This chapter explores the vested interests involved when psy-professionals are given the central decision-making power and resources to define distress, crisis, and suffering—experiences that are most commonly referred to in contemporary times as amounting to a mental health ‘crisis’. It includes reflections on the complexities and tensions involved in sustaining a critical perspective on ‘mental health’, within a tertiary education context. In addition to well-documented financial interests driving pharmaceutical research, there are also more subtle professional interests that shape the pursuit of biomedical and therapeutic approaches to conceptualising human experience. Such perspectives reinforce a neoliberal status quo, whereby ‘problems’ are perpetually located within individuals. Serious engagement with the sanist oppressions embedded in the mental health professional project is therefore necessary across the academy. This will enable broader and more transformative understandings of distress to become visible, which incorporate experiential expertise and social justice perspectives on psychiatric power. From here, it should become possible to look beyond the limitations of professional expertise and mainstream service provision in developing understandings of madness and difference.