Post by Admin on Jul 8, 2021 18:13:32 GMT
A Future with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health
lareviewofbooks.org/article/future-no-future-depression-left-politics-mental-health/
"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.
Depression makes manifest the contemporary subject’s alienation, in its most extreme and pathological form. As such, the psychopathology needs to be related to a world of capitalist realism, where there really is no alternative, as Thatcher triumphantly declared, and the future seems frozen once and for all.
The best political thinker of depression remains the late Mark Fisher, who suffered from and in the end took his own life because of depression. He wrote that he offered up his own experiences of mental distress not because he thought there was anything special or unique about them, but 'in support of the claim that many forms of depression are best understood — and best combatted — through frames that are impersonal and political rather than individual and ‘psychological.’
An important task, then, for a leftist analysis of the present is not only to insist on the context but also and perhaps above all to insist, with Hedva, that 'it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick.' Not the world in any abstract sense, but the concrete, capitalist world in which we live, or plod our way through.
Italian thinker Franco 'Bifo' Berardi may be right when he asserts that 'in the days to come, politics and therapy will be one and the same.' Therapy as resistance, not as reactionary obedience to the given order. Therapy as a collective project, not an individual one. Therapy as the overcoming of alienation."
lareviewofbooks.org/article/future-no-future-depression-left-politics-mental-health/
"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.
Depression makes manifest the contemporary subject’s alienation, in its most extreme and pathological form. As such, the psychopathology needs to be related to a world of capitalist realism, where there really is no alternative, as Thatcher triumphantly declared, and the future seems frozen once and for all.
The best political thinker of depression remains the late Mark Fisher, who suffered from and in the end took his own life because of depression. He wrote that he offered up his own experiences of mental distress not because he thought there was anything special or unique about them, but 'in support of the claim that many forms of depression are best understood — and best combatted — through frames that are impersonal and political rather than individual and ‘psychological.’
An important task, then, for a leftist analysis of the present is not only to insist on the context but also and perhaps above all to insist, with Hedva, that 'it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick.' Not the world in any abstract sense, but the concrete, capitalist world in which we live, or plod our way through.
Italian thinker Franco 'Bifo' Berardi may be right when he asserts that 'in the days to come, politics and therapy will be one and the same.' Therapy as resistance, not as reactionary obedience to the given order. Therapy as a collective project, not an individual one. Therapy as the overcoming of alienation."