answer:I would say mental illness is usually caused by traumatic events that don’t get processed and healed. People definitely shut down their emotional reactions at the time of trauma in order to survive them. But then later, we need to heal, and our culture tends to suck at that, in that: * Healthy healing of emotional trauma is largely missing from our mainstream culture. * Our culture has a lot of BS about it being good to tough out hard situations ourselves. * We tend to go for comfort and avoidance of hard issues rather than facing them. * We don’t get healing to our abusers. * We don’t support our victims well enough. * We also abandon all kinds of people who aren’t strong or wealthy or normal enough. * We have a lot of child abuse going on that gets hidden by taboos and fears and denial, generating more abusers. Pretty much everyone has some traumas from childhood. Even people who feel they had great wonderful unproblematic childhoods, generally still have issues they’ve forgotten about, and that it will benefit them to remember and heal. It’s not about how bad the situation actually was on some objective scale – it’s about the experience of the child, and can to an outsider (or the adult person looking back) seem trivial, but it’s the child’s experience that matters and goes on to form patterns around it for the rest of the person’s life.