Essay on capitalism and mental health

Note:

This is not close to finished. I am taking a small break from writing this but I wanted to get some of the ideas out there now.

Mental illness plagues modern society. As rates of stress and depression continue on their upward trend we are forced to ask why? This is not an original question but i feel many accepted answers to it are either reductive or misguided. Mental illness, on the scale it exists, is not a natural quality of humanity. We can not ignore the effect capitalist production and the culture it creates, and limits(more on this later), has on our psyche. In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher writes about the correlation between neoliberal capitalist production and increased stress and states that capitalist realism makes people reliant on themselves address their issues which distracts from what the main cause is, our socio-economic conditions.

“Over the past 15 years, antidepressant use has increased in the United States by nearly 65% (Products — Data Briefs, 2017). From 2017 to 2018, 19% of adults in the United States experienced a mental illness — an increase of 1.5 million people when compared to the previous year (State & of Mental Health in America, 2021). These do not include the increases in distress after COVID-19, which has resulted in heightened rates of moderate to severe depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation (Shade, 2021).” Psychiatrist, Anna Zeira writes in her article, Mental Health Challenges Related to Neoliberal Capitalism in the United States. She continues saying, “Additionally, life expectancy, which has increased yearly since 1918, has decreased over the past several years in the United States due to dramatic rises in deaths from suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses (Case & Deaton, 2020).” It is clear that mental health in places affected by neoliberal policy is in a state of crisis. Zeira again enforces this idea when she cites a book by psychologist, Oliver James to say “In his book The Selfish Capitalist, psychologist Oliver James found that twice as many people suffer from emotional distress in the English-speaking nations that have adapted neoliberal capitalist policies when compared to people in the Western European nations which did not (James, 2008)”

Now that we’ve established at least the presence of a severe psychological effect of modern capitalism, we’re led to a massively important and difficult question to answer: Why? Without proper analysis of neoliberal policy’s link to poor mental health, we can not attack the issue. At the surface we can look at things such as the cost of living increasing while wages stay stagnant, forcing people to work more hours, poverty, and economic inequality elevation as factors that have contributed to our ongoing mental health crisis. These, while of course factors with varying significance, would be foolish to label as the full answer to our question of Why? We have to dig deeper. Our relegation to mechanistic economic entities, loss of culture, deterritorialization, and constant circulation of conflicting information are, as well, among the many factors in our society that contribute to our deteriorating mental health.

People in neoliberal society have largely given up on protesting the culprit of their conditions, neoliberalism, and in many ways have accepted it as a fact of life, this is called reflexive impotence. They understand the effects of the system they live under but have accepted it as all that is possible. This is not an accurate observation of society but a self fulfilling prophecy. The acceptance of what is wrong and general hopelessness the thought process promotes has led many people, especially young people, to rely on constant distraction, empty pleasure, and stimulation to cope. Fisher talks about the effect of constant simulation through technology and social media when he says “The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix is twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus. Students’ incapacity to connect current lack of focus with future failure, their inability to synthesize time into any coherent narrative, is symptomatic of more than mere demotivation.” ADHD, anxiety, depression, stress, and exhaustion can all, directly or indirectly, be tied back to our socio-economic conditions.

We have, by mass privatization, been led to believe that everything, such as schools and healthcare, should be run as a business. This emphasizes production, or at least the appearance of it, which can directly lead to stress, exhaustion, and anxiety. Depression, exhaustion, and general hopelessness are also contributed to by this emphasis on productivity and the appearance of it. As i already mentioned the stimulation and distraction, especially through digital media, used to cope with this depression and exhaustion can lead to things like ADHD, dissociation, and a lack of empathy in young people.

In his book Heroes, Franco Berardi (from now on referred to as ‘Bifo’) talks about a mutation of language as a product of the digital revolution. We now grow up learning language from a machine which eliminates our understanding of the emotional aspect of learning language. Bifo talks about the importance of bodily contact and trust in learning language by saying, “access to language is fundamentally linked to the affective relation between the body of the learner and the body of the mother. The deep, emotional grasp on the double articulation of language, on the relation between signifier and signified in the linguistic sign, is something that is rooted in the trusted reliance on the affective body of the mother.” He adds to this saying, “When this process is reduced to an effect of the exchange between machine and human brain, the process of language learning is detached from the emotional effect of the bodily contact, and the relation between signifier and signified becomes merely operational. Words are not affectively grasping meaning, meaning is not rooted in the depth of the body, and communication is not perceived as affective relation between bodies, but as a working exchange of operating instructions. We can expect that psychic suffering will soon follow.” Of course our society in which the online world and digital media are the center, suffers from, now more than ever, this disconnection from the process of grasping the emotional aspect of language. As a result, many of us fail to develop empathy and see language as a purely operational tool of communication. While not necessarily related to a neoliberal policy we need to mention this as it is a monumental feature and cause of our mental health crisis.

In the same book, Bifo gives us the stories of several mass murderers in recent history, many of which committed suicide, and how they were shaped by their conditions to commit the atrocities. These men all have extremely different stories, goals, and motivations but all share two things: ostracization and suffering. One man’s story, Seung-Hui Cho who murdered over 30 people, is in many ways a embodiment of ostracization and suffering as well as the previously mentioned disconnection from language, deterritorialization, and hopelessness. (the latter few we’ll touch on later) He moved from South Korea to America at a young age, forced to learn a new language and function in a society he’s linguistically disconnected from. With parents who only spoke Korean, which he could not read or write, And everywhere else a language that he had no connection to or emotional understanding of, he was destined to feel isolated, dissociated and ultimately destined to suffer. He was a product of his conditions and while this doesn’t justify anything about his horrifying act, it does show, as berardi says best “Displacement, cultural and linguistic disorientation, loneliness and a sense of inadequacy in a new cultural landscape. The psychiatric labelling and further marginalization from the group, the bullying, the humiliation, the silent rage, the desire for revenge. Cho’s story is the story of millions of migrants all around the world.” In other words, Cho’s experience is not as unique as the result and the suffering he experienced applies to millions of people in the same situation as him.

Another concept touched on by Bifo in Heroes is the obsession of identity in fascism, the aggression it leads to, and how it’s essentially a response to a need for ‘belonging’. This need to belong is invoked by deterritorialization. They cling to identification in attempt to re-territorialize and attain stability or, in other words, to compensate for and replace what was severed in the deterritorialization process. Bifo explains this by saying “Financial capitalism is based on a process of unrelenting deterritorialization, and this is causing fear to spread among those who are unable to deal with the precariousness of daily life and the violence of the labour market. This fear in turn provokes a counter-effect of aggressive re-territorialization by those who try to grasp some form of identity, some sense of belonging, because only a feeling of belonging offers the semblance of shelter, a form of protection. But belonging is a delusive projection of the mind, a deceptive sensation, a trap. Since one’s belonging can only be conclusively proved by an act of aggression against the other, the combined effect of deterritorialization in the sphere of financial capitalism and of re-territorialization in the realm of identity is leading to a state of permanent war” The response of many to deterritorialization being to latch onto identification has led to extreme aggression towards the other, all who do not share in this ‘belonging’. The aggression of those who ‘belong’ against those who do not has been part of the formation and continuation of our unstable, anxious society.

Anders Breivik, a mass murderer who killed over 70 people and injured over 300, is a perfect example of this fear and subsequent attachment to identity leading to aggression. In his manifesto titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, Breivik explains his beliefs that Islam is the enemy of (white) europeans, the west is being feminized and crumbling as a result, his hatred of ‘cultural marxism,’ (which is also tied to Islam in his view) and many other positions you wouldn’t be surprised to see a conservative politician defending. These views reflect a fear, an anxiety, a hostility regarding the other. This man, who is no doubt a white supremacist, felt isolated and alone which led to him longing for a feeling of belonging. He is told “you are suffering because of Islam’s attack on our society”, he is told “You are isolated because the modern world is leaving you behind”, he is told “the social power your people have held is crumbling because of the other.” His fear now has direction. His isolation now has a culprit. His obsession with identities has created hostility towards all that do not ‘belong’ and caused him to percieve them as a threat.