Tag: capitalism

We have accepted that the busier we keep ourselves, the happier we can expect our lives to be. "Acceptable behavior" is defined by increased productivity across all aspects of life.

MIA’s Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Bruce Cohen about dismissive psychiatrists, pervasive psychiatry, and the field's ties to neoliberal capitalism.

James Davies on the medicalization and individualizing of distress and its connection to neoliberal ideology, and the need to focus on pervasive inequality and other social causes.

Neoliberalism teaches people that suffering has nothing to do with the inequality they experience, but that it comes from their own individual failures of body and mind, and requires "experts" to identify and treat it.

Capitalists don’t discover new medicine; they invest in it. The incentive to do so, as everyone will admit, is to return a profit. Most would also agree that this profit shouldn’t be "too large," but enough to encourage adequate investment into new treatments. However, the idea that this is a well-functioning system, and indeed the best way of producing medicine, is a myth.

Researchers explore neoliberal influences on interactions in psychotherapy and question whether the radical potential of psychotherapy can counter prevailing social systems.

From Ricochet: "'Personal individual solutions of therapists, of internalizing it, and that kind of stuff, is problematic,' explains McKay. 'Our own view is...

From Medium: "We tend to think of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a frivolous internet distraction, akin to the hundreds of BuzzFeed quizzes that help us pass...

From Jacobin Magazine: "When the competitive dictates of capitalism — selling your labor if you’re a worker, maximizing profit if you’re a boss — reign...

Personality tests function for an employer, intentionally or otherwise, much like diagnostic criteria function for the mental-health system: these labels determine who gets resources that capitalism itself makes scarce — not only basic necessities like food, clothing and shelter, which require money to obtain, but empathy, understanding and support, which are kept in short supply.

Now, personality tests are being used to determine which side of the wealth gap people will fall on. Who you are is not neutral — the lens your personality-test results will be viewed through is: “are you a good worker?” Any definition of this will likely exclude psychiatric survivors, those labeled by the DSM and those who see, think, hear, speak and feel differently.

In this piece for The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino discusses how the gig economy driven by apps such as Uber and Lyft leads employees to overwork...

From the Political Economy Research Centre: The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica revelations have exposed contemporary society's ubiquitous digital surveillance. Dominance is no longer exerted primarily through physical power but through...

In this piece for Aeon, Edward Thornton chronicles the friendship and collaboration between the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari and the postmodern philosopher Gilles Deleuze. "'How could two...

In this interview for Broadly, Lauren Greenfield speaks about her new documentary, "Generation Wealth," which takes a sobering look at our societal addiction to the...

From The Alternative UK: Rod Tweedy's book The Political Self, as well as a new book due out in 2018, The Inner Level, discuss the ways mental...

In this video for Verso Books, author George Monbiot explains how neoliberalism has destroyed our natural capacity for altruism. He proposes that we create a...

From VICE: According to Marcus Gilroy-Ware, author of Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism & Social Media, society's widespread use of social media stems from and is exploited...

In Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness, Bruce Cohen explains the expanding power and influence of psychiatry in terms of its usefulness to the capitalist system — the more useful it is, the more power it is given, and the greater its power, the more useful it becomes.

The Guardian reports growing concerns from the Buddhist Society conference: “Jon Kabat-Zinn, who created the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine at the University of Massachusetts medical school, warned last week that some people feared a ‘sort of superficial ‘McMindfulness’ is taking over, which ignores the ethical foundations of the meditative practices and traditions from which mindfulness has emerged, and divorces it from its profoundly transformative potential.’”