“Truth Doesn’t Care About Your Feelings—But Facts Are Made of Them”

I. Introduction

“Facts don’t care about your feelings” has become a modern mantra for those who claim allegiance to logic, science, and objective reality. Popularized by political commentators and embraced by internet contrarians, the phrase is often wielded to dismiss emotional responses or silence perspectives deemed “irrational.” It suggests that in the great contest between reason and sentiment, reason wins by default. Truth, we are told, is immune to human interpretation; it simply is. And therefore, so are facts.

But this phrase, while superficially appealing, collapses under the weight of epistemological scrutiny. It conflates truth—which may well exist independently of human feeling—with facts, which do not. Facts, as understood within the discipline of epistemology, are not self-existent entities; they are constructed representations of truth, filtered through language, interpretation, and most critically, intersubjective agreement. They require a community of minds to recognize, accept, and uphold them. And this process is anything but emotionally neutral.

In reality, facts care very much about feelings, because humans care about feelings—and humans are the ones who decide what counts as a fact. Our cultural narratives, legal systems, scientific institutions, and even our language are soaked in subjective interpretation and emotional investment. And nowhere is this more evident than in the field of modern mental health.

The mental health system has, over the last half-century, constructed and institutionalized a biological model of mental illness that is presented as fact—but increasingly revealed to be a convenient fiction. It is not grounded in hard evidence or scientific certainty, but rather in professional sentiment, institutional self-preservation, and public demand for simple answers. The notion that conditions like depression, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder are rooted in identifiable brain pathologies persists not because it has been proven true, but because society has emotionally and economically invested in treating it as true.

This essay argues that the phrase “facts don’t care about your feelings” is not only epistemologically incoherent, but that its inversion is more accurate: facts arise from, and often survive because of, collective feelings. Using mental health as a central case study, we will explore how facts are built, sustained, and sometimes weaponized through processes of intersubjective agreement driven by sentiment, rather than truth. By the end, we will show that reclaiming epistemic integrity in any field—especially one with life-altering consequences like psychiatry—requires recognizing the emotional architecture that supports many of the “facts” we take for granted.

II. The Epistemological Nature of Facts

To understand why the phrase “facts don’t care about your feelings” is flawed, we must begin by distinguishing between two often conflated concepts: truth and fact.

• Truth refers to what is real or accurate regardless of whether it is known, acknowledged, or understood by anyone. It is independent of human perception.

  
  

• A fact, on the other hand, is a human designation. It is a symbolic construct—a statement or claim that is treated as true based on the available evidence, linguistic framing, and, crucially, social agreement.

In the epistemological tradition, facts are not synonymous with truth. They are approximations or representations of truth, filtered through the cognitive, emotional, linguistic, and cultural frameworks of those producing them. A fact is not merely a mirror of reality; it is a selected reflection, dependent on what a society chooses to notice, validate, and codify.

This is where intersubjectivity enters the picture. Intersubjectivity refers to the shared understanding that emerges when multiple individuals agree upon a concept, observation, or meaning. For something to be elevated to the status of “fact,” there must be a collective consensus that it sufficiently reflects reality to be treated as such. In science, that consensus is ideally evidence-based, but it is never divorced from emotion, identity, or belief. In law, journalism, medicine, and education, consensus is shaped not just by data, but by what people feel ought to be true—what is useful, persuasive, or comforting.

In this sense, facts are social artifacts. They are stabilized through community, language, and institutions. And because all of these are permeated with human affect, facts are unavoidably entangled with feelings. This doesn’t mean all facts are false or arbitrary. It means that the status of being a “fact” is not a purely objective distinction; it is the product of a complex interaction between observation, interpretation, emotion, and power.

To appreciate this, consider a simple analogy: a painting and the reality it depicts. Reality is the landscape itself—trees, light, wind, terrain. A fact is the painting of that landscape. It is shaped by what the painter (or society) chooses to include, what brushstrokes are used, what colors are prioritized, and what framing is imposed. Two artists might view the same terrain and produce entirely different representations—and yet both might be accepted as “true enough” to function as factual.

The critical insight here is that facts are not raw, self-evident truths. They are aggregates of constituent knowledge, and their validity depends on the conditions under which they are assembled. If those conditions change—new data, new interpretations, or new emotional sensibilities—the fact can be revised, replaced, or rejected. This is how progress in science, ethics, and culture occurs.

But it also means that facts are vulnerable to emotional bias and institutional inertia. When a belief system becomes entrenched, people may continue to uphold certain facts not because they reflect reality, but because abandoning them would threaten comfort, identity, or power. The appearance of objectivity can thus mask deep emotional investments.

In this light, the phrase “facts don’t care about your feelings” is more than just mistaken—it is an epistemological bait-and-switch. It assumes that facts are identical to reality and that they emerge independently of human influence, when in fact they are the very product of human influence.

The implications of this are far-reaching, but they become especially urgent when applied to fields like mental health, where what is considered a “fact” about the mind, the brain, or a person’s condition can determine whether someone is medicated, institutionalized, or even deprived of basic rights.

In the next section, we will explore how historical facts have changed—not simply in response to data, but in response to changing emotional and cultural agreements. These examples will make clear that facts can and do care deeply about feelings, because it is feelings that so often hold them in place—or tear them down.

III. Historical Examples of Feeling-Based Facts

If facts were truly impervious to human emotion—if they simply emerged from evidence like steam from boiling water—then we would expect them to remain stable unless disproven by irrefutable data. But history tells a different story. Facts have often changed not solely because of new information, but because people’s collective feelings about the world changed. Emotional, cultural, and political shifts frequently precede—or outright enable—the revision of what society considers fact.

Here are several examples where emotional or ideological factors played a critical role in either establishing or dismantling facts once thought immutable:

1. The Geocentric Universe

For centuries, it was considered a fact that the sun revolved around the Earth. This idea wasn’t based purely on observation—it was reinforced by religious doctrine, philosophical systems, and a deep emotional need for human centrality in the cosmos. The Ptolemaic model of the universe wasn't just an astronomical claim; it was a worldview.

When Copernicus, and later Galileo, proposed heliocentrism, the backlash was swift and emotional—not scientific. Galileo was tried by the Inquisition because the challenge to this “fact” disrupted religious authority and existential comfort. The data was there, but what changed the public status of the geocentric model was not just improved evidence—it was a slow emotional unhooking from the idea that humans were the center of everything.

2. Bloodletting and the Four Humors

For over a millennium, Western medicine accepted as fact the theory that the body was governed by four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile), and that illness was caused by their imbalance. Treatments like bloodletting and purging were widely accepted. These practices were not just upheld due to tradition—they also fit neatly into cultural understandings of morality, purity, and the nature of the human body.

Even as new scientific methods began to emerge, the medical community resisted abandoning these facts. Doctors, patients, and institutions were emotionally invested in these models. Changing them meant not just revising knowledge but challenging deeply held identities and practices.

3. Homosexuality as a Mental Disorder

Until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as a pathological condition. This classification was considered a scientific fact, even though it was never grounded in reproducible biological evidence.

What overturned this “fact” was not the emergence of new data, but decades of advocacy, protest, and cultural transformation. Gay rights activists challenged the psychiatric community to confront its own biases. As public sentiment began to shift, so too did the so-called fact. The APA removed homosexuality from the DSM in direct response to changing emotional, political, and social conditions.

4. The “Naturalness” of Slavery

For much of recorded history, it was a factual assumption in many societies that slavery was a natural and moral institution. In the ancient world and again in colonial empires, this was more than just an economic system—it was presented as a factual hierarchy of human value.

Here, the shift away from slavery wasn’t the result of discovering new evidence. The facts had always been false, but the emotional and moral compass of the public had to change. Only when slavery began to feel wrong to enough people—through moral reasoning, empathy, religious conviction, or political will—did the “fact” of its naturalness collapse.

5. Mental Illness as a Purely Biological Phenomenon (Ongoing)

Even in the present day, facts are shaped by sentiment. The claim that mental illness is caused by identifiable brain pathology has never been proven conclusively. There are no laboratory tests that can diagnose schizophrenia, depression, or bipolar disorder. Yet this claim is treated as fact—in courtrooms, schools, clinics, and media.

Why? Because it feels true to many stakeholders:

• It simplifies complex problems.

• It gives psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies a clear role.

• It allows families and institutions to avoid confronting systemic or relational causes.

• It provides society with a moral framework for coercion and control.

As we will explore more deeply in the next section, this fiction persists not because it is true, but because it is emotionally convenient. It is, in short, a feeling-based fact—and an extraordinarily dangerous one.

The Pattern

Across all these examples, we see a recurring pattern:

• A “fact” emerges from a mix of observation, tradition, belief, and emotion.

• It becomes embedded in institutions and identities.

• Eventually, it may be overturned—not simply by new information, but by a shift in the emotional and cultural atmosphere.

This is why facts, unlike truth, are historically contingent. They are not fixed coordinates in the landscape of reality, but rather flags planted by human beings—flags that can be moved, reinterpreted, or taken down entirely.

In the next section, we will examine how this process is playing out right now, in real time, within the mental health system. There, we will see with particular clarity how facts are manufactured, upheld, and weaponized—not by truth, but by the collective emotional needs of institutions and professionals.

IV. Case Study: Mental Health as a Domain of Emotionally-Sustained Facts

If ever there were a field where facts should be anchored in empirical truth, it is the field of mental health. Diagnoses carry legal consequences. Treatments alter brain chemistry. Institutional labels can justify confinement, surveillance, forced medication, and social ostracization. And yet, within this high-stakes terrain, some of the most consequential “facts” are held together not by hard data, but by emotional consensus and institutional convenience.

The central “fact” under scrutiny is this: mental illnesses are biological brain diseases. This claim—repeated in media campaigns, courtrooms, textbooks, and even suicide prevention hotlines—presents itself as scientific, neutral, and irrefutable. But upon closer examination, it is neither scientifically proven nor epistemologically sound. It is, instead, a fact sustained by feelings, both personal and professional.

A. The Rise of the Brain Disease Model

The idea that conditions like depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder are caused by discrete, identifiable biological dysfunctions gained cultural dominance in the late 20th century, particularly with the publication of the DSM-III in 1980. Psychiatry, long criticized for its lack of scientific rigor, sought legitimacy by aligning itself with biomedicine. The brain disease model offered a promise: if mental disorders could be shown to have physical causes, then psychiatry could be treated as a branch of neuroscience, not just human interpretation.

But that promise has never been fulfilled. To this day:

• No laboratory test exists to diagnose any major mental illness.

• No consistent biomarkers have been identified across populations.

• Twin studies and genome-wide association studies have yielded inconclusive and inconsistent results.

• The chemical imbalance theory—once presented as settled fact—has been formally disavowed even by leading psychiatric institutions, though it continues to circulate in public discourse.

So why does the biological model persist?

B. Truth Is Gone—What’s Left Is Sentiment

The persistence of the brain disease narrative cannot be explained by evidence—it must be explained by emotionally-driven intersubjective agreement.

1. Professional Security

Psychiatrists, psychologists, and other licensed professionals benefit from a medicalized framework. It grants them:

• Prescriptive authority

• Legal credibility in court

• A stable professional identity

• Simplified pathways to insurance reimbursement

To question the factual basis of the disease model is to risk undermining the entire infrastructure of one’s profession. It is emotionally safer to believe the fiction.

2. Institutional Convenience

Hospitals, prisons, schools, and courts rely on psychiatric labels to categorize behavior. It is administratively easier to say someone has a “mental disorder” than to examine:

• The effects of trauma

• Systemic injustice

• Economic deprivation

• Existential crises

• Spiritual suffering

Mental illness as brain disease functions as an institutional shorthand—and emotional investment in its convenience is strong.

3. Public Comfort

The general public also has emotional incentives to accept the disease model:

• It attempts to reduce stigma by suggesting that people “aren’t to blame” for their suffering (ironically this fiction, at times, can also have the opposite effect by increasing stigma).

• It provides a narrative of hope: “Take a pill, fix your brain.”

• It turns disturbing behavior into something manageable and clinical.

Even families often find relief in the narrative: it redirects focus away from interpersonal or generational trauma and toward a tidy medical explanation.

4. Legal Utility

In legal contexts, the biological disease model is instrumentalized to justify forced treatment, involuntary commitment, and the denial of legal agency. Testimony about “diagnosed brain illness” carries the weight of fact—even when the diagnosis is based on subjective interviews and circular reasoning.

Judges and juries are not experts in epistemology. They defer to authority. And those authorities are often testifying to facts that rest on nothing more than shared sentiment.

C. The Machinery of Fictional Facts

To sustain this emotionally convenient “fact,” psychiatry often manufactures the appearance of scientific consensus through:

• Selective citation of studies that confirm desired narratives

• Professional silence around internal debates

• Strategic public messaging

• Collusion with pharmaceutical marketing campaigns

Meanwhile, the growing body of literature that questions the biological model is:

• Marginalized

• Discredited by association

• Ignored in mainstream education and media

Even though many researchers and bioethicists openly acknowledge that the biological model is incomplete at best and deceptive at worst, the public continues to treat it as settled fact.

What we have, then, is not an empirical consensus—but an emotional alliance, secured through professional incentives, legal frameworks, public fear, and institutional inertia.

D. When Feeling-Based Facts Cause Harm

The consequences are not abstract:

• People are medicated for life based on unproven disease models.

• Entire families are taught to view loved ones through a medicalized lens, cutting off deeper understanding.

• Individuals are deprived of liberty, dignity, and informed consent under the guise of treating a “fact-based” illness.

• Scientific innovation is stifled because no one wants to question the emotional foundation of current psychiatric paradigms.

This is not just epistemological confusion—it is a crisis of truth, enabled by the myth that facts are neutral.

In the next section, we will return to the phrase “facts don’t care about your feelings” and demonstrate how the mental health system, far from disproving this statement, proves its opposite. We will examine how the continued survival of the brain disease model is one of the clearest examples in modern life of facts being entirely dependent on—and distorted by—feelings.

V. Reframing the Phrase

At this point, the phrase “facts don’t care about your feelings” no longer appears as a bold affirmation of rationality—it reveals itself as a conceptual smokescreen, concealing the emotional and institutional dynamics that actually shape what gets called a “fact.” In the field of mental health, this inversion is especially clear: the prevailing “facts” about brain-based mental illness persist precisely because they are propped up by emotional, economic, and ideological forces, not because they reflect incontrovertible truths.

The claim that mental illness is a biological disease has been promoted so persistently, for so long, by so many institutions, that it now feels like a fact—even though it has no consistent empirical foundation. It’s treated as fact in media campaigns, legal proceedings, public education, and healthcare systems not because it is true, but because it is emotionally useful to those involved in upholding it.

This is the precise opposite of what the original phrase is meant to convey. Rather than demonstrating the purity of objective knowledge, the mental health system shows us how facts can be manufactured, maintained, and weaponized through shared sentiment.

Let’s return, then, to the original formulation:

“Facts don’t care about your feelings.”

What is this phrase really doing? It is:

• Asserting rhetorical superiority (“I’m aligned with truth; you’re being emotional”)

• Imposing a false binary between feeling and reason

• Pretending that facts emerge outside of human experience

• Masking the emotional investments of the speaker themselves

It implies that those who disagree with a given claim are simply being irrational—while conveniently ignoring that the so-called “facts” may themselves be products of emotional consensus, institutional ideology, or personal bias.

In this light, a more epistemologically honest slogan might be:

“Truth doesn’t care about your feelings. But facts are built from them.”

Or:

“You can’t change truth with emotion—but you can absolutely manufacture facts with it.”

Or even:

“Facts care a lot about your feelings—because that’s how they get called facts in the first place.”

These revised versions restore the essential distinction between truth, which exists independent of us, and facts, which we generate through a dynamic interplay of perception, language, power, and emotion. And in doing so, they expose how much of our modern “knowledge” is negotiated, not discovered.

This is not an argument for relativism. Rather, it is a call for epistemic accountability. If we want facts to better reflect truth, we must be honest about the emotional architecture behind how facts are formed, selected, and upheld. In the domain of mental health—where the difference between a fiction and a fact can determine whether someone is medicated against their will or imprisoned without trial—this accountability is not just intellectual. It is moral.

In the final section, we will summarize this reframing and suggest what it means for both mental health reform and the broader human project of seeking truth in a world full of emotionally saturated “facts.”

VI. Conclusion

We began with a phrase that has come to symbolize confidence in cold, objective truth:

“Facts don’t care about your feelings.”

At first glance, the sentiment seems admirable. It champions logic over sentiment, reality over wishful thinking. But upon closer inspection—especially through the lens of epistemology—it becomes clear that the phrase is not just inaccurate. It is deeply misleading.

Facts, as distinct from truth, are social artifacts. They require human interpretation, agreement, and contextual framing to exist. They are not pure reflections of the universe; they are the symbols we use to talk about what we think is true. And because humans are emotional creatures, these symbols are unavoidably shaped by emotional dynamics—our fears, hopes, attachments, incentives, and power structures.

In science, in law, and in everyday language, feelings shape what gets counted as a fact. Sometimes this is benign. Often, it is dangerous. Nowhere is the danger more acute than in the field of mental health, where fictional facts—like the claim that all mental illness stems from brain pathology—have been elevated to legal and medical authority, despite lacking the support of definitive science. These fictions endure not because they are true, but because they are comfortable, profitable, and institutionally reinforced.

The mental health system thus becomes a clear and urgent case study in how facts can be engineered through emotional and social consensus, while masquerading as neutral truths. Professionals uphold narratives they know to be epistemically weak because those narratives sustain jobs, simplify liability, and maintain public trust. Courts accept these narratives as facts because they serve the emotional and procedural needs of the legal system. Patients and families cling to them because they offer meaning, moral clarity, and a sense of control.

This is the reality behind the illusion:

“Facts don’t care about your feelings” is a feeling-based assertion disguised as an epistemic axiom.

In truth, the only reason many facts persist is because of the feelings attached to them. When those feelings change—when the emotional consensus cracks—the fact collapses with it. This doesn’t make truth relative. It means that our access to truth depends on how we manage our emotional and social constructions of fact.

So what now?

We must begin by reclaiming the humility of epistemology. This means:

• Acknowledging the social and emotional scaffolding that holds facts in place

• Being willing to revise or discard facts that no longer serve truth

• Insisting on transparency in how professional and institutional “facts” are generated

• And, in the realm of mental health, demanding that life-altering interventions be based on more than emotional consensus disguised as scientific certainty

To seek truth is noble. To weaponize facts in the name of truth, while ignoring the emotional and institutional machinery that produced them, is not. It is cowardice masquerading as courage. It is comfort posing as objectivity. And above all, it is epistemological negligence.

Let us replace the slogan with something more honest, more precise, and more worthy of those who truly seek understanding:

“Truth doesn’t care about your feelings. But facts are shaped by them. Know the difference.”