One recent survey of employees conducted in early 2018 estimated that 47 percent would consider looking for a new job during the coming year. Across all three countries, children identified the needs for their own well-being as consisting of quality time spent with parents and friends, and opportunities to indulge their creativity, especially through outdoor activities. This sketch will include a depiction of the politically conscious movement of users of mental-health services that has emerged in Britain in recent years to challenge biological explanations of poor mental health and to call for locating inequality and capitalism at the heart of the problem. Yet the contemporary medical reaction to this epidemic almost never asks the difficult but necessary questions: Why are people physically and emotionally isolated? In this process, consumerism as a form of alienation becomes evident. With little likelihood of the working class instigating revolutionary action, the potential reality is a continuation of the “present process of decay, with the contradictions between the compulsions of the system and the elementary needs of human nature becoming ever more insupportable,” resulting in “the spread of increasingly severe psychic disorders.”13 In the current era of monopoly capitalism, this contradiction remains as salient as ever. 7 (2015): 231–35. This oppresses users of mental-health services by subordinating them to the judgment of medical professionals. Alienation’s specific value for understanding mental health lies in illustrating the distinction that emerges under capitalism between human existence and essence. People are emotionally invested in the meanings associated with consumer goods, in the hope that whatever intangible qualities items are said to possess will be passed on to them through ownership. Without this, it is intolerable to exist as an individual.27 Second, the dominance of humans over nature allows for an easier satisfaction of biological needs and for the emergence of human aptitudes, contributing to the development of creativity. Learn more, Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. From city to suburbia, virtually everyone has either suffered or knows someone who has. It is the plight of the initially sane person reacting to a mad world, to which the modern psychiatry industry would have us believe that the solution is to improve the individual, whether through therapy sessions or psycho-drugs. In 2017–18, such conditions constituted 44 percent of all work-related ill health in Britain, and 57 percent of all workdays lost to ill health.40 An additional study in 2017 estimated that 60 percent of British employees had suffered work-related poor mental health in the past year, with depression and anxiety being some of the most common manifestations.41. This week on Economic Update Professor Wolff delivers updates on the ICE raid in Mississippi, global comparisons of gun violence and conservatives’ reactions to Democrats’ proposed wealth tax ideas. It’s time, then, that we started to be precise about what exactly is at the root of the mental health crisis; it’s time we identified this system by its name: capitalism. ↩ See Ricardo Antunes, “The New Service Proletariat,” Monthly Review 69, no. Oppression, exploitation, and inequality greatly repress the true realization of what it means to be human. As social beings gifted with powerful mental faculties, we are naturally wired to cooperate and to create. Adopting a broadly materialist perspective, a social model of mental health addresses material disadvantage, oppression, and political exclusion as significant causes of mental illness. Capitalism can never offer the conditions most conducive to achieving mental health. ↩ Brett J. Deacon and Dean McKay, “The Biomedical Model of Psychological Problems: A Call for Critical Dialogue,” Behavior Therapist 38, no. To do this, Marx asked us to imagine the pre-industrial artisan — the shoemaker, the baker, the tailor — who worked not for a capitalist, but for themselves. In this light, the connections between political economy and mental illness become clear; what is capitalism, after all, if not a system that rests upon the great majority of the population living in constant fear and insecurity? Turning to Marxism, he constructed a theory of the individual whose consciousness is shaped by the organization of capitalism, with unconscious drives repressed or directed toward acceptable social behavior. Beyond these direct threats to our material and psychological wellness, modernity also seems to be accompanied by an inescapable feeling of general emptiness, isolation, and lack of meaning, which so many existential philosophers and social theorists have attempted to capture and understand. For those in distress, Margaret Thatcher’s oft-cited mantra, “There is no such thing as society,” sends the most disturbing possible message: “You’re on your own.”. Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. The basic norm of cognitive therapy is this: Except for how the patient thinks, everything is okay. For Fromm, a genuine sense of belonging could only be achieved in a society built on solidarity.29 Fourth, humans crucially desire and develop a sense of identity. As a result, the conditions required for optimum mental health are violently undermined, with monopoly-capitalist society plagued by neuroses and more severe mental-health problems. The inadequacy of social relationships within monopoly-capitalist societies was identified by Baran and Sweezy. ↩ Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Freud and Marx (London: Continuum, 2009), 7. ↩ Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 35. ↩ Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 131. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. ↩ World Health Organization, Data and Resources. Instead of consuming a product designed to satisfy inherent needs, consumer goods exemplify their synthetic nature via their manufactured meanings and symbolisms, which are designed to stimulate and satisfy a preplanned response and need.60 Any identity a person may desire, or feel they have obtained, from consuming a product, as well as any form of creativity invoked by a consumer good or item of popular culture, is false. Yet, despite this, the medical model continues to dominate, reinforcing an individualistic conception of mental health and obscuring the detrimental effects of the present mode of production. The more fortunate among us will be prescribed regular meetings with a therapist who promises to fix us and help us adjust ourselves to polite society, possibly with the aid of medication to correct our “chemical imbalances.”. Work feels draining rather than satisfying, because we understand that those hours do not belong to us; our lives begin when work ends. She should quell passions that would put her at odds with the status quo. Mental illness is increasing among the young. The decision to engage in popular culture and purchase a type of automobile, brand of clothing, or technological equipment, among other goods, is frequently based on what the product is supposed to convey about the consumer. As the basis on which society’s superstructural formation is erected, capitalism is a major determinant of poor mental health. The growing attention given to work can be illustrated in relation to working practices. I know that when I’m depressed the best antidepressant is company – the complete opposite of capitalism’s relentless atomization of us. ↩ Trade Union Congress, “15 Per Cent Increase in People Working More than 48 Hours a Week Risks a Return to ‘Burnout Britain’, Warns TUC,” September 9, 2015; Josie Cox, “British Employees are Working More Overtime than Ever Before—Often for No Extra Money,” Independent, March 2, 2017. ↩ David Marjoribanks, A Labour of Love—or Labour Versus Love? David Matthews is a lecturer in sociology and social policy at Coleg Llandrillo, Wales, and the leader of its degree program in health and social care. Thus, loneliness is embedded within the structure of any capitalist society as an inevitable outcome of its value system. Having become an axiomatic notion, rarely is the idea of expanded production challenged. And it was from this that Baran, in particular, was to draw.16. In response, an analysis of British families was conducted in 2011 comparing them to those in Spain and Sweden, countries that ranked in the top five for child well-being.61. Coronavirus, capitalism and a crisis of mental distress. Alienated labor, Marx contended, is when “labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being…therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.”35 Under capitalism, great efforts are made to ensure human energy is channeled into labor, even though it is often miserable and tedious.36 Rather than satisfying the need to express creativity, it frequently represses it through the monotonous and grueling obligation of wage labor.37. Half of all adults in the U.S. will develop at least one mental illness during their lifetime, with 45 million experiencing psychiatric disorders in any given year. A mental-health crisis is sweeping the globe. All members of society are affected by the inhumane nature of capitalism, but, slowly and determinedly, the fight is being led most explicitly by the most oppressed and exploited. Today, there are slivers of hope: a growing awareness among psychiatrists that social and cultural norms influence mental health and diagnoses; psychology research that critically examines the effects of neoliberal policy and values; and renewed interest in worker cooperatives, which promote greater worker happiness. The unpublished chapter of Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, entitled “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society II,” drafted by Baran, had included an extensive section on mental health. See Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster, The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, 1949–1964 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 127, 131. ↩ Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press, 1990); Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (London: Pluto Press, 1976). Such an independent producer retained control over their work and the entire creative process, so that their product was something they could be proud of and see themselves in; moreover, they had the satisfaction of seeing their product go to immediate use, fulfilling a human need. Human nature, Marx argued, consists of dual qualities and we “must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.”20 There are needs that are fixed, such as hunger and sexual desires, and then there are relative desires that originate from the historical and cultural organization of society.21 Inspired by Marx, Fromm argued that human nature is inherent in all individuals, but that its visible manifestation is largely dependent on the social context. It is a loss of his self.”. In Marx’s words: “The activity of the worker is not his spontaneous activity. Subsequently, parents compensated for this with consumer goods, which largely failed to meet their children’s needs. While difficulties in measuring its existence and nature abound, arguably one the most widespread neuroses to plague present-day capitalism is loneliness. The human cost of this is crippling as work takes precedence over investing in social relationships. However, the social, political, and economic organization of society must be recognized as a significant contributor to people’s mental health, with certain social structures being more advantageous to the emergence of mental well-being than others. Once we have reduced this complex social phenomenon to the apolitical realm of individual medicine, it follows that the solution to the broader mental health epidemic is presented as merely public “awareness” and “destigmatization” — essentially efforts to funnel people into the therapy pipeline. In short, our world is shaped in the image of the market. Consumerism, however, ultimately breeds dissatisfaction as the desire to substitute old products for new ones turns maintaining one’s position in society into a relentless pursuit of an unobtainable standard. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 45, 171-186. Capital makes the worker ill, and then multinational pharmaceutical companies sell them drugs to make them better. British parents were considered more materialistic than their Spanish and Swedish counterparts and behaved accordingly toward their children. The most recent National Health Service Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey illustrates that in 2014, 17.5 percent of the population over the age of sixteen suffered from varying forms of depression or anxiety, compared to 14.1 percent in 1993. One historical figure too often omitted in contemporary discourse, however, is the young Karl Marx. It is our task to bring this emancipatory language and action back into the political realm. Although not going into detail as to how alienation manifests itself, Baran and Sweezy argued without hesitation that A long line of social science research has shown that unemployed people are much more likely to become depressed; after all, under the reigning ideology, our self-worth is measured by our economic output. It is worth noting that the treatment of mental health in Monopoly Capital did not go unnoticed and was subject to criticism by Robert Heilbroner in a review in the New York Review of Books, to which Sweezy responded in a letter, defending their analysis in this regard. Shapiro, S. (2003). The relationship among mental health clinicians' beliefs in a just world, attitudes toward the poor, and beliefs about helping the poor. The WHO World Mental Health Consortium study (2004) is an attempt to overcome these shortcomings (Oakley Browne et al., 2006). Dr. Stephen Bezruchka discusses the pharmaceutical/psychiatric industry and the spiraling rates of anti-depressants and other drugs given out to adults and children. Moreover, since the market is (we are told) a level playing field, with no single actor appearing as the obvious coordinator, those who happen to be losers in this global scramble ostensibly have no one to blame but themselves. Considerable evidence suggests that far from being beneficial to mental health, work is actually detrimental to it. Mental illness consists in the failure of such development.”32 Rejecting a psychoanalytical understanding that emphasizes the satisfaction of the libido and other biological drives, mental health, he claimed, is inherently associated with the satisfaction of needs considered uniquely human. The challenge posed must be viewed as part of the wider class struggle, as being one front of many in the fight for social justice, economic equality, dignity, and respect. This principle permeated Fromm’s psychoanalytic framework, which maintained that, under capitalism, humans become divorced from their own nature. Furthermore, Olds and Schwartz fail to accept the trend as a reflection of the structural organization of the labor market, which makes more work a necessity instead of a choice.

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