What if everything we know about mental health and addiction is what keeps them alive?We call it treatment.We call it care.But what if the very systems built to heal have become part of the harm?For more than a century, society has measured sanity by compliance-rewarding calm, punishing distress, and labeling dissent as disorder. The Treatment Trap exposes how modern mental-health and addiction frameworks have turned survival into symptom, and coping into pathology.Through history, psychology, and cultural critique, Valerie Knox examines the hidden machinery behind today's treatment industry-spanning psychiatry, trauma psychology, and the troubled-teen industry-revealing how good intentions can still create institutional betrayal and systemic trauma.This is not an attack on help. It's a reckoning with what help has become.Because when healing is defined by obedience, freedom will always look like defiance.⸻Perfect for readers of Mad in America, The Myth of Normal (Gabor Maté), Lost Connections (Johann Hari), and Trauma and Recovery (Judith Herman)-and for anyone questioning why "care" so often feels like control.Covers rarely discussed topics including: - Psychiatric and therapeutic industry reform- Trauma-informed care and systemic coercion- The troubled-teen industry and institutional abuse- Addiction recovery myths and relapse cycles- Survivors of psychiatric abuse and social erasure- Institutional betrayal trauma and policy failure- How profit, stigma, and obedience keep the cycle alive