is it Your Fault If Everything Is Awful?
March 4, 2020 8:15 AM Subscribe
“Consequently, any cure to the problem of depression must take a collective, political form; instead of individualizing the problem of mental illness, it is imperative to start problematizing the individualization of mental illness. The call is for the left, for these specific reasons, to take seriously the question of illness and mental disorders. Dealing with depression — and other forms of psychopathology — is not only part of, but a condition of possibility for an emancipatory project today. Before we can throw bricks through windows, we need to be able to get out of bed.” A Future with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health (LARB)
Yes. This is intimately tied up with the medical model, in which distress can only possibly be understood as due to a failing specific to the individual that can be isolated to a specific subsystem.
posted by PMdixon at 8:59 AM on March 4, 2020 [17 favorites]
posted by PMdixon at 8:59 AM on March 4, 2020 [17 favorites]
Maybe a good place to start, then, with regards to the politics of depression, is to collectivize suffering, externalize blame, communize care...This is care that transcends the hospital, the clinic, the family, the state, the insurance company, Capital as such (even if one does not have access to those institutions in the first place). This is care which, based on a politicized understanding of mental illness, moves beyond care in its commodified and capitalist form. When bodies take care of each other, when responsibility is redistributed, and individual collapses are transformed into collective intimacies, the future can be (re)built in the name of a communist, shared, and sustainable one. "
I mean this already happens in many societies and global mental health responsibility is something being discussed by mental health professionals and researchers around the world.
I am glad this is becoming a common dialogue because, yeah, who wouldn't be freaking depressed in this era?
posted by Young Kullervo at 9:22 AM on March 4, 2020 [11 favorites]
I mean this already happens in many societies and global mental health responsibility is something being discussed by mental health professionals and researchers around the world.
I am glad this is becoming a common dialogue because, yeah, who wouldn't be freaking depressed in this era?
posted by Young Kullervo at 9:22 AM on March 4, 2020 [11 favorites]
Obligatory link to ThereIsHelp on the MeFi wiki.
Thanks for posting! This is good stuff, although there's always a certain risk in these conversations that the necessary understanding of mental health as also a systemic issue will turn into a claim that it is only a systemic issue. Or in the author's words:
Thanks for posting! This is good stuff, although there's always a certain risk in these conversations that the necessary understanding of mental health as also a systemic issue will turn into a claim that it is only a systemic issue. Or in the author's words:
[T]o understand depression through political frames does not mean that the problem of depression can be immediately solved by political means. There is a horror to depression that cannot and must not be translated too quickly into the sphere of politics, regardless of our critical and revolutionary aspirations. As anyone who has been depressed — or been around someone who has — knows, it is literally hell on earth. The physical pain is unbearable, your body is inert and feels too heavy, your mind is not functioning, and you cannot escape the feeling of being stuck, stagnated, that the race is run and that the present — which is hell — is all there is and all that can ever be imagined to be. It would be an offense to say, well, it’s just politics.posted by Not A Thing at 9:23 AM on March 4, 2020 [6 favorites]
No, but I have experienced, both first and third hand, that folks often are better able/motivated to work through the pain when they hear that their distress is in some ways a non-pathological response to their environment.
posted by PMdixon at 9:29 AM on March 4, 2020 [8 favorites]
posted by PMdixon at 9:29 AM on March 4, 2020 [8 favorites]
I know articles like this aren't about people like me, who will be taking antipsychotics for life for our own and others' safety. And they generally even do include a careful disclaimer somewhere that makes it clear they aren't demanding we go off our meds.
But I wish they went beyond the disclaimer and recognized that we aren't just exceptions to their program, we actually have common cause with them.
Like, I need the kind of personalized treatment that she chooses deliberately shitty examples of in this article. But despite that, I still need socialism too. I just need a socialism informed by disability theory. I need a world where the demand for profits hasn't taken all the slack out of the system, and I need some of that slack to be available for my personal medical needs that won't go away just because the world is better.
Some of those medical needs, like cheap meds and therapy, could in theory be provided lots of ways, including under gentler forms of capitalism. But some of them would be especially easy to provide if you ended capitalism first. When you're bipolar, your sleep schedule stops being a nice-to-half quality-of-life thing and starts being an essential safety need. Missing a few hours of sleep every few nights is dangerous. I don't think there's any realistic form of capitalism where bipolar people have the ability to defend our sleep schedule as fiercely as we really need to. I think that's only going to be possible in a world where we stop extracting profits from each other's time.
Like I said, for me this is anchored very strongly in disability theory. One thing that's important about disability theory is that it distinguishes between having symptoms and being disabled. Symptoms are a thing that happens to your body. Disability is a thing that happens in society, where people with some sets of symptoms are given accommodations they need and others with other sets aren't.
Right now, "I'm grieving because my mother died" is seen as a valid symptom that's often, even at shit jobs, accommodated with at least a little time off. Both "I'm grieving because the planet is dying" and "I need to be in bed by 8 because I'm worried I'm getting manic" are invalid symptoms that aren't accommodated. Let's have a disability-informed socialism that works to relieve or accommodate both those sets of symptoms, instead of drawing a line between them and saying the planetary one is valid and the "merely personal" one is ridiculous.
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:31 AM on March 4, 2020 [90 favorites]
But I wish they went beyond the disclaimer and recognized that we aren't just exceptions to their program, we actually have common cause with them.
Like, I need the kind of personalized treatment that she chooses deliberately shitty examples of in this article. But despite that, I still need socialism too. I just need a socialism informed by disability theory. I need a world where the demand for profits hasn't taken all the slack out of the system, and I need some of that slack to be available for my personal medical needs that won't go away just because the world is better.
Some of those medical needs, like cheap meds and therapy, could in theory be provided lots of ways, including under gentler forms of capitalism. But some of them would be especially easy to provide if you ended capitalism first. When you're bipolar, your sleep schedule stops being a nice-to-half quality-of-life thing and starts being an essential safety need. Missing a few hours of sleep every few nights is dangerous. I don't think there's any realistic form of capitalism where bipolar people have the ability to defend our sleep schedule as fiercely as we really need to. I think that's only going to be possible in a world where we stop extracting profits from each other's time.
Like I said, for me this is anchored very strongly in disability theory. One thing that's important about disability theory is that it distinguishes between having symptoms and being disabled. Symptoms are a thing that happens to your body. Disability is a thing that happens in society, where people with some sets of symptoms are given accommodations they need and others with other sets aren't.
Right now, "I'm grieving because my mother died" is seen as a valid symptom that's often, even at shit jobs, accommodated with at least a little time off. Both "I'm grieving because the planet is dying" and "I need to be in bed by 8 because I'm worried I'm getting manic" are invalid symptoms that aren't accommodated. Let's have a disability-informed socialism that works to relieve or accommodate both those sets of symptoms, instead of drawing a line between them and saying the planetary one is valid and the "merely personal" one is ridiculous.
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:31 AM on March 4, 2020 [90 favorites]
Like, I bet under a less relentlessly industrialized economy, with more safety protections for workers, we'd have less cancer. But it seems weird to say "My socialized medicine plan is that cancer is caused by capitalism anyway, and some cancer treatments seem to be ineffective profiteering scams, so things will get better after capitalism ends" — even though all those things are true. You probably want a two-part plan where the other part is running hospitals and making useful drugs and stuff. And you probably want some talking points about how socialism will do those things well — or at least, to not have any of your talking points involve actively disparaging those things.
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:41 AM on March 4, 2020 [10 favorites]
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:41 AM on March 4, 2020 [10 favorites]
nebulawindphone, am I correctly understanding you that you see the piece as failing to address what needs to be added to the picture (or really even observe that anything does need to be added, even in the abstract) rather than what needs to be taken out of it? I don't think I disagree with anything you're saying, but my understanding of disability theory is cobbled together in an unsystematic way so I want to make sure I'm parsing correctly.
posted by PMdixon at 9:52 AM on March 4, 2020
posted by PMdixon at 9:52 AM on March 4, 2020
I'm not sure I understand what you're asking. Give me a concrete example, maybe?
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:04 AM on March 4, 2020
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:04 AM on March 4, 2020
See also:
Turn Illness into a Weapon, and the SPK more generally.
Anti-Oedipus
posted by Richard Saunders at 10:14 AM on March 4, 2020
Turn Illness into a Weapon, and the SPK more generally.
Anti-Oedipus
posted by Richard Saunders at 10:14 AM on March 4, 2020
There s no socialism in one country, and no health in one mind
posted by eustatic at 10:14 AM on March 4, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by eustatic at 10:14 AM on March 4, 2020 [3 favorites]
I'm not sure I understand what you're asking. Give me a concrete example, maybe
What would you have liked in the essay that wasn't there?
posted by PMdixon at 10:16 AM on March 4, 2020
What would you have liked in the essay that wasn't there?
posted by PMdixon at 10:16 AM on March 4, 2020
Psychiatry in Former Socialist Countries: Implications for North Korean Psychiatry
Beyond ideological platitudes: socialism and psychiatry in Eastern Europe
posted by Ideefixe at 12:15 PM on March 4, 2020 [3 favorites]
Beyond ideological platitudes: socialism and psychiatry in Eastern Europe
posted by Ideefixe at 12:15 PM on March 4, 2020 [3 favorites]
I just started on depression medication (again) today, so this is kind of a weird sense of being targeted here.
posted by mephron at 12:49 PM on March 4, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by mephron at 12:49 PM on March 4, 2020 [1 favorite]
PMdixon: Ok, so it's like
THESIS: Mentally ill people need therapy and meds. Capitalism and individualism can do this.
ANTITHESIS: Therapy and meds are capitalist individualist nonsense. Mentally ill people need the world to be better. Socialism can do this.
SYNTHESIS: Mentally ill people can need lots of things, including therapy, meds, a better world, or all three. These things aren't opposed; they support each other. Socialism can still do all of this if we play our cards right.
The article seemed to be saying the second thing, and I wanted it to be saying the third -- which would mean taking away some points and adding others but also leaving a lot of its best points unchanged.
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:10 PM on March 4, 2020 [31 favorites]
THESIS: Mentally ill people need therapy and meds. Capitalism and individualism can do this.
ANTITHESIS: Therapy and meds are capitalist individualist nonsense. Mentally ill people need the world to be better. Socialism can do this.
SYNTHESIS: Mentally ill people can need lots of things, including therapy, meds, a better world, or all three. These things aren't opposed; they support each other. Socialism can still do all of this if we play our cards right.
The article seemed to be saying the second thing, and I wanted it to be saying the third -- which would mean taking away some points and adding others but also leaving a lot of its best points unchanged.
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:10 PM on March 4, 2020 [31 favorites]
We don't hear much about him these days, but back in teh 60s & 70s Scottish psychologist R.D. Laing authored several books. In them, he took a contrarian view along these lines. E.g.
posted by Twang at 3:24 PM on March 4, 2020 [7 favorites]
Modern therapy has no use. It forces the patient to adjust to an already broken world. Instead, the cure would treat the world itself. [?]Anyone interested in following up on this idea would find Laing inspiring. Here he is at Archive. His CBC 'Massey Lectures' are no doubt out there in audio somewhere.
Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.[?]
posted by Twang at 3:24 PM on March 4, 2020 [7 favorites]
This is care which, based on a politicized understanding of mental illness, moves beyond care in its commodified and capitalist form. When bodies take care of each other, when responsibility is redistributed, and individual collapses are transformed into collective intimacies, the future can be (re)built in the name of a communist, shared, and sustainable one.
Not long after reading Capitalist Realism, (cited in the article) it dawned on me that one of the best things I could do for my own mental health was to look out for my friends and acquaintances who were also struggling, and actively encourage them to talk about it. A very simple thing to do, but surprisingly helpful to all of us in distinguishing brain chemistry from learned behaviour, and building a little trust network in the process. At the same time, it was becoming abundantly clear to me that there are vast, yawning gaps in our knowledge about the workings of human brains, individually and collectively, as any reputable professional in the field will happily tell you. No doubt certain problems are exacerbated by social conditions (it was ever thus) but that model will only take you so far before you run into chemical imbalances, cognitive impairments or any number of ailments which need interventions no matter what, and we're back where we started. In that respect "your problems are failures of capitalism" is not much better for the patient than "your problems are failures of character."
Imposing overtly political models on conceptions of anyone's mental wellbeing scares me shitless for all kinds of reasons, chief among them the slippery slope towards totalitarianism. With the greatest respect to the late Mark Fisher, whose analysis I found to be brilliant but incomplete, I would argue that the transformation can and should be cultural as opposed political, starting with the realisation that life is not a zero sum game. It's not about solving problems by ourselves, but helping other people with theirs, asking for help in return, and generally reducing the stigma surrounding our universal struggle with the human condition. If the social structures aren't there to for us to help each other in our quest to live meaningful lives, then we have no choice but to rebuild them from the bottom up. It staggers me that we have lost sight of the basic need for reciprocity in our social interactions, and replaced it with rampant self-interest. I'm more than convinced this is an outcome of capitalism, but I don't see how we can change capitalism unless we can confront what it does to us and why. Honestly, this is more than politics. It's culture.
posted by Elizabeth the Thirteenth at 3:25 PM on March 4, 2020 [12 favorites]
Not long after reading Capitalist Realism, (cited in the article) it dawned on me that one of the best things I could do for my own mental health was to look out for my friends and acquaintances who were also struggling, and actively encourage them to talk about it. A very simple thing to do, but surprisingly helpful to all of us in distinguishing brain chemistry from learned behaviour, and building a little trust network in the process. At the same time, it was becoming abundantly clear to me that there are vast, yawning gaps in our knowledge about the workings of human brains, individually and collectively, as any reputable professional in the field will happily tell you. No doubt certain problems are exacerbated by social conditions (it was ever thus) but that model will only take you so far before you run into chemical imbalances, cognitive impairments or any number of ailments which need interventions no matter what, and we're back where we started. In that respect "your problems are failures of capitalism" is not much better for the patient than "your problems are failures of character."
Imposing overtly political models on conceptions of anyone's mental wellbeing scares me shitless for all kinds of reasons, chief among them the slippery slope towards totalitarianism. With the greatest respect to the late Mark Fisher, whose analysis I found to be brilliant but incomplete, I would argue that the transformation can and should be cultural as opposed political, starting with the realisation that life is not a zero sum game. It's not about solving problems by ourselves, but helping other people with theirs, asking for help in return, and generally reducing the stigma surrounding our universal struggle with the human condition. If the social structures aren't there to for us to help each other in our quest to live meaningful lives, then we have no choice but to rebuild them from the bottom up. It staggers me that we have lost sight of the basic need for reciprocity in our social interactions, and replaced it with rampant self-interest. I'm more than convinced this is an outcome of capitalism, but I don't see how we can change capitalism unless we can confront what it does to us and why. Honestly, this is more than politics. It's culture.
posted by Elizabeth the Thirteenth at 3:25 PM on March 4, 2020 [12 favorites]
Thank you for this post. It's a discussion that needs to happen.
From the article:
Perhaps therefore the answer here is that therapy and meds are the leg up we need to break out of that catch-22 and begin to make positive change.
I've had no small amount of cognitive dissonance with regards to my own depression: on the one hand, I always took to heart the MeFi wisdom that treating depression with meds/therapy is no different to treating a broken limb. But on the other, I always knew that it was the soul-destroying aspects of the world we find ourselves in that were the root cause. But these need not be incompatible.
The metaphor I have used (for everything from poverty to depression) is that it is like being stuck in a well. Throwing down vital supplies might keep you alive but doesn't help you get out. Likewise, telling people to simply climb out is worse than useless. Meds might be throwing down a rope in that analogy. And, I guess, socialism or similar would be boarding it up to make sure others don't fall down there in future.
It's true that breaking the cycle - be it depression or poverty or violence or climate change - is the biggest challenge. There may be no panacea. Solutions can be varied and specific. It beats succumbing to despair.
posted by Acey at 8:08 AM on March 5, 2020 [3 favorites]
From the article:
I am tempted to say that revolution is the best antidepressant there is, it makes for a better world, true happiness. But, alas!, in order to do revolution, we need to get out of bed. A real dialectical catch-22 of depression.nebulawindphone: SYNTHESIS: Mentally ill people can need lots of things, including therapy, meds, a better world, or all three. These things aren't opposed; they support each other. Socialism can still do all of this if we play our cards right.
Perhaps therefore the answer here is that therapy and meds are the leg up we need to break out of that catch-22 and begin to make positive change.
I've had no small amount of cognitive dissonance with regards to my own depression: on the one hand, I always took to heart the MeFi wisdom that treating depression with meds/therapy is no different to treating a broken limb. But on the other, I always knew that it was the soul-destroying aspects of the world we find ourselves in that were the root cause. But these need not be incompatible.
The metaphor I have used (for everything from poverty to depression) is that it is like being stuck in a well. Throwing down vital supplies might keep you alive but doesn't help you get out. Likewise, telling people to simply climb out is worse than useless. Meds might be throwing down a rope in that analogy. And, I guess, socialism or similar would be boarding it up to make sure others don't fall down there in future.
It's true that breaking the cycle - be it depression or poverty or violence or climate change - is the biggest challenge. There may be no panacea. Solutions can be varied and specific. It beats succumbing to despair.
posted by Acey at 8:08 AM on March 5, 2020 [3 favorites]
is it Your Fault If Everything Is Awful?
Just reminds me of the Kids in the Hall sketch where Bruce (I think it was Bruce) apologizes for causing cancer.
posted by aspersioncast at 8:47 AM on March 5, 2020 [3 favorites]
Just reminds me of the Kids in the Hall sketch where Bruce (I think it was Bruce) apologizes for causing cancer.
posted by aspersioncast at 8:47 AM on March 5, 2020 [3 favorites]
I identified deeply with the parts of the essay I understood.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:35 PM on March 5, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:35 PM on March 5, 2020 [1 favorite]
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posted by j_curiouser at 8:43 AM on March 4, 2020