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Wherever you find mental health services to have expanded, you find a parallel increase in the numbers who have been classed as disabled due to a mental health disorder.

Let’s try to get some other messages out there that challenge the old, tired, damaging narrative of diagnosis and disorder. Messages that offer hope and solidarity to people and messages that put the responsibility for the primary causal factors of emotional distress firmly back where it belongs.

Paula Caplan, known for her fierce criticism of psychiatry and its diagnostic manual, died Wednesday at age 74.

We need a new narrative of shared distress to replace the failed one of individual disorders. We need human connection and mutual support. We can learn to manage our feelings in a way that helps us through the crisis and gives us the energy to make much-needed social and environmental changes afterwards. The usual dividing lines melt away in the face of global emergency. We really are all in this together.

On MIA Radio we interview Dr. Derek Summerfield, honorary senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, former Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford and consultant at Oxfam.