Addressing the mental health crisis was a frequent topic in the 2025 mayoral debates in New York City, but the main focus of discussion was crisis work. This either looked like more capacity for police to force people into treatment, or the seemingly more progressive option of increasing mental health crisis workers to connect people to treatment. As a mobile crisis worker, multiple people approached me asking if I was excited that the now mayor-elect Mamdani wants to expand crisis work in his department of community safety to help connect people with evidence based treatment. My response — that I was not necessarily excited about this — was surprising to most. I said this, not because I am against crisis work, which I believe has a role to play, but rather because the focus on crisis work displaces our attention and resources onto the symptomatic rather than the essential issues.
It is politically viable to talk about mobile crisis work because it appeases the people who are afraid of “the mentally ill,” as well as the mental health advocates who want police out of mental health response. More importantly, it provides us with a fantasy that if we just had enough crisis workers out in the streets, we could catch all the people falling through the cracks and connect them to care. This fantasy misses the fact that the mental health crisis is twofold, and must be fought on both fronts. The first crisis is the well-known crisis of rising mental health challenges, but the second is the less obvious crisis of the neoliberal psychiatric establishment itself, which not only fails to address the first but exacerbates it.
Crisis 1: The Mental Health Crisis
The crisis of rapidly rising rates of mental disorder, substance abuse, and suicide is the crisis that everyone has in mind when talking about “the mental health crisis”. What we fail to say, however, is that this is the direct product of a social order that is destroying us: mind, community, and planet. At its core, the essential mechanisms of capitalism work to keep people unable to sustain themselves autonomously in order to force them to work and live under authoritarian conditions. People’s life drives, desires, imagination, and intellect are subordinated to the ends of profit accumulation or bureaucratic management, in a social order that elevates the production of things (over the care for humans) to ultimate value. To obfuscate the real reasons for our suffering and to justify the planetary work order, the economic elite modulate the affects of fear and aggression that capitalism generates, turning them into racism and sexism, and attack critical explanatory frameworks, while spreading various reductive-individualist and economic ideologies.
The cutting of all social programs alongside the marriage of financialization and new technologies in the 80s, pushed these capitalist processes of exploitation into the extreme. From childhood onward, global technological and financial automations operate directly on families and children (down to the unconscious levels), subordinating psychic and communal life to competition, endless production, and the foreclosed futures of war, surveillance, concentration camps, and meaningless work. In response, we see everywhere psychic collapse, withdrawn libido, attentive depletion, emotional overload, panic attacks, drug induced psychosis, and general life desertion. While psychopathology may still develop in the family, this family is pressurized and fragmented by integrated world capitalism, and due to the incursion of the technosphere into every facet of life, the family can no longer shield children from the chaos and collapse of what was paradoxically referred to as liberal democracy. As a crisis worker, so many of the seemingly confusing “symptoms” of the people I meet with, who generally fail to conform to DSM diagnoses or even classic psychotic/neurotic distinctions, appear to be rational responses to over-work, over-stimulation, and foreclosed futures.
There should be no conversation today about the mental health crisis that does not start from the crisis of integrated world capitalism, which some have argued recently morphed into an even worse system, better understood as techno-feudalism. By only discussing mental health as part of the department of community safety and crisis work, Mamdani, and democrats generally, miss the opportunity to connect mental illness to capitalism and mental health to democracy, egalitarianism, and autonomy. By tying the mental health crisis to inequality and authoritarianism, Mamdani could go a long way in making clear the connection, long obfuscated by the biomedical model, between mental health and social conditions, while also combatting the social psychosis of the far right induced by exploitation, symbolic negation, and unbound fear and aggression.
Crisis 2: The Neoliberal Psychiatric Establishment
The second crisis is that the psychiatric establishment supposedly dedicated to addressing the mental health crisis, instead contributes directly to its production by providing reductive theories and inadequate treatments that block access to transformation. The establishment approach argues that mental illness is a matter of individual malfunctioning. At its most extreme (the biomedical model) these disorders are seen as caused by bad genes that once triggered assume an autonomous, irreversible course. Yet this is not backed up by current research indicating that neurobiological risk toward particular manifestations of distress are significantly mediated by psychological and socio-environmental factors, and that mental disorders are extremely heterogeneous in their expression and development, and capable of complete resolution.
Instead of reflecting this, people are accepted into the psychiatric establishment where they are shaped into the mentally ill rather than shifted away from the position of illness. This should not be surprising because the mental health system was developed not by those who were in distress nor by the concerned communities in which they lived, but primarily by men in the dominant class invested in the new global work-order and faced with a problem and a potential. With the transition to the capitalist work order, the masses of newly suffering individuals posed 1) a threat to the new order in which the proto-psychiatrists held power and 2) a potential for profit.
The psychiatric establishment then was born out of the transition to capitalism with the purpose of segregating and converting heterogenous suffering bodies who could not, or refused to fit into the new work-order back into productive citizens, and to warehouse the rest in institutions where they could become a steady stream of income. This continues to solve multiple problems for the economic elite and their politicians today — it explains and hides away our system’s failures as individual failures, it controls the distressed who might otherwise collectivize around their suffering and revolt, and it creates fear in those who are working about what could happen if they stopped.
While the national mental health systems that developed for the purposes of social management were not emancipatory due to their inherent connection to the capitalist system, the more robust welfare programs and general prosperity of the post war period (premised upon exploitation of the global south) allowed for degrees of counter-establishment practice within institutional settings, and at least some continuity of care for more chronic patients. With the neoliberal turn, however, everything only became unimaginably worse.
The privatization of so much of healthcare, alongside the rise of health insurance companies and the deregulated pharmaceutical industry, led to a fragmented array of public and private services where the work is determined not only by the classic disciplinary needs of capitalist society but also by new competing interests around funding, budgets, and profit. Even from a purely disciplinary standpoint (get people back to work) the psychiatric establishment is failing, as competing profit drives take over as more important than disciplinary ends. In order for clinics to get reimbursed for the work they want to do, they have to provide services determined by private health insurance companies, organized psychiatry, and the pharmaceutical industry, all primarily motivated by profit rather than “science”. Not only are reimbursable services not determined by those doing the work, but those doing the work now spend more and more of their potential time with patients, doing administrative work to justify inadequate interventions, get reimbursed, and protect corporations from risk of being sued.
All of this arrives at the same time as neoliberalism threw the masses into debt and shifted exploitation into hyper-speed, leaving more people than ever rushing to outpatient clinics and flooding psychiatric ERs. Rather than anyone in the psychiatric establishment doing much therapeutic work, caseloads grow, sessions are shortened and spread out — a 30 minute check-in every two weeks becomes “therapy.” Psych workers are less and less taught complex theories or depth-focused work because of capitalist society’s demands to crank out ever more people-managers and because universities are dominated by the profitable interests of organized psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry. At a time when therapy and mental health are slightly less stigmatized due to this being in the interests of the economic elite, therapy and therapists are significantly “deskilled.” Psych workers in the establishment resemble less healers today than a growing class of neo-feudal people-managers who can sustain themselves off the economy of distress, while misrecognizing themselves to be fundamentally different from their patients (precarious and on the brink of psychic collapse).
People seeking care, or forced into it, navigate a Kafkaesque institutional circuit in which there is no room for their complexity, let alone their basic needs, and many conclude there is no point. When they rationally determine they cannot be helped by the pills and skills on offer from the mis-attuned psychiatric establishment, they are deemed to be sicker, and now marked for long-term surveillance and forced psychiatric detention. When people miss three appointments in the psychiatric establishment, and they are deemed by the corporation to be a risk, an automatic mobile crisis referral is placed, triggering an unwanted team to show up at one’s apartment.
As funding becomes ever scarcer and the political need to blame and hide individuals for capitalism’s failures becomes more pressing, the mental health system is at risk of reverting back to its most anti-social functions of segregation and elimination (as it has in the past, as evidenced by psychiatric genocide). In September 2025, a Fox news host suggested live on TV to give lethal injections to the houseless mentally ill, and the state of Utah is moving forward with plans for what are onward toward concentration camps for the same population.
Addressing the Twofold Mental Health Crisis
Addressing the roots of the mental health crisis then means addressing the crisis of capitalism as it both generates mental illness (crisis 1) and overdetermines the work of the psychiatric establishment in the direction of social control and profit (crisis 2). Mamdani’s platform of affordability is a start in the direction of increasing a space for ordinary people to catch their breath, and when discussing mental health, he should connect these; but progressive politics need to go beyond this. Political platforms should include universal health care (such as the New York Health Act) and a universal basic income program to provide people a real out from being forced into the slavery of wage-labor and financial and medical debt, and therefore a chance for mental stability. Policies should also be created to incentivize worker-cooperatives over corporations, returning autonomy to the people. These directions which would combat capitalism and the mental health crisis across the city, are also ways that we take capitalism out of mental health care.
For New York City to provide good mental health care would require a combination of 1) passing the New York Health Act to create a single payer healthcare system that would effectively eliminate private insurance companies and 2) the municipalization and democratization of the psychiatric establishment and its various semi public, semi private, and non-profit organizations. Municipalization should be understood in the most radical sense of taking back city control over community clinics, clubhouses, respites, shelters, supportive housing, etc. but also purchasing (or appropriating) the land so as to free care providers from the unnecessary burdens of rent. This could also go for new social clinics, respites, and supportive housing in unused spaces which could be purchased by the city and turned over to care workers to quickly expand self-determined care. Municipalization would also lead to the consolidation of patient and worker information in one city-wide system, which would facilitate continuity of care between currently fragmented locations and decrease the need for repetitive intake rituals that hold people back from genuine encounters in times of crisis.
In order to avoid hierarchical management of the system, municipalization needs to be paired with democratization. This means establishing consensus-based, worker councils to determine the type of care provided, which would counter cross-discipline fragmentation and allow for flexibility and a diversity of approaches to flourish. If democratization is about giving people a say in the governance of their lives, then democratization needs to be extended to psychiatric patients as well, who have historically been excluded from discussions around the type of care they feel they need. A solution to this would be the creation of a city patient union, where anyone hospitalized or diagnosed at a city community mental health center would be given the option to join the patient union. They could manage a fund which they could use to invest in social projects and activities (itself therapeutic), they could connect with the labor movement for dignified labor, and they could have representatives participate on the city worker councils to play a critical role in determining mental health care.
When we think about the failures and determining forces of the psychiatric establishment, and the vast potential that could come with single-payer healthcare, municipalization and democratization, it should not be surprising that I was disheartened by the exclusive focus on crisis work in the mayoral debates. Crisis work today tends to play a simple function in a vast system of social control: hospitalize someone who is loosely considered a danger to themselves or others, or connect them with woefully inadequate “treatment,” which looks more like a personally assigned bureaucrat. Far more important than crisis work is changing the conditions generating mental health crises and creating the participatory democratic conditions for transformative approaches to mental health to emerge.
Mamdani and progressive politicians can play an important role, but what is required is also an organized democratic movement of workers and patients, promoting municipalization, participatory democracy, and a campaign of reeducation to attack the entrenched biomedical framing of psychological and social alienation and to provide useful frameworks for disalienation. While I would like to see Mamdani frame mental health not as a problem of community safety but of neoliberal failure, and to explicitly link his plans for a more affordable NYC to mental health, it is not his fault that his explicit mental health plan is limited. This is rather a reflection of how little we have come to expect and how basic our demands have become, amounting to not much more than “don’t let police kill people in crisis.” To me, this is evidence of the victory of neoliberal ideology but equally so the fault of mental health workers who have failed to organize with patients to reimagine and recreate a holistic mental healthcare system oriented around psychological and social transformation and rooted in participatory democracy. In fact, the only real mental health organizing going on today is among patients in the clubhouse movement, many of whom no longer want clinicians included in the process at all. This is entirely understandable and clinicians need to heal the relationship with patients in order to work together for psychological and social transformation.
Woah! You really researched! What about the so called clubs that were started in Cleveland, NYC, and DC? The Green Door in DC had a club membership and work type of options. The union concept more powerful than a club context in multiple ways. I would line to hear you or others thoughts and or experiences with those clubs. I think the seventies were the years they started and the thought was supportive but created by others not the folks. I know some people were turned off. Some others not so much, Thanks Caleb.
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Hi Mary, thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts. There’s been a lot of variations on the club since the late 60s/70s across the North Atlantic. My thinking around a patient union is that it highlights the fact that beyond social exclusion, the psychiatrized are economically exploited (by those extracting wealth from them with more concern for profit than care and by the wage-system that largely excludes them for not being productive enough) and they are cut off from the body governance that would determine the type of care they receive (psychiatric authoritarianism). I picture the patient union as addressing this economic/political aspect of exploitation and psychiatric authoritarianism while also being connected to the clubhouse movement. People move about in the city, especially those in the shelter system. Entrance into the patient union could gain one access to all clubhouses in the city (which need to be expanded). In addition to other social activities and resource sharing, clubhouses could be the base for patient organizing and developing representation in city patient-worker councils. So I don’t see the patient union as an alternative to the clubhouse model but a way of expanding the political-economic dimension of the clubhouse movement.
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Thanks Caleb. It might be worth a try. I am familiar with the clubs and shelters and all that and having a community as a union why not? I would check out the late Mitch Snyder’s DC ‘s Community for Creatuve Nonviolence for another source.
The latest article on Social Work gentifrcation also fits in here. Mitch was a Wall Street person then life then homelessness then I think that’s when he got a MSW and created his group. There was a film and Martin Sheen was in it somehow. And lots of burnout and almost all create burnout situations for both the employees and the clients with housing and everything else. One needs to look at those in control of the agencies and the funding.
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Your conclusions match mine. IMO your solutions merit serious consideration. What flaws or openings can you forsee that a patient union can be exploited by inside or outside entities?
Because if there’s a way it will be done. Best think of solutions for all scenarios
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Hi Lori, thanks for taking the time to read and comment. To answer your question well, I would probably need to write a full essay. But I think a union for patients would face similar internal and external challenges as any other union. Corporate powers are always trying to subordinate the radical core of unions (direct democracy in worker councils) to their own ends from profit accumulation to ensuring the stability of the current system in which they hold power. I imagine organized psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry would be trying in whatever way possible to influence the patient union as soon as it gained any real power. Additionally, there are always personality dynamics that get in the way of successful organizing and democratic participation in any union. These challenges, however, are always worth facing. In my opinion, we really have no other choice.
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When I asked ChatGPT to summarize this article, this was the result:
Below is the same summary translated into clear, well-structured English, preserving meaning and accuracy, with headings and bullet points for easy reading:
Core Argument
The text argues that discussions about the “mental health crisis” in New York City focus too heavily on crisis intervention, which obscures the deeper structural causes of distress. The author contends that the crisis is twofold, and that addressing symptoms alone cannot resolve it.
Critique of the Focus on Crisis Work
* In the 2025 NYC mayoral debates, mental health was mainly discussed in terms of:
– Expanding police power to mandate treatment, or
– Increasing mobile mental health crisis teams as a more “progressive” alternative.
* The author, a mobile crisis worker:
– Is not opposed to crisis work itself,
– But argues that overemphasizing it diverts attention and resources away from root causes.
* Crisis work is politically appealing because it:
– Reassures people who fear “the mentally ill,”
– Satisfies advocates who want police removed from mental health responses.
* It also creates a false fantasy:
– That with enough crisis workers, everyone falling through the cracks can be connected to care.
* This fantasy ignores the fact that the mental health crisis has two distinct dimensions.
Crisis 1: The Mental Health Crisis (Social and Economic Roots)
The author argues that rising rates of mental distress are the direct result of the current social order, especially capitalism.
* Key Claims
– Capitalism:
. Prevents people from sustaining autonomous lives,
. Subordinates human desires, creativity, and care to profit and bureaucratic control,
. Values production over human well-being.
* The real causes of suffering are obscured by:
– Channeling fear and aggression into racism and sexism,
– Promoting reductive, individualist explanations.
* Since the 1980s:
– Social programs have been cut,
– Financialization and technology have intensified exploitation,
– Life from childhood onward is organized around competition, productivity, and foreclosed futures.
Consequences
* Widespread psychological collapse, including:
– Panic attacks,
– Attention depletion,
– Emotional overload,
– Drug-induced psychosis,
– Withdrawal from life.
* The author observes that many “symptoms” seen in crisis work are:
– Not irrational disorders,
– But reasonable responses to overwork, overstimulation, and lack of viable futures.
Political Implications
* Framing mental health solely as a matter of community safety and crisis response:
– Misses the connection between mental health and inequality, capitalism, and authoritarianism
* Linking mental health to democracy, autonomy, and egalitarianism:
– Could challenge the dominance of the biomedical model,
– And help counter the fear-driven politics of the far right.
Crisis 2: The Neoliberal Psychiatric Establishment
The second crisis lies within the psychiatric system itself, which claims to address mental distress but instead helps produce and sustain it.
Critique of Psychiatric Models
* Mental illness is framed as:
– Individual malfunction,
– At its extreme, genetically determined and irreversible.
* However, current research shows:
– Neurobiological vulnerability is strongly mediated by psychological and social factors,
– Mental disorders are heterogeneous and often fully resolvable.
Function of the Psychiatric System
* Instead of moving people away from illness:
– The system often shapes them into the identity of “the mentally ill.”
* Historically:
– Psychiatry developed not from distressed communities,
– But from elite interests aligned with the capitalist work order.
* Its original purpose was to:
– Reintegrate nonconforming individuals into productivity,
– Institutionalize those who could not be made to conform.
Role Today
* The psychiatric establishment:
– Recasts systemic failure as individual pathology,
– Prevents collective resistance and politicization of suffering,
– Maintains fear among workers of what happens if they stop functioning.
* In doing so, it continues to serve economic and political elites.
Conclusion
* The mental health crisis is not merely a clinical or individual problem.
* It is simultaneously:
1. A crisis produced by capitalist social conditions, and
2. A crisis of the psychiatric system that misdefines and manages that suffering.
* Focusing narrowly on crisis intervention:
– Manages symptoms,
– But leaves the structural causes of distress intact.
**********
Below is an academically oriented adaptation of the summary, using a formal tone, analytical framing, and conceptual clarity, suitable for coursework, papers, or policy analysis:
Abstract
This text advances the argument that contemporary debates on the “mental health crisis” in New York City are overly centered on crisis intervention mechanisms, thereby neglecting the structural and institutional determinants of psychological distress. The author conceptualizes the crisis as twofold: first, a widespread escalation of mental health challenges produced by capitalist social relations; and second, a crisis internal to the neoliberal psychiatric establishment, which reproduces rather than resolves this distress. The paper contends that symptom-focused interventions obscure root causes and limit possibilities for transformative responses.
1. Crisis Intervention as a Displacing Framework
Recent political discourse, particularly during the 2025 NYC mayoral debates, has framed mental health primarily in terms of crisis response—either through expanded coercive powers for police or through the growth of mobile crisis teams. While such approaches are politically expedient and institutionally legible, the author argues that they function as displacing mechanisms, redirecting attention away from structural causes of distress toward its most visible manifestations. Crisis work thus becomes a managerial solution that promises containment rather than transformation.
2. Crisis I: The Social Production of Mental Distress
2.1 Capitalism and Psychological Suffering
The first dimension of the crisis concerns the rapid rise in mental distress, which the author situates within the dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Capitalist social relations are described as systematically undermining autonomy, subordinating human creativity and care to profit accumulation and bureaucratic control, and prioritizing production over human well-being. Mental distress is therefore not an aberration but a predictable outcome of these conditions.
2.2 Neoliberal Restructuring and Technological Intensification
Since the 1980s, neoliberal policies—particularly the dismantling of social welfare programs and the convergence of financialization with digital technologies—have intensified these dynamics. The penetration of technological systems into everyday life, including childhood development, has subjected individuals to constant competition, overstimulation, and precarious futures. Within this context, symptoms such as anxiety, attentional collapse, emotional exhaustion, and withdrawal from social life are interpreted as rational responses to structurally induced pressures.
2.3 Political Implications
By framing mental health primarily as a matter of public safety and crisis management, policymakers foreclose discussions linking mental health to inequality, authoritarian governance, and democratic erosion. The author argues that reconnecting mental health to broader questions of democracy, egalitarianism, and social autonomy would both challenge biomedical reductionism and counter reactionary political mobilizations grounded in fear and aggression.
3. Crisis II: The Neoliberal Psychiatric Establishment
3.1 Epistemological Reductionism
The second crisis lies within the psychiatric establishment itself. Dominant psychiatric models frame mental illness as individual dysfunction, often invoking genetic or neurobiological determinism. The author contends that such models are inconsistent with empirical research demonstrating the central role of psychosocial and environmental factors, the heterogeneity of mental disorders, and the possibility of full recovery.
3.2 Institutional Function and Historical Origins
Rather than facilitating emancipation from distress, psychiatric institutions are argued to produce and stabilize the subject position of “the mentally ill.” Historically, psychiatry emerged alongside the consolidation of the capitalist work order, serving to discipline nonconforming individuals and to institutionalize those unable or unwilling to adapt. This dual function—rehabilitation for productivity and custodial containment—continues to structure contemporary mental health systems.
3.3 Social Control and Depoliticization
In its current form, the psychiatric establishment functions as a technology of social management. It individualizes systemic failures, inhibits collective political responses to suffering, and reinforces disciplinary fear among workers. As such, it contributes directly to the reproduction of the conditions that generate mental distress.
4. Conclusion
The text concludes that the mental health crisis cannot be adequately understood or addressed through crisis intervention alone. It is simultaneously a crisis generated by capitalist social relations and a crisis of the institutional apparatus tasked with managing psychological suffering. Effective responses, the author suggests, would require a paradigmatic shift away from symptom management toward structural, political, and emancipatory transformations.
NOTE: This article would be better understood if a summary were provided. I hope these AI summaries have been helpful. Best regards.
With my sincerest wishes. Y.E 🙂 Research blog writer (Blogger)
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Hi Yildirim, this is a good summary for the criticism piece (the first two sections), but it misses the final section on moving forward. I only mention this because I think there is a lot of critique today without much talk of a way forward. I would like to move in the direction of conversations of what it would look like to create positive change, such as worker-patient organizing for participatory democracy, municipalization, and universal health care, and to start organizing around these issue and pushing for them because emancipatory policies will never be spontaneously introduced by an exploiting class. It is interesting to me that the AI summary left this out entirely.
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Caleb, if you seek a way forward, the first step should be to change the tone and terminology of discourse on this subject.
Thus, it’s high time to stop speaking of “mental illness” and “patients,” which only perpetuates the fallacious notion of emotional distress as a form of pathology that requires “expert” intervention.
Medicalized metaphors are fraught with harmful physical and/or psychological consequences for those labeled with them.
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Hi Joel, thanks for reading and for your comment. I appreciate that perspective. I used to feel quite strongly that we shouldn’t use the term mental illness and I still tend not to use the term when I’m speaking, and certainly not in therapy, choosing to use more specific words. However I think it’s more important for us to be able to take back the discourse from organized psychiatry, the pharmaceutical industry, and biomedical practitioners who, in my opinion, make the term problematic to begin with. There is a real phenomenon of widespread distress/alienation that I believe the transition to capitalism generated and neoliberalism threw into hyper-speed (not that psychosocial alienation didn’t already exist but not so ubiquitously) and I think this warrants a label for critical and emancipatory purposes. Mental illness probably isn’t the best but any term is subject to misuse. I think the label is only problematic insofar as it is understood in a biomedical manner and used to legitimize surveillance, psychiatric incarceration, and forced drugging. I think that what is more important than the signifier applied to various psychosocial alienations, is how we understand what we’re talking about and what we’re doing about it. If illness or disorder signifies a subjective sense of inability to live one’s fullest and transform oneself in desired ways then I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t be applied in the psychosocial terrain. Patient is someone who suffers from something. This is all of us. It doesn’t necessarily require an expert intervention. Although I was not forced into therapy as many are, when I was in therapy I much preferred to think of myself as a patient than a client. However, what’s more important to me than the language battle is that we work together (with people across the spectrum of mental illness is myth to mental illness is a brain disease) in order to create a social order that doesn’t generate so much emotional suffering/illness/alienation, and that provides quality care to those who are suffering. The reality is that so many people are suffering. How can we be better at caring and creating conditions to reduce the immense suffering (whatever we call it) that is the product of our social order?
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Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Caleb, but I still disagree with you. Words have social connotations, and in the public consciousness the term “patient” is invariably associated with medical conditions. It’s inappropriate to use in the case of those who suffer because of emotional abuse, such as LBGT individuals bullied or physically assaulted by prejudiced hostile peers. Similarly with terms such as “disorder” and “illness,” which likewise have medicalized connotations that are misleading when applied metaphorically in a psychosocial context.
This conflation of metaphor and reality is the basic rationale for psychiatric diagnoses and treatments, and should be exposed and combated as a harmful fallacy.
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Sovereignty is personal. It just is. The rest is distraction.
Real change happens silently, one mind at a time.
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As an Existentialist with lived experience I will keep it short.
Great article.
People over profits. Without people there are no profits. Bring back Social Democracy and leave out the racism.
Treatment: Focus on making patients better rather than curing them. Instead of focusing on what is wrong with them ask how you can help them. Alienation has long been considered to be at the root of mental issues. However the focus has always been on the source of this. Feelings of alienation are not a neurosis and can be simply reversed by the formation of a positive relationship. If and when the subject brings up the source of the alienation is the time to address it. The more severe a mental disorder the lighter the touch. Just be there with the subject without judgement, listening and trying to understand will help more then volumes of psychobabble.
Medication: Was originally approved to facilitate treatment not as a treatment.
I support patient centric medication but am opposed to its use as a medical strait jacket or as a symptom suppressor.
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