Why does a one-size-fits-all approach to mental health so often leave people feeling confused, frustrated, or like they’ve failed? How did mental health become framed as a single problem with a single solution, despite the complexity of human experience? What changes when we approach mental health as an individualized, multidimensional journey rather than a universal checklist?
This article explores why the promise of simple, universal fixes in mental health is so appealing—and why it so often falls short. Drawing on psychological insight and clinical experience, it unpacks our natural desire for certainty and quick relief, the cultural forces that reinforce oversimplified solutions, and the misleading narratives that suggest one tool, habit, or intervention should work for everyone.
By reframing mental health as a broad, deeply personal ecosystem shaped by biology, relationships, environment, and meaning, the piece argues for a more grounded, pluralistic approach to healing. Rather than chasing “the answer,” it invites readers to embrace nuance, personalization, and humility—recognizing that lasting well-being is built through multiple tools, ongoing discovery, and respect for the uniqueness of each individual path.
The lure of the “one thing” that solves our problems is powerful. And when it comes to emotional pain, the power of that lure is magnified even more.
Psychologically, it makes perfect sense. For as long as we have struggled with emotional pain, we’ve looked for simple, elegant answers. Something that is clean and definitive, capable of fixing what feels messy and overwhelming. And ideally, do it quickly.
It’s a deeply human impulse.
Complexity is uncomfortable. Mental health challenges often arrive tangled: overlapping symptoms, conflicting emotions, triggers we don’t (or can’t) fully understand on our own. In the face of that uncertainty, a “silver bullet” is incredibly appealing.
Simplicity is also comforting because it implies predictability. How many articles and Instagram Reels are based on trying to tap into the underlying thought pattern that “if this worked for someone, it should work for me too”?
It works because there’s a kernel of truth in it. Some solutions really do work for a broad cross-section of people. A specific breathing technique, eating more whole foods, talking to a mental health professional, prioritizing sleep, and using medication can be life-changing health interventions. But part of the reason mental health conversations become confusing or even harmful is that what works beautifully for one person may barely move the needle for another. Or it addresses a piece of the problem but leaves the rest untouched. And then there’s also the temptation of people to go “off the trail” and float more niche, less proven, and sometimes, even harmful ideas in pursuit of better well-being.
The result is a landscape full of confident prescriptions—”just meditate,” “just exercise,” “just get off social media,” and “just take this supplement.” All of these have one key underlying message: a single intervention could universally resolve the full spectrum of human psychological experience.
The allure of simplicity is powerful. It’s also incredibly flawed and often sets people up for confusion, guilt, or a sense of personal failure when the supposed “one-size-fits-all” fix doesn’t deliver.
Defining the Problem: “Mental Health” Isn’t One Thing
Part of the challenge with mental health is that there isn’t a single cohesive definition of what “mental health” really is. In the way we use it today, it’s a shorthand for a remarkably broad and multidimensional ecosystem.
When people say they’re struggling with their mental health, they may be talking about grief, burnout, trauma, anxiety, identity loss, biological depression, attachment wounds, existential dread, or dozens of other internal landscapes. These experiences might look similar on the surface. If they’re affecting you or someone you love, they might seem like a lack of motivation, sadness, irritability, or overwhelm.
It’s also important to understand that some mental health challenges are influenced by biology or neurology. Factors that we cannot control through our thoughts and actions, such as genetic predispositions, chemical imbalances, or brain-based differences in processing and regulation, are contributors to maintaining our mental health balance. Others arise from relationships and family systems that teach us how to trust, connect, or protect ourselves.
Then there are the external forces that are familiar to everyone, such as work stress, financial insecurity, chronic pressure, or societal expectations.
Knowing this is important because of its significance. Imagine two people with incredibly similar mental health problems. They are both female, 35, with two siblings, a busy full-time job, a partner, and two kids. But the diversity of origins (the chemical composition of their brains, their childhood experiences, and more) may require entirely different approaches to heal these two people.
This example shows exactly why a uniform “one size fits all” model fails so often. It tries to narrow a deeply unique human experience into a single treatment pathway.
Why We Cling to the “One-Size-Fits-All” Fantasy
Even knowing how complex mental health truly is, many of us still reach for universal answers. Why is that? Well, the reasons aren’t irrational. They’re psychological, cultural, and deeply human.
We all naturally crave certainty and quick relief. When faced with a long-term health goal like “increase my aerobic capacity so I can run 10 miles” or “get stronger so I can lift twice the weight I can currently,” how many of us are genuinely excited by the months of consistent work it will take to get there? Only a small minority.
It’s the exact same for mental health, with the added layer of wanting relief from emotional pain. When someone feels anxious, depressed, or overwhelmed, their mind is already operating under strain. In that state, the promise of a single, definitive fix can feel like a lifeline. Ambiguity is exhausting. Complexity feels threatening. Simplicity feels safe.
Culturally, we are surrounded by messaging that reinforces this desire. The wellness industry, self-help influencers, and even some medical or therapeutic voices often promote solutions that sound universally applicable—even when they’re not. “Cold plunges cured my anxiety.” “Journaling changed my life.” “This supplement fixed my mood.” If you give these statements the benefit of the doubt, they might be rooted in genuine belief. But they’re also compelling narratives that spread easily, especially in short-form content ecosystems (social media) where nuance often dies.
Then there’s the human tendency to overgeneralize our successes. When something genuinely helps us, it’s natural to feel enthusiastic about it. This is just simple confirmation bias in action: we look for evidence that supports the thing we now believe, and we ignore the countless stories that don’t align.
The fantasy persists because it offers hope and because it’s emotionally easier than confronting the complexity. But understanding why this illusion is so persistent, and who it benefits, helps us begin to see its limits. And that’s an important step toward something far more effective: individualized, contextualized approaches that honor the breadth of human experience.
The Players Behind Oversimplified Approaches
Oversimplified approaches to mental health are often amplified by certain (sometimes fraudulent) personalities, industries, or incentives. And while some of these players are genuinely well-intentioned, the result is the same: a narrative that promises universality where there is none.
Let’s start with the genuinely well-meaning. These are the people who have discovered something that genuinely helped them and now want to share it with the world. I think the “cold plunge” evangelist Wim Hof probably falls into this category. These folks come from a place of sincerity. When someone feels like a tool genuinely helped them at a time when other approaches had let them down, it’s natural to think that it could work for everyone else, too.
You can see this in recovery communities, online wellness spaces, and among entrepreneurs who host podcasts about their own transformations. The truth is that the scope of their experience is limited. They’ve lived one path, learned one set of lessons, and overcome one cluster of challenges.
Then there is the “wellness entrepreneur,” whose incentives are vastly different. Here, the motivation shifts from genuine enthusiasm to profit, scale, and market dominance. When a company develops a supplement, an app, a self-help program, or a coaching methodology, its success depends on expanding the addressable market. A niche solution is harder to sell. A universal solution is much easier. Though most successful entrepreneurs will talk about finding product-market fit first.
This is where capitalism and marketing begin to shape mental health narratives. Broad claims sell better than nuanced ones. Because certainty sells better than complexity, the messaging becomes more sweeping: “This will reduce anxiety” or “This rewires your brain.”
Both the advocate and the entrepreneur can inadvertently create cultures that underestimate just how varied human suffering is.
The Limits of Single Solutions—Even Good Ones
That’s not to say that we need to ignore all of it. The fact is that many tools in the mental health world are deeply effective. The problem is that even the best tools break down when we treat them as cure-alls.
Take psychiatric medication, for example. Medication is life-changing for countless people. It can restore functioning, reduce suffering, alleviate debilitating symptoms, and even save lives. But when used as the sole intervention, it has natural limits. Medication can stabilize an imbalance (not a chemical imbalance, by the way), but it cannot build meaning and understanding. It can calm the mind, but it cannot mend fractured relationships. It can reduce symptoms, but it doesn’t teach self-awareness, self-compassion, or emotional literacy. Medication helps many people feel capable of doing the deeper work, but it rarely replaces that work. That doesn’t mean to dismiss it—but to consider it a tool that can be combined with others.
What gets lost when we rely solely on single solutions is the human dimension of mental health. Important parts of this include:
- Human connection and community—the need for support, belonging, and being seen by others.
- Purpose and fulfillment—the existential layer of why we wake up and what we move toward.
- A sense of agency and self-understanding—knowing how we work internally, what our patterns are, how our past shapes our present.
These are central pillars of psychological well-being. Yet they rarely feature in one-size-fits-all solutions, because they cannot be packaged into a universal product. They require engagement, reflection, relationship, and nuance.
And those things simply cannot be delivered by a singular method, no matter how effective it may be in its own lane.
A More Grounded Perspective on Healing
My experience as a mental health professional has led me to believe that a more realistic approach to mental health and healing is pluralism. It’s the understanding that people vary enormously in biology, temperament, history, and worldview, and therefore require different paths toward emotional well-being. I believe that’s just grounded in practical experience and truth. In fact, I think it would be fair to say that every clinician who has worked with more than a handful of patients quickly learns that what’s transformative for one person may just be one of several tools required to help another.
A more realistic perspective on mental health acknowledges that healing is a multidimensional process. There are biological factors, psychological dynamics, and social influences that all play a part. And beyond all of that, there are existential layers that involve questions about purpose, identity, meaning, and the kind of life one wants to build.
When mental health solutions ignore these domains, they become brittle. By that, I mean that they may work temporarily but fail to create lasting, sustainable change, and even fall apart if wrongly applied.
This is where data, personalization, and humility come into play. Good clinicians approach their work without the arrogance of believing they have the singular answer. They approach it as a process of discovery that requires testing, learning, adjusting as part of a two-way conversation, and a curious mindset.
The diversity of mental health methods used to help people find the answers that they need to live happier, more productive lives reflects something that is so obvious it feels odd to even write: each individual is unique. So, it makes total sense that there are many paths to healing. The existence of those is a sign of respect for the complexity of human living.
No single solution should have to carry the weight of being “the answer.” Our collective mental health outcomes improve when we finally let go of that expectation and embrace a more honest view: we are all works in progress, and no two paths look exactly alike.
In coming posts, I’ll be elaborating on some deeper dilemmas in the process of finding the right solution(s) for each individual, and how we’re working to address them at WellDAO.
Key Messages
Ultimately, mental health is not a single issue. Healing is not one path. And growth is never a linear roadmap someone else can hand us.
Reframing mental health as an evolving, deeply individual journey liberates us from the pressure to find “the” method, “the” philosophy, or “the” product that promises resolution. It encourages curiosity and compassion instead of rigidity and comparison.
The work of understanding ourselves becomes richer when we realize we’re not meant to follow a single track. We’re meant to gather tools, to experiment, to integrate, to discard what doesn’t fit, and to build something uniquely our own. With the right mix of openness, guidance, and self-reflection, we can move toward lives that feel more aligned, more authentic, and more sustainable.
Perhaps the best place to leave this is with a quote that I come back to again and again, by Jack Schwarz. His words capture the ideas we’ve explored here beautifully: “There are at least 21 paths to the top of the mountain. If anyone says he’s on the path, he isn’t even on the mountain.”
