going to become ambitionless, goal-less people.
Igbos, for example, are extremely ambitious and industrious and, apparently, do so because they want to seem superior to other people; they are not likely going to stop being ambitious and industrious, but they can improve all of society through their working hard. They can obtain good interpersonal relationships by no longer neurotically comparing themselves to other people and feeling that they are superior people; no one is superior to other people; all people are equal.
One can work hard by trying to make the most of one’s abilities, not because one wants to be better than other people. One does not have to compete with other people for glory but simply resolves to do one’s best, to, in Abraham Maslow’s categories, actualize one’s real self and its potential.
DISCOURSE
Even people with diagnosable mental disorders such as schizophrenia, mania, depression, and delusional disorder cannot really change the entirety of their mental status, but they can understand them and put their positive aspects to positive social uses. We do not need to merely pile their bodies up with medications that, while sometimes useful, destroy many of their visceral organs.
The schizophrenic hearing voices perhaps is a remnant of ancient human beings who were said to talk with the gods and disembodied people; maybe the manic in his euphoric happiness and energetic activities is a remnant of past people that worked around the clock and made it possible for the survival of the human race; maybe deluded people are remnants of human beings that were indeed very grand (Jesus claimed to be one with God, that is grand self-assessment, a self-view that today would make the mental health establishment suspect that he is psychotic) and not merely grandiose; maybe depressed people were oversensitive folks who could not tolerate human suffering and worked to eliminate human suffering.
We can go down the line and examine all mental disorders and observe why evolution produced people with those mental patterns. The untrusting and suspicious, forever scanning the environment looking for danger and being guarded, paranoid person probably evolved to sense danger in the environment, a lurking lion that could eat people, and alerted people to the danger, and they did what protected them.
The mentally ill certainly can be redirected so that they find a way to be socially useful and contribute to all people’s good.
CONCLUSION
Western Psychiatry dominates how we see mental illness. This pattern of approaching the so-called mentally ill probably has its uses. But other human groups had their own understanding of mental illnesses.
It is now time for us to understand the evolutionary function of so-called mental illnesses and how they can be dealt with without just diagnosing people and dismissing them as mentally ill.
The so-called mentally disordered people can be helped to retrain themselves and use their unique mental patterns to do what benefits the entire society and humanity.
Ozodi Osuji
October 13, 2026
Postscript:
In the above write-up, one followed the traditional belief that the environment produced and determined human beings. One is aware that there are people who believe the opposite of that nature-deterministic view, people who say that people are divine and choose to separate from their divine real selves and come to experience life in energy, matter, space, and time; this is the perspective of New Age Religion; the members of this perspective on life say that people create their reality, every part of it, including their bodies, choose their parents and families, societies, and everything they experience on earth. According to that line of thinking, individuals with neurosis, personality disorders, mental disorders, alcohol and drug addictions choose to experience that type of life. If they chose their current conditions, then they can choose the opposite, choose what we might call mental health. But what exactly is that? In this brief essay, one is not going to devote time to debating rival points of view. What is evident is that people have mental health issues, and the point one makes here is that they can accept their issues and redirect their trajectory to socially useful ways. One is not engaged in a theological debate here.
