Mental Health
Mental health is treated very ambiguously in society. We may accept it in others, pitying them, but run from it in ourselves, probably because we often feel at the edge of our own crisis. There is a deliberateness in this, as it keeps people in a perpetual state of anxiety and fear, meaning they cannot take action and change things. Historically we saw mental health as a gift, a useful ability to think differently. The term ‘touched’, meant touched by god. However, this view of difference can seen as dangerous by those with power.
As we explore elsewhere, we individualise mental health in terms of its nature, its causes and its treatment. Psychotherapist Jay Watts observes in the Guardian that ‘psychological and social factors are at least as significant and, for many, the main cause of suffering. Poverty, relative inequality, being subject to racism, sexism, displacement and a competitive culture all increase the likelihood of mental suffering’.
Governments and pharmaceutical companies are not as interested in these results, throwing funding at studies looking at genetics as opposed to the environmental causes of distress. Similarly, there is little political will to recognise that increasing mental distress is also caused by structural inequalities, though the evidence is robust and many professionals think tackling inequalities would be the best way to tackle the current mental health epidemic’.
Current economic structures generate mental illness. At the root of the current system is alienation, alienation from our work and what we produce, and alienation from others and ourselves. This makes for an efficient, and controllable, economic units.
Consumerism and materialism are themselves widely recognised today as key drivers of a whole raft of mental health problems, from addiction to depression. As George Monbiot notes, ‘ perpetually buying more stuff, but never being satisfied, is associated with depression, anxiety and broken relationships. It is socially destructive and self-destructive’. Bakan talks about how corporations are pathological, and in turn make those who succeed in them pathological. As he says ‘The corporation’s legally defined mandate,’ he notes, ‘is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others.’
Treatment of mental health is also a profit-making business and again a way to contain the poor, marginalised and politically inconvenient. The nineteenth century asylums used to be open to the public, Bedlam being somewhere you could undertake a tour of inmates, paying slightly more for a stick to poke them with. Nowadays whole psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries thrive on mental health, with the ever-present threat that if you say the wrong thing, you will be put in a mental health system that is notoriously hard to get out of.