When Help Hurts: The Limits of Charity and the Medicalization of the Human Spirit
When Help Hurts: The Limits of Charity and the Medicalization of the Human Spirit
by Carl J Chan
Three years ago, my friend Aaron was a handsome young man with a part-time job and a circle of friends. He was shy and claims to have had childhood trauma, but functional—like millions of others quietly balancing ambition and insecurity. Then he was “helped.”
A charity intervened, offering him free housing and psychological assistance. What began as compassion soon evolved into dependency. He spent two years in a mental institution, medicated for what doctors called an anxiety disorder. Six months ago, he moved into a subsidized apartment and began living on food stamps. Now, he tells me he is working with a lawyer to apply for disability benefits.
Aaron said he has completely lost his normal life, is unable to quit prescription drugs. The side effects of the drugs have caused him to become obese.
The Pathologizing of Emotion
Anxiety, sadness, and despair are not diseases. They are signals—messages from the soul indicating that something in one’s life demands change. For centuries, humans understood that pain, fear, and failure are part of growth. From Job’s cries in the desert to the Buddha’s awakening under the Bodhi tree, anguish was not an illness to suppress but a path to wisdom.
Yet today, society tends to treat emotional discomfort as a medical problem rather than a moral or existential challenge. By attempting to eliminate suffering, we also eliminate the lessons it offers.
Michel Foucault foresaw this in Madness and Civilization: when emotional struggle is redefined as a medical issue, the individual is stripped of personal responsibility. Instead of being encouraged to face reality and grow, people are told they are ill and must be managed.
Aaron’s “anxiety disorder” might once have been seen as a call to strengthen his will and realign his purpose. Instead, he was treated, sedated, and excused from responsibility. His emotions were seen not as tools for self-discovery but as malfunctions to suppress.
The Charity That Destroys Agency
Charity is among humanity’s highest virtues—but it becomes destructive when it replaces personal responsibility with permanent dependency.
In Aaron’s case, charity gave him comfort but took away his courage. It provided shelter but stole his sense of purpose. Each new layer of assistance—hospital care, free housing, food stamps, legal aid—redefined him as a client rather than a capable adult.
Nietzsche once warned that pity can become poison. When compassion freezes people in weakness, it is no longer kindness—it is domination disguised as care.
If Aaron had been encouraged to take responsibility for rebuilding his life, to work, to contribute, and to face difficulty with courage, his mind and body might have healed. The human brain’s neural circuits can regenerate within days when fueled by purpose and effort. But no such challenge was offered. Charity numbed him instead of awakening him.True compassion strengthens; false compassion sedates.
The Soul’s Need for Meaning
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the concentration camps, observed that the greatest suffering comes from the loss of meaning. “When we are no longer able to change a situation,” he wrote, “we are challenged to change ourselves.”This principle is the essence of personal responsibility. Even when life seems unbearable, a person still has the freedom to respond with dignity. Anxiety, properly understood, is not a defect—it is the soul’s way of urging transformation.
Carl Jung expressed a similar truth when he said that neurosis is “the suffering of a soul that has not discovered its meaning.” Suffering, for Jung, was a doorway to consciousness. Through it, the individual learns who they truly are and what they must become.
Aaron was never given this chance. His anxiety was interpreted as pathology, not as potential. He was denied the opportunity to grow through struggle—the very process that makes us human.
The Culture of Managed Misery
Aaron’s story reflects a widespread social illusion: that compassion means comfort, and that struggle should be avoided. But life’s challenges are not enemies to be feared—they are the forge of character.When a society replaces self-reliance with constant rescue, it produces dependence instead of dignity. Emotional fragility becomes a social norm, and resilience—a moral duty once admired—is quietly forgotten.
True maturity requires friction. Growth is born through the resistance that life naturally provides: failure, uncertainty, effort, disappointment. When institutions and charities erase these experiences, they also erase the very conditions for human development.The result is what Foucault called a “biopolitical” society—one that manages people rather than frees them. People stop living as moral agents and start surviving as managed patients.
Rethinking What It Means to Help
Real compassion does not protect people from life—it helps them rediscover the strength to live it. To help responsibly is to believe in the other’s power to rise, not to pity their fall.A wiser form of charity would aim not to rescue, but to reawaken. It would say: You are capable. You are responsible. You can begin again. It would treat emotional pain not as pathology but as the birth pangs of renewal.
Aaron did not need endless care; he needed a meaningful challenge—a reason to move, act, and rebuild. Through purposeful struggle, both his mind and body could have healed more rapidly than any medication could promise.Personal responsibility is not cruelty; it is respect. It affirms that each person possesses the inner resources to grow, to transform, and to find meaning even in hardship.
The Courage to Grow Through Suffering
To suffer consciously is not to be broken—it is to be alive. To face pain without denial is to honor one’s humanity. Every challenge carries a seed of awakening; every hardship, a hidden invitation to growth.The future of human dignity depends on rediscovering what Foucault, Jung, and Frankl each defended in their own way:That the path to healing is not comfort, but consciousness. Not escape, but engagement. Not avoidance, but growth.