Here I interrogate the three big inheritances that fragment care: Cartesian dualism, the brain disease model of addiction, and neoliberal individualism. Each promises clarity, yet each distorts human suffering by splitting mind and body, reducing meaning to malfunction, and moralising survival as personal failure. I show how these philosophies harden into funding codes, eligibility thresholds, and referral rules that demand stability before support. The result is not integration, but triage. The chapter replaces either/or thinking with a both/and ontology of co-emergence, preparing the ground for a model that attends to layered pain, agency within constraint, and structural determinants.