Case-Study II: Mental Health Treatment in Neoliberal Nation-States

Abstract

Neoliberal ideology has infiltrated mental health practice and now guides the provision of mental health care. As a result, market values like individualism, self-reliance, and consumerism shape what is regarded as a rational, responsible, and “normal” mode of human agency. Mental health and illness are understood in relation to an ability to participate in society as a wage earner and consumer. We begin by discussing how the “disease model” of mental illness both reflects and advances a neoliberal agenda. We then examine how the logic of mental health practice, and its associated rhetoric of “responsibilization” and “resilience,” help to form a neoliberal mode of subjectivity. It does so by encouraging subjects to engage in self-regulation and self-governance, whereby they adjust their own affective framings so as to conform to social demands and shared expectations. This “medicalized,” over-individualized approach to mental health centrally involves commodification, mechanization, coercion, the incentivization of desire, and false consciousness. As a result, people are alienated from their true human needs and find it increasingly difficult to attain genuine mental health. Due to its destructive and deforming impact on patients and practitioners, and in view of the basic true human need for mental health, the social institution of mental health care qualifies as a fundamental example of collective sociopathy.