Does mental illness sometimes come from being unable to live as your real self?

I’ve been thinking about whether at least some forms of mental suffering come from not being able to live as one’s real self.

Not discounting biological and medical issues that can create these situations, but sometimes psychologically something is happening that presents externally.

R.D. Laing wrote about the split between a “true self” and a “false self,” and saw psychotic breakdown not just as random pathology, but sometimes as something connected to a divided way of existing. Jung thought neurosis often had to do with failing to become who one really is. Reich thought repression, especially sexual and vital repression, produced armor in both the psyche and the body. Audre Lorde, in a different register, writes as if cutting ourselves off from the erotic leaves us numb, externally defined, and unable to live from within.

What I find interesting is that all of these thinkers, in different ways, seem to be saying that there is something in us that wants expression, and that when it is blocked for too long, the blockage doesn’t just stay still, it turns into symptoms like rigidity, numbness, hopelessness, agitation, feeling trapped. Sometimes even can cause breakdowns.

I wonder whether some suffering comes from having to betray your own deepest feelings in order to survive, belong, or function.

How much of mental illness is chemical, developmental, or traumatic — and how much of it is the pain of being unable to live as who you actually are?

Can a person get sick from too much self-suppression?

And is Eros part of what tries to push back against that?