When the Body Begins to Speak for the Soul
Why symptoms are not failures of the body, but messages from the psyche asking to be heard.
When the Body Begins to Speak for the Soul
Over the last thirty years, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in diagnoses related to mood, attention, immune function, pain, fatigue, and nervous system regulation. These increases are often framed as evidence that something is going wrong with the human body. Today, I want to offer a different lens.
I keep returning to an image that circulates widely online. It lists diagnoses that have risen dramatically over the last thirty years ADHD, depression, autoimmune conditions, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, autism, bipolar disorder in youth. The percentages are startling. Thousands of percent increases. At first glance, it looks like proof that something has gone terribly wrong with the human body.
But I no longer read it that way.
What I see now is not a sudden collapse of human biology, but a cultural moment in which suffering has finally found a language. Not a complete language, perhaps, but one loud enough to interrupt our collective refusal to listen.
Much of what these charts claim is true in direction, if not in precision. Diagnoses have increased. More people are struggling. More bodies are signaling distress. But the numbers themselves are often exaggerated, pulled from small baselines or from eras when many of these conditions were barely recognized, let alone named. What matters more than the percentages is the question underneath them.
Why now?
Why this body?
Why this symptom?
Carl Jung wrote, “The gods have become diseases.” By this he meant that when the symbolic, emotional, and instinctual life is denied conscious relationship, it does not disappear. It returns through the body, through fate, through symptoms that insist on being noticed.
James Hillman later insisted that symptoms are not problems to be solved, but imaginal events, carriers of meaning. The symptom, he said, is how the soul enters the room when it has been shut out of the conversation. If we silence the symptom too quickly, we miss the message it came to deliver.
From this perspective, the rise in diagnoses begins to look less like pathology and more like revelation.
It also feels important to say this plainly: none of these conditions are truly new. Human beings have always struggled with anxiety, depression, exhaustion, pain, mood instability, attention differences, immune vulnerability. These experiences existed long before modern diagnostic language. They showed up as temperament, melancholy, nervous exhaustion, hysteria, “weak nerves,” spiritual crisis, or moral failure, depending on the era and the culture. The suffering was real. The language was not.
What has changed is not the existence of these conditions, but the conditions under which the human body and psyche are now asked to function.
When I look at this moment longitudinally, I see a stacking effect. Decades of industrialized and ultra-processed food systems. Persistent environmental toxins and endocrine disruptors. Constant electromagnetic stimulation. Chronic sleep disruption. Reduced movement. Prolonged sitting. Continuous cognitive demand. A nervous system designed for cycles of stress and recovery now living inside unbroken activation.
None of these factors alone creates illness. Together, over decades, they erode regulation capacity.
And when load exceeds capacity, awareness follows limitation.
People begin to notice what they once pushed through. Symptoms that were previously masked by adrenaline, youth, or social expectation become harder to ignore. What we may be witnessing, then, is not an explosion of disease, but an escalation of visibility. The body is no longer able to compensate quietly. It is asking, through increasingly clear signals, to be taken seriously.
This is where the nervous system becomes central to the conversation. The body evolved for movement, sunlight, rest, social co-regulation, and meaning. What it has received instead is stress without completion, stimulation without digestion, information without embodiment, productivity without pause. The autonomic nervous system adapts, as it must. Over time, adaptation becomes identity. Survival becomes personality. Symptoms become the only remaining language.
Gabor Maté reminds us that trauma is not what happens to us, but what happens inside us when we are left alone with what happened. When stress becomes chronic and relational repair is absent, the body learns to stay braced. The immune system becomes vigilant. The endocrine system strains. Inflammation becomes communication.
Marion Woodman taught that the body is not an object we inhabit, but a living psyche. She wrote, “The body is the unconscious made visible.” When the receptive, rhythmic, instinctual dimensions of life are devalued, the body carries that split. Symptoms arise not as punishment, but as compensation, an attempt to restore balance when consciousness has leaned too far in one direction.
Joe Dispenza, from a different lineage, speaks about how repeated emotional states condition the nervous system and even gene expression. When the body lives in stress long enough, it forgets how to return to safety. The chemistry of survival becomes the chemistry of self. Healing, then, is not simply insight, but repetition of new internal experiences until the body learns that the present is not the past.
What strikes me most is that many of the diagnoses rising most dramatically sit at the intersection of mind, body, and meaning. They are not purely structural diseases. They are functional, relational, systemic. They live in the gray zones medicine has never been fully comfortable inhabiting.
This does not mean symptoms are “all in your head.” That phrase itself belongs to an outdated split. The psyche lives in the body. The nervous system is a bridge between experience and physiology. The immune system remembers.
When I look again at that image of rising diagnoses, I no longer feel fear. I feel grief, yes. And tenderness. And a strange kind of hope.
Because to name something is to bring it into consciousness. And to bring something into consciousness is the beginning of relationship. Jung believed that what is made conscious can be transformed. Not eliminated, perhaps, but integrated. Lived with. Learned from.
Perhaps these rising diagnoses are not evidence that humanity is failing, but that the old ways of coping are no longer sufficient. Perhaps the body is asking us to slow down enough to hear what we avoided for generations. Perhaps anxiety, fatigue, pain, and depression are not enemies, but messengers insisting that we live differently.
If the body is speaking more loudly, it may be because, at last, we are beginning to listen.
by Bren Littleton
December 11, 2025
Tin Flea Press c 2025