You’re Not Crazy, You Live in a Society
“Mental Illness” & The Logic of Capital

Each morning begins, for me, with a brief yoga routine and a bit of stretching. I meditate or exercise, sometimes. As I sit down to breakfast, I accompany the meal with a small mound of pills – daily vitamins, medicinal mushroom supplements, probiotics, a fish oil capsule, as well as a dosage of Lexapro and Wellbutrin. Some of these pills strengthen my immune system, maintain a healthy gut biome, or regulate blood pressure. The anti-depressants help to ward off intrusive, self-destructive, or debilitating thoughts. I take the once daily vitamin not because I am especially deficient in any necessary nutrient – there’s nothing particularly wrong with how my body processes food – but rather because my diet doesn’t provide all of the vitamins and nutrients I need to stay healthy. It’s easier to take a supplement than to eat nourishing food. Likewise, I pop the Lexapro and Wellbutrin not because there is anything malfunctioning in my neurological chemistry — everything is working as it should be. Each day I eat these little circles because I am forced to live according to a structure that is totally unnatural and unhealthy; emotionally alienating and socially dysfunctional. I am racked with a justifiable dread and legitimate sadness. To ward off the resulting distress, I medicate.

I am not a “mental health” professional. I am not a doctor or academic, nor do I have any experience in the “field.” I am a college drop-out and a punk. I am a traveler, a community organizer, and I live in a van. So, if you’re looking for legitimate “credentials,” this zine may not meet your standards. I am, however, someone who “has depression.” I go to therapy and I take SSRIs. I’m from a working class family. I have experienced the physical, mental, and emotional toll that poverty takes on individuals and communities. Those struggles have been a motivation for this writing.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m crazy, like I’m gonna freak out. I’ve wrestled with intrusive thoughts and self-harming ideation since I was in middle school. Back then, listening to Nine Inch Nails helped. As I got older, getting blackout drunk became a regular coping mechanism, which was normalized in both the subcultural and mainstream worlds I inhabited. Lately, I am better at managing those feelings. A meditation practice, decent diet and exercise, and getting sober helped with that. The medication also helped to turn down the volume of my self-destructive inner voice

Since I am not an academic, this is not an academic work. I have done my best to cite references and credit resources. The numbers you see next to quotes or excerpts — like this^1‘ – correspond numerically to the list on the reference page in the back of this zine. For sources, refer to that reference page. I am highly indebted to the source materials that I cite and refer to within, and want to acknowledge those works for inspiring, shaping, informing, and building this piece.

By no means is this an exhaustive or definitive work. I don’t claim to be breaking new ground here. My goal has been to gather some ideas, distill and organize those ideas, and present them in a way that is (hopefully) coherent and accessible. I hope this can help folks think critically about these topics even though they may be complex, uncomfortable, or activating. If you identify with a mental health diagnosis and feel invalidated as you read this, please know this is not my intention. I don’t claim to have any “correct” answers or insights, I am simply speaking from my own observations while referencing some of the reading I’ve done on the subject and attempting to articulate an approach to mental health as a social phenomenon, rather than an individual pathology.

The Logic of Capital & Human Nature

The disorientation of modern life is enough to make anyone feel emotionally dysregulated and mentally unstable. Statistics show a sharp increase in depression over the last 30 years. This is partly due to an expansion of our understanding of mental health along with wider ranging diagnostic criteria, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that “society is literally becoming more pathological.”[22]. People feel on edge, experiencing breakdowns, debilitating sadness, pacifying numbness.

Mental Health is an endemic social issue, but we are generally discouraged from thinking about our problems beyond individual symptoms and expressions. Popular discourse on the subject of mental health tends to ignore the wider contexts which have such a profound effect on our emotional wellbeing, namely the totalizing socio-economic structure of capitalism. Capitalism is more than an economic model, it is an all-encompassing societal paradigm which shapes our desires, behaviors, and social outlooks. “Capitalism is a fundamental way of being, first of all, and then a society built around perpetuating that way of being.”⁵

What is “rational” under a capitalist framework is often ecologically destructive, socially harmful, and ethically indefensible. Ecological devastation, mass exploitation, and the loss of human and non-human life are all acceptable, according to this logic, so long as profits rise in the upcoming fiscal quarter. “That fundamental dynamic toward accumulation is definitional. It will always be stronger than any other tendency.”¹²

This pervasive ideological framework is referred to herein as “the logic of capital.” This not only refers to the prioritization of profit, but all the ways this ideology effects our lived experience – how our neighborhoods are built, how our relationships form, how we perceive our own self-worth, how we shape our political ambitions, how we engage with the natural world.

According to the logic of capital, profit takes priority over all else. Food is not grown in order to feed people; it is manufactured for profit. Housing is not understood as existing for the purpose of sheltering people, but as a means by which individuals or real-estate conglomerates with abundant capital can make financial investments. Healthcare is not a system designed to make sick people well, it is an enterprise provided (or denied) for the profit of insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations.

The alienation, exploitation, and social decay resulting from this logic is bound to make us feel an existential dread, sadness, and anxiety. The irrationality and outright hostility of capitalist logic to our social, emotional, physical, and spiritual health corresponds to our expressions of these sicknesses in our outlook, behavior, and mental/emotional state.

While depression, stress, and anxiety are not necessarily unique to our time, the kind of “mental health” challenges we face are characteristic of our particular moment in history, a moment fundamentally shaped by the logic of capital. This is not to suggest that capitalism is the only reason for widespread “mental illness,” but if we are to meaningfully confront people’s emotional and psychological wellbeing, we must acknowledge that the way our society is organized is antithetical to our nature and antagonistic to our basic material, psychological, and social needs.

If we want to truly understand the root causes of our mental health crisis, we have to take on a structural analysis. I find Johann Hari’s critique of trendy dieting a helpful analogy here. In his attempts to lose weight, Hari was made to believe that his unhealthy eating habits were a personal failing. Personalized diet plans were the only thing on offer in response to a “crisis with primarily social causes.”¹⁹ He continues,

The scientists that have studied it discovered that 95% of people in our culture who lose weight on a diet regain it within one to five years. That’s 19 out of every 20 people. Why? It’s because it misses [the reason people] gained weight in the first place. It has no systemic analysis. … Diet books ignore the fact that you live in a society and culture that are shaping you every day to act in certain ways. A diet doesn’t change your wider environment, and it’s the wider environment that is the cause of this crisis. Your diet ends and you’re still in an unhealthy environment that’s pushing you to gain weight.¹⁹

Applying this same analysis to the mental health epidemic can be illuminating. When we interpret our own mental or emotional distress as individual phenomena, we ignore the larger crises which are making us distressed in the first place.

The logic of capital is so invasive in almost all aspects of our lives, yet so ubiquitous that it goes largely unexamined. We come to consider this way of organizing society as inevitable. However, the impersonal financialized economy of neoliberal capitalism is a historical abnormality. No matter how violent or unnatural they are, the ideologies and activities that maintain the status quo will be “enshrined as human nature, while deviations from them (are) seen as abnormal.”³ The logic of capital serves the interests of the ruling class. Therefore, hegemonic social and political structures insist this logic is natural.

An analysis of what it means to be “healthy” or what is “natural” requires a basic understanding of the biological and social conditions under which our species evolved. These conditions formed our social and emotional needs. In The Myth of Normal, Gabor & Daniel Maté propose:

Insofar as it is possible to speak coherently about human needs, we have to consider how they developed eons before oral or written history … If one wants to know what is ‘correct’ for a species, one must know the inherent expectations of that species. An inherent expectation is a wired in need, something that, if denied, interferes with our personal and physiological equilibrium, leading to poor health outcomes physically, mentally, and socially.³

Our species evolved in small band hunter-gatherers societies which means our minds and bodies “expect” the social conditions of those societies. The material reality of pre-agricultural peoples required social collectivity to meet basic needs of food and shelter – these bands had to work together to survive. Most human societies throughout history depended on collective and social obligations which “expressed the nature and priorities of the community and the network of relationships between its members.”¹³ Until very recently, people mostly experienced their sense of purpose through some social role, something beyond the self which binds them to a cohesive collective project. Through privatization and pursuit of profit, neoliberalism has all but destroyed these communal bonds in their various forms.

It is not as if prehistoric societies or preindustrial peoples were more morally righteous, more concerned with ethics, or maintained some angelic quality that was lost in a biblical fall from grace. Rather, it was by material necessity for survival that people depended on mutual support and reciprocal networks of cooperation. In this way, meeting our physiological needs collectively is what shaped our higher psycho-emotional needs for social belonging within a community.

Humans have a hard-wired expectation for a life fundamentally oriented around cooperation and collective belonging. It was collectivism, not competition, which gave our species the evolutionarily edge, and cooperative communal relationships are what shaped our minds, bodies, and social expectations. Our psycho- emotional health is dependent on these evolutionary expectations – these social needs – being met. The logic of capital inhibits this “natural” way of life and perpetuates the falsehood that competition and self-interest are inherent to human nature.

Alienation serves as a sort of catch all term for a kind of social detachment – an isolated and atomized social environment totally hostile to our evolutionary expectation. In an economic context, alienation describes labor relations in which the bosses profit from the toil of the working class, but alienation also articulates the ways the logic of capital orients our relationships and social structures towards an indifference to other people. Social bonds become instrumentalized. Relationships are valued only in terms of their “usefulness” to our personal interests. Our ability to care about the suffering of others becomes perverted into either pity or disgust. Alienation is the “precise and correctly applied word for describing the major social problems today. People feel alienated by society.”¹⁵ Under tremendous financial stress, physically overworked, emotionally drained, and detached from meaningful connection with community, working people struggle to attain the basic dignities of life. This creates an existential tension. In an alienated society, this tension is turn inward. We are led to believe that we are responsible for our own wellbeing rather than recognizing that “suffering is always socially mediated.”¹⁸ Attaching our emotional or mental dysregulation exclusively to the individual “privatizes suffering,”¹⁸ while the injustices of modern capitalism go on unquestioned. This turning inward for responsibility and blame not only narrows our social analysis, it weakens our empathy for others and can guide us down a path of narcissistic egoism.

Centering the self above the social body leads us to seek solutions individually by “self-optimizing.” Everything we learn, the encounters we have, the improvement we seek comes to serve our individual “value,” rather than the health of the social whole. This egoic approach only makes us more depressed and anxious as we can never reach the perfect self we pursue. Of course, the profit motive sees an opportunity here, and advertisers are fully aware of the emotional longing and existential dissatisfaction that people experience in our culture. It is their job to convince the masses that the void can be filled by the purchase of products or “experiences,” which only leaves us feeling more empty and estranged.

Individuals and communities cannot be psychologically, emotionally, or spiritually healthy in a social system that exploits labor, degrades relationships, and destroys the natural environment on which their lives depend. Our interconnectivity means we also share in one another’s suffering – from our financially struggling neighbors to oppressed populations around the globe. We experience mental distress when we deny or repress our mutuality, when we atomize and close ourselves off. In contrast, because we are fundamentally social creatures, it feels good to behave in pro-social ways. In recognizing that our own wellbeing is tied up with the wellbeing of those around us, acts of solidarity and service are mutually beneficial. To connect with others interpersonally and communally is a reinforcement of our biological evolutionary expectation and a necessity for emotional and social wellbeing. Quoting The Myth of Normal again,

A society that fails to value communality, our need to belong, to care for one another and to feel caring energy flow towards us, is a society facing away from the essence of what it means to be human. Pathology cannot but ensue. To say so is not a moral assertation but an objective assessment.³

The logic of capital forces people to arrange their lives in a particular way in order to survive. What is understood as normal or healthy is determined by the social conditioning and cultural norms under which behaviors and emotions are formed. Mainstream mental health discourse standardizes normalcy as adequately adhering to capitalist logic. Deviation from the standard of the behavioral, emotional, or intellectual norm is pathologized on an individual level and deemed in need of individual “fixing.” But, a society that worships opulence while it normalizes millions of people sleeping in the streets is deeply sick. A value structure of competitive and self-aggrandizing consumption undermines the deep, caring relationships that people need to feel happy and healthy. Under a crumbling economy within a collapsing empire, judgment of worth based on material success leaves a majority of the population deeply resentful and distressed. We lose sight of the socially dysfunctional and morally reprehensible nature of our culture when dehumanization is constantly normalized, incentivized and, in a sense, required by capitalist society.

The consequences of being forced to structure our lives under the pressure of market forces, profit motive, and capitalist ideology are mental, physical, social, and political dysfunction. Depression, anxiety, and various other diagnosis are the “illnesses” we assign to the reactions the human creature has when subjected to such unnatural social conditions. But these are not neurological malfunctions or emotional sicknesses, they are the direct and inevitable result of a culture of extreme alienation, an economic structure which make the basic necessities inaccessible and a social reality which denies large swaths of the population fundamental human dignity.

In her book Warp & Weft, Lisa Fannen challenges the term “mental health” itself for its framing of a phenomenon taking place explicitly in the brain/mind of the individual. Fannen elaborates:

I tend to use the term psycho-emotional health … to acknowledge the deep relational and contextual dimensions (of) experience … I think it steers away from the dominating narratives we’re given that distress is caused by individual personal mental health issues which are located in the brain/mind. I think it describes what’s usually being spoken about (when referring to “mental health”) i.e. how we feel. And that feeling happens in the body and soul, not just the head, mind, or brain.²

I find Fannen’s articulation helpful, so, I use the language of “psycho-emotional health” throughout this work. Psycho-emotional distress, then, is not simply the result of an individual pathology or imbalance of brain chemistry, but rather the natural human response to threatening, unnatural, and dangerous conditions, both material and psychological, individual and social. Therefore, this dysfunction can be understood not just as “expressions of individual pathology, but as living alarms, directing our attention toward where our society has gone askew.”³ Joanna Macy writes in her book Active Hope:

How would we notice if we were straying off course, as a society? We would start to feel uncomfortable. If we were heading in a dangerous direction, we might feel alarmed. If something unacceptable was taking place, we might feel outraged. If parts of our world that we loved were dying, we would expect to grieve. These feelings are normal, healthy responses. They help us to notice what’s going on. They are also what rouses us to respond.¹⁷

People are made to believe their emotional or mental instability is their own fault, a lack of strong character or perseverance. Oppressed and exploited populations are far more likely to struggle with mental health, because of their material conditions and social positions. Individual expressions of psycho-emotional distress in all its various forms can’t be invalidated or dismissed, and sometimes require real attention and intervention. However, our collective focus should not be only on mitigating symptoms, but also on improving the conditions that cause the distress to begin with.

Biomedicine

Psycho-emotional distress or discomfort can be understood as a sort of alarm system, our bodies and minds alerting us to situations in our lives that aren’t good for us. However, at some point the idea that this discomfort “is the effect of some physical disturbance or neurological dysfunction found traction and became hegemonic. Too little of this and too much of that ingredient as it were the recipe for soup.” To blame anxiety or depression on mere imbalance of brain chemistry or individual pathology ignores the social causes of that distress, flattening the complex realities and struggles people face.

“Biomedicine” is a term assigned to the dominant process of diagnosing and addressing “mental health” which focuses on individual brain malfunction or chemical imbalance. It is a framework “primarily concerned with biological processes and looks at symptoms rather than addressing their root causes.”² “Alternative” or “holistic” counselors or practitioners may go a little deeper in their inquiry regarding psycho-emotional health, asking patients about stress or trauma. However, to get a full understanding of a person’s physical, emotional, and “mental” health, requires consideration of systematic causes of distress, particularly the “manifestations of inequality and injustice, like the reality of damp housing, having to work long hours without any time off, the experience of social isolation or threat of police aggression, etc.”²

Mental health diagnoses often pathologize the inevitable reactions people have to living under social conditions which are threatening to their basic physical, emotional, and social needs. Moreover, the concept of “Neurotypical or neurodivergent … has a tendency to suggest a binary, an ‘either, or’ rather than a more diffuse and sometimes fluctuating range or spectrum of experience.”²

It is true that many people find personal value, social validation, and genuine healing through biomedical diagnosis and treatment. The relief and support that therapy, medication, or peer groups have the potential to provide cannot be disregarded. Without invalidating the benefits of these kinds of mental healthcare, we can also question how medicalizing psycho-emotional distress absolves us from needing to discuss and confront a social environment which makes us cripplingly depressed and distressed.²³

While medication can certainly be helpful, and sometimes even vital, implicit claims that prescription drugs are a “cure” can encourage people to “view themselves as powerless victims of their biology. At another level, it allows governments and institutions to ignore the social and political reasons why so many people feel discontented with their lives.”² A prescription to anti-depressants may help alleviate debilitating intrusive thoughts or destructive behavior. It can also avert people from seeking a broader understanding of the source of their pain or a more genuine and effective means of addressing their discomfort.

The logic of capital insists that “suffering is not a social or systematic problem, but a medical problem requiring intervention at the individual level.”⁴ To attribute psycho-emotional distress to faulty brain chemistry, abnormal physiology, or independent pathology focuses our attention entirely on the individual and the measurable. These claims assume that our mental health can be fully understood according to scientific models and “solved” through medical intervention. This limits our understanding of how to help people while simultaneously undermining the larger social solutions to the problems people face.

Moreover, certain diagnosis rely on a circular reasoning. For example, someone may be diagnosed with ADHD because they exhibit behaviors associated with ADHD. Why do they exhibit those behaviors? Because they have ADHD, so the logic goes. As Johann Hari states, ADHD is simply “a description of certain behaviors that sometimes occur together.”¹⁹ Gabor Maté drive this home:

It bears repeating – there are no measurable physical markers of mental illness … Like all concepts, mental illness is a construct — a particular frame we have developed to understand the phenomena and explain what we observe. It may be valid in some respects and erroneous in others; it most definitely isn’t objective. Unchecked, it becomes an all-encompassing lens through which we perceive and interpret. Such a way of seeing can say as much about the bias and values of the culture that gives rise to it as about the phenomenon being seen, whether a religious concept, like ‘sinful’, or a biomedical one, like ‘mentally ill’.³

“Normalcy” is established solely through social context and the value structure of a given society. Cultures that function under the logic of capital will define health not as a fulfillment of needs or balance with social and natural environments, but in terms of utility as units of labor and consumption. Inability or refusal to adapt to the material and social conditions of capitalism is therefore labeled as “strangeness” casually, or “mental illness” clinically. Those who suffer from “mental illness” are not unique in terms of neurology or genetics, but are fundamentally shaped by the social context of their lives, the conditions of their upbringing, their access to basic resources, and their interpersonal relationships, among other things.

We can acknowledge that the symptoms and challenges associated with “mental” conditions are real and affect people’s lives while also pointing out that they are socially and politically constructed, as are the ways we understand and conceptualize them. Instead of compulsively defining psycho-emotional distress as a sickness that must be fixed, what could we learn from this discomfort?

Conscious or not, our psycho-emotional distress might be understood as a sort of refusal to twist ourselves into the distorted shapes required of us to be obedient workers and consumers, breaking our bodies and spirits in service of the profit motive. Pain and discomfort are not always something to escape from — they can have value as a signal of our longing for change. In a systemic paradigm which attempts to numb our emotions, despair is a sign of our desire for something better. It reveals our capacity to feel. Grief and joy are intertwined – the ability to feel one is dependent on the ability to feel the other.

It is an oversimplification to attribute psycho-emotional discomfort to the malfunctioning of the brain. Under conditions that are antithetical to the biological and social needs of human health and wellbeing, the mind/body’s natural response is psycho-emotional distress and discomfort. Diagnostic models that revolve around genetics or chemical imbalances help to justify the social injustices that cause psycho-emotional pain and that deny the fulfilment of non-negotiable social and material needs. The insistence that existential sadness or debilitating stress or social anxiety are caused genetically or can be solved by a simple jot of the prescription pad ignores the social environments that shape people’s thoughts, emotions and behaviors, and physical health.

To be clear, someone effected by a severe personality disorder wouldn’t just be “cured” if we abolished capitalism. By no means do I intend to deny or invalidate the very real struggles of people living with mental distress, emotional dysregulation, or those debilitated by trauma. However, when such a large percentage of the population experiences “illnesses” like depression and anxiety, these are fundamentally social problems, not cases of individual neurological malfunctioning.

There are limitations to the biomedical methodology of diagnosis and treatment, and the current discourse around “mental illness.” Psycho-emotional health cannot be fully understood if its social context is ignored. Incomplete assessment of the causes of psycho-emotional distress that obscure factors like social inequality or political dispossession can be unhelpful, or even harmful.

Trauma, Tech, & Childhood

Trauma is widely discussed in today’s mental health discourse. Gabor Maté describes trauma as an “inner injury, a lasting rupture or split within the self due to harmful events. By this definition, trauma is primarily what happens within someone as a result of a harmful event, not the events themselves.”³ Throughout The Myth of Normal, Maté refers to trauma as a fracturing, a loss of connection to ourselves and the world. He also differentiates between “Capital T & small t trauma.”

…capital-T trauma occurs when things happen to vulnerable people that should not have happened, as, for example a child being abused or violence in a family […]There is another form of trauma — and this is the kind I’m calling nearly universal in our culture — that has sometimes been termed small t trauma.³

Daniel Maté elaborates on small-t trauma:

It’s not bad things happening, but good things, necessary things, not happening. Humans have non-negotiable needs – not that we will die without them, but we will experience abnormal development without them. When these needs aren’t met, we have to adapt in unhealthy ways.⁹

“Capital T” Traumas highlight specific experiences, such as physical abuse, while “little t” traumas might refer to more constant structural injustice like insecure housing or food scarcity or the threat of racial violence. Conversations about trauma seem to have broken into the mainstream, and that may well be a good thing. However, public perception of trauma usually refers to the individual experiences of “Capital T” Trauma, and has less consideration for the systematic traumas, despite their long-term detrimental effects on health. While understanding trauma is essential to understanding psycho-emotional health, “it often stays very individuated.” Fannen continues:

There can be a strong focus on transforming your life and healing from trauma, which doesn’t tend to come overtly interlinked with how we also need to transform and heal the relational world we live in. Of course, tools and healing practices we can use and share personally are profound, but they need to sit within wider practices of collective care, social change, and systematic transformation for them to have more or real meaning or efficacy.²

As significant as trauma is to our psycho-emotional health, we should avoid totalizing trauma as the sole cause of our distress. An over-identification with traumatic experiences as an essential and unresolvable part of our character misses potential opportunities for healing. Engaging trauma through a process of growth requires speaking to resiliency, building upon a person’s strengths in a process oriented towards breaking free from trauma’s grip on their life. Too often our engagement with trauma is pacifying and defeating rather than liberating. People regard trauma as an essential part of their character, rendering them forever broken.

Though we have made some progress in social equality and cultural inclusion over the last few decades, we have also experienced dramatic shifts the way we relate to each other. People are increasingly isolated and disconnected. Without sufficient human connection, we experience a deep, unshakable loneliness. There is, perhaps, no time in human history when this level of loneliness has been felt so deeply and persistently. The effects are being expressed through epidemics of psycho-emotional distress and reinforced through pathological beliefs and behaviors.

While loneliness may be a part of any human experience, “there is a capitalist form of loneliness that we must confront as such.”¹² Working people who are physically and emotionally exhausted often lack the time and energy and capacity to invest in deep, loving relationships. Loneliness is compounded through economic desperation. Meaningful connection cannot thrive in such a toxic environment. The seeds of compassion struggle to germinate in the soil of domination. Immiserated by the conditions of our world, we become less socially equipped to love or connect, emotionally dulled and relationally adrift.

The isolated nuclear family has weakened community relationships, narrowing the possibilities for children to attain the healthy and stable environments they require. Consider the dramatic shift in how children interact with each other over the last 20 years. Today, far fewer children gather in real life to participate in the collective play which is so important in social and emotional development. The relationships between families in a neighborhood (or village, or city block) which used to be quite common created tangible and cohesive communities. Now, it seems, each individual household is shut off behind locked doors with a Ring camera glaring out in a constant suspicion of the other.

Neurological and emotional development depend on a complex network of social and interpersonal factors, from the stress level of parental figures to the air pollution in the neighborhood. Working class people are increasingly economically strained in meeting the basic needs of food and shelter. Anyone who has experienced the skyrocketing cost of housing and groceries understands this challenge. Financially stressed and overworked parents have little time or energy to provide the attentive and emotionally stable caregiving that children require for healthy brain development and emotional attunement. Without these nurturing environments, children cannot properly develop emotional regulation or learn healthy social interaction. Many children come to understand the world not under the guidance of embodied loving relationships, but through the unending glow of the screen’s profit-driven algorithm.

Young people today mostly socialize online, mediated by screens in some way. We have all seen the pacifying power of the ipad in a toddler’s hands. Advertisers recognize children as the hyper exploitable captive market of their dreams. Developing minds are bombarded by ads reinforcing a “relationship with products, with things – not people…Fast food and toy companies, not parents and teachers, know what’s best for them.”³ Because they are designed by -and work in service of — the logic of capital, these technologies exist to profit corporations by exploiting neurology, opening portals to unending advertisements and disembodied social interaction. The psychological effects of these devices, particularly on the developing minds, are coming into focus. Richard Gilman-Opalsky writes,

Human neurology is highly adaptable, but it does not evolve as fast as technology and the density and complexity of high speed transmissions overwhelm the organic human being’s receptive apparatus causing pathological effects — panic, overexcitement, hyperactivity, ADD, dyslexia, information overload, and the saturation of neural circuitry.⁸

When children and young people react to the highly unnatural social conditions of modernity with hyperactivity or emotional instability, they are often diagnosed with mental illness or disorders which are then treated with psychoactive drugs that have potential long-term effects. Interfering with the physiology of a developing brain can be quite risky. It continues because it facilitates compliance to a version of “normalcy” that better facilitates the consumption of marketable commodities, and the training of an obedient workforce in our nation’s classrooms.

By now it is common knowledge how the developers of social media intentionally designed their platforms to be highly addictive in order to gain higher profits from advertisers, with no regard to the social or cultural implications. The language of neurology is often utilized in these discussions – how social media’s “likes” or “comments” supply a dopamine “hit” for their users. However, it would be an oversimplification to critique social media solely in terms of “neurological manipulation.” Lisa Fannen wisely points out,

The dopamine science presented as what drives addictive behavior and claims to be shamelessly exploited by social media profiteers feels like loops and layers of misguidance. Not only are we being strategically encouraged to spend all our time hooked into social media, but the industry perpetuates an idea that that behavior is all dependent on certain neurochemical activity … I don’t believe [neurological] ‘hijacking’ techniques seduce purely because they cause some chemical high. We are offered (albeit technologically mediated) connection, affirmation, interest, intellectual stimulation, stories, drama, excitement. We are offered both feeling and the avoidance of feeling. The effect of that in our mind/body/souls is embodied and somatic, not just neurochemical.²

I don’t mean to sound like an old man shaking my cane at “these damn kids”, but a conversation about mental health in the modern world must confront these issues. Tech companies facilitate more and more of our social interactions, shaping our reality and understanding of the world around us. The fracturing of our attention spans is a widespread crisis, especially when we face deeply complicated and intertwining social and ecological disasters. Our time is increasingly given up to our devices, our relationships dictated and mediated by multinational conglomerates who seek not to connect people, but to profit from them.

None of this is to say that technology is always harmful to social engagement, but that it simply cannot replace the deep emotional connection that is an undeniable human need. The internet can be a great tool of communication and information, but it cannot provide transformative and nurturing relationships – those are found in physical spaces, in doing things with other people in real life.

Our innate human desires for connection, to be understood, to be a part of something larger than ourselves are all exploited by profit motivated algorithms. Our experiences and personalities transform into brands to be bought and sold in the attention economy. People shape their behaviors and identities to be desirable on the personality market. In this way, social media helps to transform yet another aspect of our lives – our sociality, our relationships, our very sense of self – into just another commodity. Communal belonging and social connection are necessary for emotional health and mental stability. The logic of capital replaces embodied relationships that reinforce social cohesion with egoic worship of identity mediated by an algorithm of profit extraction. A digitized reward system that incentivizes self-aggrandizement results in loneliness, isolation, and “mental health” issues. Emptiness and alienation only deepen.

Psychosis of the Status Quo

Accepting the assumptions of capitalist ideology and adopting the values of its logic reproduces particular beliefs and behaviors. Adhering to this logic normalizes a disregard for the wellbeing of others and demands a callousness to vast suffering. It could be said that the logic of capital creates a distorted, perverse, even psychopathic culture. Stepping over dying people on a daily commute or passively scrolling through images of genocidal violence among curated ads and cat photos are standard activities in our society. This is psychologically tormenting to anyone with a functioning heart. It does something to the human spirit, or psyche, or soul, to live in a social environment so disconnected from basic dignity.

We are all, in one way or another, complicit in the violence that is inextricable from a capitalist society. Forced to adhere to the logic of capital, we become dissociated from the world, from life itself – hypnotized by ideology and conditioned to normalize grave atrocities. According to Richard Gilman-Opalsky, the result is a population which

will go along with the most insane social relations, will view generalized insanity as perfectly sane and will identify a sick state of affairs as healthy and good. All this is cultivated in capitalist society. It becomes cemented as a psychological disposition.⁸

A society dominated by the logic of capital rewards (and therefore reproduces) the sorts of individual behaviors and social policies that best conform to and perpetuate its logic. “Ideology and psychology are inseparable.”¹ The behaviors that are rewarded and incentivized under capitalism are anti-social, destructive – indeed, psychotic. ⁶ Those who “make it” in this society, who are considered successful in capitalist terms, are those most equipped, able, and willing to engage in the structural violence that is incentivized by the logic of capital. The rest of us are given no choice but to comply to this logic, face the punishment of the carceral system which protects it, or starve.

Throughout history and into the modern day, it has been adherence to the status quo that has perpetuated the most egregious violence the world has ever known. People behaving reasonably according to the logics and ideologies of their social context have carried out genocide, chattel slavery, and the bombing of innocent people en masse. This “reasonable” behavior continues today. It is insane to continue to extract fossil fuels from the earth when we know that doing so is a threat to life on earth. To waste literal tons of food everyday while people starve down the street or across the globe is fundamentally anti-social behavior. To justify the bombing of hospitals or the deaths of thousands of children as “collateral damage” is to give up your humanity. Michael Parenti says these are not

irrational departures from a rational system. It’s not that this is an irrational or ‘crazy’ time. It’s the converse. They are the rational outcomes of a basically amoral and irrational system. When you’ve got that kind of system, this is what you’re going to get.¹⁴

It’s not that members of the ruling class set out to perpetuate destruction and violence for the sake of it. They simply aim make as much money as possible at whatever cost, because they are materially and socially incentivized to do so. Destruction and violence are simply means by which to achieve these ends.

The top brass at a fast-food corporation, for example, aren’t twisting their mustaches while hatching diabolical plans to poison the population. Rather, the increasing rates of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity are not a consideration in their business model, which is pursuing the highest possible profit margin. The wealthy and powerful ruling class “elites” are not evil, per se. They simply act in accordance with capital’s logic. Those with their hands on the levers of power aren’t necessarily interested in killing you, they just don’t care if you die.

These complex and brutal structural injustices are not merely pernicious plots, they are the result of the capitalist paradigm of social relationships and material incentive structures. Matt Christman points out that we refuse to

talk about or point to those structures, (instead we) only talk about a culture that results from those relations, and then reverse engineer it – as if it is the culture that is making these things happen, (rather than) the structures that created the culture.⁶

Who is a bigger threat to society: the populations who crowd the prisons, or the energy companies who pollute the air, poison the water, and degrade the soil? Who is more likely to be responsible for the deaths of large numbers of people: the “mentally ill and deeply disturbed” lone gunman, or the weapons manufacturers who build 2,000 pound bombs? Who is violent and dangerous: the houseless person experiencing a manic episode in the town square, or the powerful media figures who espouse xenophobic and racist rhetoric?

While it is obvious that poverty and structural oppression can cause or exacerbate psycho-emotional distress, it is also abundantly clear that power, “success”, or material wealth do not guarantee mental or emotional stability. Wealthy people are just as likely to struggle with addiction, be prescribed medication for depression, or suffer childhood abuse. Charles Eisenstein states that while the poor may suffer through sheer deprivation,

the rich suffer poverty of another kind: lack of community, connection, meaning, and intimacy, which can cause severe psychological stress even in conditions of material plenty.¹⁶

Billionaires live in an entirely different material and social reality than the rest of us, with inconceivably disproportionate access to wealth and power which essentially disconnects them from the basic framework the rest of us exist in. The hyper-wealthy and politically powerful, while they enjoy material comfort, have forgone their own humanity to a degree that could be described as a distinct sort of psychosis.

To be so captured by delusion that you are able to justify such extreme exploitation occurring on your behalf results in a moral and mental perversion which cannot be easily articulated. This is not to attribute some supernatural villainhood to the powerful, but rather to articulate how the pernicious ideologies of a capitalist society can so thoroughly contradict basic dignity, and yet somehow be culturally justified and fully naturalized. The logic of capital is so antithetical to what it means to be human that even those who benefit from this social arrangement suffer from such psychological depravity and social isolation to such a point “that they become incapable of love.”⁸

Conclusion

From day-to-day activities to our conceptualization of life’s purpose, everything is dictated by the logic of capital. People are forced to take part in alienating activities in order to survive. What we do with our brief time on earth is determined by social forces that have no regard for our health or happiness. Deep entrenchment of this logic persuades us to accept it as natural. Living according to the logic of capital requires either numbness through consumption or ideological manipulation. Working people, estranged from autonomy or power, struggle through life at the mercy of political and economic forces beyond their power to effect or control, essentially running along a track predetermined by the logic of capital. “Disempowerment is at the heart of poor health – mental, physical, and emotional.”¹ The maddening social conditions of capitalism make psycho-emotional instability all but inevitable.

In a sense, it is easier to accept that we are “mentally ill” or suffering from complex biochemical imbalances than it is to face the reality of the violent and oppressive conditions of our world. It is discomforting to acknowledge how much injustice we have normalized, how internalized the oppressive norms of a capitalist society have become. Without this recognition, though, we fail to properly address the conditions which oppress us all, and instead we blame ourselves or each other for our collective misery.

The current mental health epidemic is an indication of how unnatural and harmful the logic of capital is. Our collective distress is a signifier that we are not living how we should be. Capitalist logic and the high degree of alienation it causes is creating social, emotional, and mental collapse. Our inability to conform to its demands is a sign not of our failure, but a sign of our humanity. Our mind’s rejection of these logics provides evidence of their antagonism to all it means to be human – biologically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. “The meaning we give to our emotional responses are of central importance. The perception of radical interconnectedness … helps us recognize how healthy a reaction this distress is.”²² You are not wrong to be feeling depressed or anxious. Given these conditions, it would be weird not to be depressed and anxious.

Diagnosis can be flattening, leading people struggling with their psycho-emotional health away from any further investigation into the cause of their distress. “Why do I think/feel/behave this way? Because I have ‘mental illness’” – end of story. This reductionism reinforces the falsehood that a “disorder” is the result of individual malfunction and can be fully resolved with medication or lifestyle changes.

Feel sad about having no meaningful control over the conditions of your life? Take this pill! Find the endless cycle of unfulfilling work and mind numbing consumption to lack meaning? Time to get into therapy and “do the work.” Have no close friends or supportive community? Maybe a $700 yoga retreat will help.

This is not to say that diagnosis is necessarily pacifying. Sometimes a diagnosis can be a catalyst to pull a person out of helplessness and despair and into a supportive community of people with similar experiences. Medication can help avoid constant mental torment.{1} Any means by which someone can come out of unbearable despair or debilitating psychosis is a positive in both the individual and social sense.

There is nothing inherently wrong with individual diagnosis if that diagnosis leads to a larger understanding of all the factors that contribute to our psycho-emotional health — including the social and structural ones. Rosi Braidotti writes,

A certain amount of pain, the knowledge about vulnerability and pain is actually useful. It forces one to think about the actual material conditions of being interconnected and thus being in the world.”²¹

A collective understanding that all people are affected by the logic of capital can free us from the idea that there is something “wrong” with us as individuals.

Without a wider analysis of capitalist social arrangements, diagnosis can easily lead a person struggling with their psycho-emotional health down a path of defeated passivity or a resigned victimhood which mutates into a sort of cultural signifier. Trauma can become something around which we build our entire identity. With a profound human need to be seen and understood gone unfulfilled by healthy, embodied relationships, identification with diagnosis or the reification of traumatic experience is an attempt to feel a sense of belonging or shared identity. Trauma can be essentialized as a catch-all explanation for the suffering that people experience. Neurodivergence can become fetishized, particularly among young people, serving as a sort of symbol of disenfranchised authenticity. For a generation already so disaffected by the social landscape and grappling with justifiable despair about the future they’ve inherited, there are consequences to internalizing the idea of being irreparably damaged, broken people who cannot make basic positive changes for their lives, much less come together in the collective pursuit of meaningful social change.

If psycho-emotional health is depoliticized and dysfunction is attributed solely to the peculiarities of the individual, the logic of capital is taken for granted as natural and unchangeable, which it is not. Antidepressants are fine, but a society that did not drive so many people into such unmanageable despair would be better. Therapeutic inquiry may give us insight into personalized nuances of why we are the way we are as individuals, but it alone does not adequately confront social problems. Tools for emotional regulation may help us get through the day and build healthier relationships, but they are not a solution to institutional oppression. A disciplined mindfulness meditation practice can help us to become happier and more engaged people. We cannot uproot structural injustice if we are in a state of constant distress. However, let’s acknowledge that we need more than individuated self-care routines to put an end to the unjust conditions which create mass suffering.

While overcoming personal emotional dysregulation should not serve to pacify our righteous outrage, working towards transformation on the personal level does not necessarily counteract or negate the struggle for radical systematic change. These transformations can and must and do work alongside each other, inform each other, strengthen each other. This process “allows us to share and evaluate our subjective experience in solidarity with others. The structures that will enable this are not therapeutic, but political.”² Donald Rothberg writes,

Examining concerns about care for oneself and others, we may see more clearly how the roots of suffering, as well as the possible responses to such suffering are indeed personal, but also relational and collective.¹⁰

With social needs met, and worldviews freed from the distortions of the logic of capital, the types of mental illnesses now so prevalent would be far less so. It is not a radical demand or utopian dream to insist on a way of organizing society which does not require vast systematic violence and exploitation, which does not operate according to the profit motive, which does not make us feel so crazy.

Our feelings of fear, grief, rage, and panic are fully justified and appropriate, given the capitalist world we’re all subjected to. Individuating these feelings denies an opportunity for a sort of collective recognition of the alienation we all experience. This kind of solidarity is a prerequisite for the profound changes necessary for both personal well-being and collective social change. Losing sight of the structural causes of our mental and emotional dis-ease means a failure to recognize our mutual enemy – the logic of capital – and to unite in struggle against that logic.

Addendum: Radical Madness

Any attempt to internalize, normalize, rationalize, or adapt to the world we live will drive you to delusion, detachment, or madness. It is impossible to adhere to “normalcy” in this society, and also be healthy, or well according to our evolutionary needs and hard-wired social expectations. In the same breath, we are disempowered to do anything differently either by material constraints, emotional capacity, or fear of carceral punishment.

To believe in and embody values like compassion and love for humanity, or an insistence on justice and environmental sustainability leads a person to madness, either in action or affectation. In this way, abnormality can be subversive. To “go mad” can be a sort of rebellion against a hegemonic structure which is so blatantly destructive and exploitative.

A rejection of normalcy in such a violent society doesn’t equate to a romanticization of madness. Certainly, dealing with outbursts of delusion, struggling with intrusive thoughts, or experiencing mental breaks can have detrimental effects on one’s life. That being said, La Marr Jurelle Bruce in his text How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind shines a light on the ways certain kinds of madness might be harnessed “as stimulus for radical thought and action.”⁷ Madness can be an expression of our civilization’s grave injustices. This madness has the potential to be harnessed towards movements of liberation.

Behaving “reasonably” in a capitalist society perpetuates and complies with a logic that is antithetical to all that is beautiful, all that makes life worth living. It is time, then, to be unreasonable.

Let the [capitalists] find us confusing, or better, totally incomprehensible. If the sense and sensibility of capital is what we oppose, let us become capital’s nonsense.⁷

A refusal of the logic of capital means embodying beliefs which are antagonistic to normalcy. A life dedicated to the rejection of the profit motive in favor of radical, loving connection and pro-social values requires we break from the symbolic order. Therefore “madness might be desirable amid a corrupt world order that deems itself reasonable.”⁷

It takes a kind of crazy faith to believe in a future which might be less violent & exploitative, with social conditions more conducive to material and emotional wellbeing. The complex and deep-seated matrix of vast exploitation, crumbling social structures, political instability and existential ecological threats which result from the hegemonic capitalist ideology demands a total overthrow of normalcy — a reorientation of what we deem “crazy.”

“The fact is, madness has a spiritual component and touches on the same ontological problems as spirituality, for both are for going out of mind”⁵ Recognition and acceptance of the undeniable interconnectedness of all life drives us to a spiritual awareness which does not placate the ego’s incessant need to categorize, differentiate, and make sense of everything.

Liberation from normality may entail a sort of collective “ego-death” – an experience which spiritual seekers describe as dissolving the boundaries of separation to reveal the interconnectedness of all life. “True compassion is ruthless, from the ego’s point of view, because it does not consider the ego’s drive to maintain itself.”¹¹ A collective overcoming of the self — this is the divine madness.

To see beyond social constructs of normalcy and madness, to deny our conditioning and reject the logic of capital completely, to deny the distinction between mine and thine — between self and other — to embrace the insubstantial and impermanent nature of social and mental paradigms is to call upon a madness that is liberating.

References

{1} Author’s note: a prescription to Lexapro was definitely a factor in helping me to get out of a cycle of self-destructive thoughts and behaviors, and finally addressing my alcoholism