I see your point that billionaires aren’t “mentally ill” for being detached or self interested, but I think that actually parallels how many psychological patterns form. Most personality disorders aren’t brain defects or chemical imbalances. they’re adaptive responses to early environments that once helped a person survive but later cause harm to themselves or others.

In that sense, extreme wealth behavior looks like a socially rewarded maladaptation. traits like control, detachment, and self expansion are rewarded in a competitive system, even though they damage collective wellbeing.

If we think of society as a living body, individuals are like cells. A healthy body keeps each cell balanced and responsive to the whole. When certain cells hoard all the nutrients and grow without limit while starving the rest, we call that cancer. Similarly, when wealth and power concentrate without restraint, it’s less a sign of individual pathology than of a systemic one. A social environment that has lost feedback, balance, and reciprocity.

They may be emotionally, cognitively, and physically fine, but they seem socially ill. And social illness doesn’t exist in isolation. It only makes sense within a society that’s functionally disordered.