Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?

—Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Who is to say postpartum depression isn’t a manifestation of our capitalist system?

Rant- tangentially related: I’m not a member of an Indigenous group, but I work in a field where the big push recently is incorporating “traditional ecological knowledge”. Holy shit, the un-deserved patience that Indigenous teachers extend to us crackers is mind boggling. Like we’re slowly using western scientific framework to “discover” knowledge, which has already been cultivated by other peoples over time, peoples that we genocided without mercy, but now that our cultural hegemony has declined so much and we’ve fucked up the balance of the ecosystem so much, we have the gall to finally “acknowledge” other knowledge systems. It even still is empty gestures until something meaningful is done with it. I’ve heard tribal elders talk about the necessity of patience, and they’re seemingly endless fonts of it, because god damn do we never get the point. Like at a recent event, an Indigenous scientist was talking about how everything is about balance, and a PhD asked how we can quantify balance. Like…1) such an effective missing of the point. 2) like fucking look outside idk- you’re a fucking climate scientist surely you’ve observed the world around you. I’m constantly feeling the need to shake and shout at my colleagues, and I’ve not been doing this nearly as long. As patronizing of a tone that crackers always take with Indigenous people, we really are just the shitty teenage nibling who insists they’re an awesome driver after wrapping their car around a tree- maybe one day we’ll be better, but I have a hard time finding faith. Anyway, that’s why I’m not a member of the Sturgeon clan.

really puts the steppe in “I’m the dad that stepped up”

So people give me weird looks when I say things like “everyone should have their kids taken immediately after birth to be raised in the childcare communes”, but when an “anthropologist” says it it’s all right huh