This article aims at investigating and specifying the form of suffering that is characteristic of mental illness in relation to other forms of human suffering, such as political suffering, existential suffering, and bad luck suffering. It does so by making use of a theoretical framework found in phenomenological philosophy, according to which the flourishing or suffering of a person can be understood as an attuned and embodied being-in-the-world in and through which a person aims to realize core life values made meaningful by way of a life narrative. The importance of such a phenomenological analysis lies in pointing towards how contemporary psychiatry needs to involve the life world and life narrative of the patient to make a reliable and valid diagnosis and how such a phenomenological diagnostic approach can act as a counter movement to unnecessary medicalization in psychiatry.