This New Book Asks Whether Capitalism Really Is Driving Us All Crazy

Most of us really have very little say in the diagnoses we get, even though we all carry a lot of self-knowledge about our bodies and minds. You see the impacts of this a lot when it comes to mental health and neurodivergence: people fighting for years for their autism or ADHD diagnosis, or trying to get an eating disorder diagnosis despite their g

That’s a really exciting prospect to me – the ways that we could all be mad and weird and neurodivergent in a world that didn’t value us according to our exploitability.

Awareness’ is an unambitious political end-goal for a few reasons. Firstly: awareness of what? The information circulated in ‘awareness’ narratives often uncritically props up neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism supports the privatisation of major businesses, cuts to state welfare, and an emphasis on ‘individual responsibility

Micha Frazer-Carroll: When you tell people in casual conversation that you are writing a book on mental health, the first thing they often want to talk about is diagnosis. I think it occupies a really central position in the cultural imagination right now. Lots of people I speak to seem to be coming to a diagnosis as a means of understanding their

That ‘individual responsibility’ idea is present in so many messages from awareness campaigns: the idea that it is our duty to reach out to loved ones and services for help; the suggestion that mental health support should come in the form of a ‘service’ at all; the emphasis on individual tools like therapy, meds, self-help, mindfulness and apps to

In any liberated future, care will be wide-ranging, abundant, flexible, ever-evolving, and tailored to hyperlocal context and also to the individual

Our suffering, our diagnosis and our treatment are far from objective or apolitical. If you are a marginalised person, your experience of all three of these things is likely going to be worse.

To make diagnosis something ‘empowering’, the first step is to completely break it apart and acknowledge all of its potential different and conflicting functions. Diagnosis can give you access to community, or cut you off from community. It can give you access to benefits, or it can bar you from income through employment. It could get you your meds

we should also remember that so much of what we call ‘madness’ or ‘mental illness’ is actually just behaviour that does not lend itself well to the capitalist economic system