Crazy how mental health developed into what it is now. All in the names of normalization, destigmatization, and advocacy. The over-promotion and consumption of mental health services in society lead to more stigma for the actually mentally ill, as regular people roleplay as mentally ill in a form of narcissistic navel-gazing for victimization points.
Someone saying “Go to therapy,” is the same as an aspiring TikTok tarot card reader stepping in to help the paramedics by proclaiming, “My dad is a doctor.” They treat their experience as somehow giving them the ability to diagnose problems in others, they become a spokesman for the pseudoscience. You’re a therapy ghoul. The therapy ghoul most likely wouldn’t tell a fat person they were fat either—they want to maintain a certain self-righteousness based on self-victimization, dressing up their words in HR-speak.
The point of destigmatizing mental health is to convince people to accept the truly awful living conditions they find themselves in and stabilize their mental illness rather than change the root systemic reason. I’m very much of the Mark Fisher view:
This is really serious, I think. Since there are so many people who are depressed – and I maintain that the cause for much of this depression is social and political – then converting that depression into a political anger is an urgent political project. Of course it’s not only about that. It’s also about levels of real distress and suffering in society, which can not be handled or dealt with by the individualising, privatised assumptions of the dominant forms of treatment in mental illness, which are, in this country, cognitive behavioural therapy – which is a kind of combination of positive thinking and kind of psychoanalysis light: the focus on family background of the sufferer, and on then of converting thought patterns from these negative into positive ones. There’s that. And on the other hand, brain chemistry focus – the horrible loop whereby massive multinational pharmaceutical companies sell people drugs in order to cure them from the stresses brought about by working in late capitalism. Neither of these things are very effective – all they do is largely contain people’s depression rather than actually deal with the actual cause of depression.
One can apply Marx’s arguments about religion very directly to this – that religion was the opium of the masses. Anti-depressants and therapy are the opium of the masses now, in lots of ways. That isn’t to say that they don’t do anything at all. They do in many cases relieve intense suffering, which people are undergoing. But it’s just the same as religion. As Marx said, it’ll make people better in a kind of savage and pitiless world – religion wants real comfort to people in the same way, in a world of relentless competition, of digital hyper-stress, etc. Being able to talk to someone for an hour in cognitive behavioural therapy or having something which will take the edge of things via anti- depressants – that will make people feel better, but just as with religion, it doesn’t get to the sources of that sort of misery in the first place. It in fact obfuscates it.
If you want to look at the rise of capitalist realism, one can also look at the decline of anti-psychiatry. As anti-psychiatry declined, then capitalist realism grew. I think there’s a relation there between the two. That normalization of misery as part of the privatization of stress has been absolutely central to the rise of capitalist realism.
How do we get beyond that? Some kind of return to the issues that were raised by anti-psychiatry. I’m not saying necessarily that everything anti-psychiatry said was right. With anti-psychiatry, as with many other anti-authoritarian strands of leftism that emerged in the 60s – that kind of rhetoric became diverted and captured by the neoliberal right. When did anti-psychiatry cash-out? Well in some ways, Care in the Community, etc. But of course that wasn’t the only way it could have gone. Thinking about ways of reforming, changing institutional care, of looking at a shift beyond this narrow kind of focus either on family background or the kind of chemical make-up of people’s brains
His Marxist critique of therapy certainly worked out well for him. Mark Fisher took his own life in 2017.
Our society is sick in the head and no amount of mass-adopted therapy is gonna change any of the material conditions that fuck you so.
Therapy Ghouls are the turing cops of the present, waiting to Ice you with a rubber gun shooting SSRI pellets.
Unless you’re schizophrenic that is. Go to therapy then. Let’s knock some Oedipus into you.
-> Slopunk <- 