Does anyone have any good sources on capitalism beign fucking AWFUL for your mental health/well being? I'm writing a paper on alienation and I could have sworn I had concrete sources for this lying around but I appear to have lost what I had.
Capitalist Realism is a good short read about it. It directly deals with how neoliberalism deteriorates our mental health. Fisher understood it well; it would ultimately end up killing him.
I think the majority of modern mental health issues are a result of capitalism. Would ADHD really cause you so much distress if your livelihood didn't depend on doing one boring task for eight hours straight? I'm an anxious mess, but would that be the case if I wasn't living under the constant threat of poverty? How many cases of depression are really just burnout? Obviously this isn't the case for all mental illness, but I think this is the reason why mental illness is on the rise.
I don't have any research on this to share, unfortunately, but I do think that communism will require a vastly different model of mental health than what we are accustomed to.
I definitely think capitalism makes mental illness worse, but while the abolition of capitalism would certainly help me feel a lot better, it wouldn’t anywhere near cure me. I’ve had panic attacks since I was 8 years old, and depression since like 10. It wasn’t capitalism making me feel that way, my brain just doesn’t work right.
It wasn’t capitalism making me feel that way, my brain just doesn’t work right.
My parents argued about money, so capitalism has fucked my shit from the start! Zing!
In all honesty, take the Gabor Mate pill: even if you had a comparitively good childhood, our collective shit is fucked
I'd say the same, but I can also trace my depression right back to the point where I became fully cognizant of the fact that I would never get to experience "recess" again. It wasn't 1:1, obviously, but I started having a lot of those thoughts around the same time my depression took hold. Maybe those thoughts were symptomatic of depression, but maybe there just really is a whole lot to be depressed over and I was predisposed to it. Probably some combination of the two!
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3233003
Not really. I always point to the french reports of early americans being anxious all the time as a good anecdote to start with though.
That one in particular Alexix de toqueville was one of the first french diplomatis to america post revolution so we are so deep in it we cant imagine life without it. Like water to a fish
Capitalist Realism discusses it to some extent. Fun fact! Bullshit jobs actually delves on the psychic damage that capitalism creates by creating bullshit jobs that are fundamentally useless. Delving on the concept of play as a child discovering they have the power to affect their environment, and it is one of the things that makes us fundamentally human. The creation of useless jobs basically robbing these workers of that ability to profound psychological harm.
I have nothing but I am interested in your paper, would you post it here when it's finished?
Sounds great, I'd love to read it when you're done. Capitalist Realism is good. I also like Capitalism and Schizophrenia and it's funny that the buzzfeed guy wrote about it. Disciplined Minds (Jeff Schmidt) is good too, but it's kinda old and i guess redundant at this point.
For something specifically like dementia, I'd recommend reading Daniel George and Peter Whitehouse. They both go into how dementia rates have fallen over the past few decades, despite the silver bullet still not being available to beat dementia/Alzheimer's. They're heavily critical of the desire to look for this silver bullet, when there is evidence that social policies geared towards the collective well being of any given populace have a noticeable effect on lowering rates of cognitive decline.
They're super critical of neoliberalism and the marketization of nearly all aspects of Western life. They delve into how programs like the New Deal and others which allowed for greater access to education and healthcare had an outsized effect on slowing down mental decline. They mention the reduction of lead in gasoline as an example of something which helped tremendously, and also mention how lead in water pipes remains an issue. Recently I heard an interview with both of them, and they are seemingly becoming more and more blackpilled. They were cautiously optimistic when they saw the temporary revival of some social programs during the pandemic, hoping that it would lead to societal reset as it relates to the state becoming more involved in the welfare of the people. Unfortunately that hasn't happened, and we might soon go back to our regularly scheduled programming.
I remember a viral tweet about some class (sociology? not sure) where the professor explained that existing while poor literally damages your DNA (or something similarly dramatic, I'm not a sciencer). No sources but maybe you or someone else can find it based off that.
I got you, comrade. I wrote a talk on this a few years ago for my organization. Here's my bibliography:
Article that provides support for sections on individual vs. societal health and the "pathologization of everyday life": https://socialistworker.org/2017/08/02/they-ask-whats-wrong-not-what-happened
A review of the book that was my main source: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/reviews/not-every-kid-bond-matures-2/
(LibGen's down for me at the moment or I'd link to that, too . . . the book is Kids These Days, by Malcolm Harris.)
A recent psychological study that explicitly blames neoliberalism for an uptick in certain personality disorders: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/under-neoliberalism-you-can-be-your-own-tyrannical-boss
Cops in schools statistics: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2018/02/22/putting-more-cops-in-schools-wont-make-schools-safer-and-it-will-likely-inflict-a-lot-of-harm/?utm_term=.b5190b848849
Also the chapter on cops and mental health in Alex Vitale's The End of Policing.
Here are some short articles that might help:
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https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/mental-health-psychiatry-class-struggle. Article on the origins of psychiatry in the US. I found this a really good read! It goes into how capitalist cash is linked to the construction of individualist ideas around mental health and the framing of population-wide rates of despair/dysfunction as purely biological.
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/18/teenage-girls-body-image-and-instagrams-perfect-storm. Straightforward piece on Facebook's awareness of Instagram's terrible impacts on teenage girls esteems and mental health.
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It's Not Just In Your Head is a podcast that explores this particular issue
