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I'm pretty certain cultural and social conditioning is a large, if not the entire, part of the problem with poor mental health (and not just poor mental health!
by 50 8y ago
I'm pretty certain cultural and social conditioning is a large, if not the entire, part of the problem with poor mental health (and not just poor mental health!). Take this line from Andrei Tarkovsky's Sculpting in Time: "Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being." This is not something new. The severity of the problem has just heightened because of the information age.
But otherwise, since this topic interests me greatly, I would definitely love to hear why you might think poor mental health may be due to something like culture and politics? Possible solutions?
- elvinyung 8y agoI am not an original thinker. My main reference for this topic has been the cultural theorist Mark Fisher. In Capitalist Realism he not only describes the privatization I mentioned previously, but also introduces two ideas that he ascribes to the neoliberal condition (based on anecdata of young people from his experiences as a professor): * reflexive impotence, in which people know that things are bad and that they can't do anything about it, leading to a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy en masse * depressive hedonia, in which people are depressed, but instead of being unable to seek pleasure, they basically can't do anything except seek pleasure (to consume more, faster, etc.) He also has another book, Ghosts of My Life, in which he talks about how we're essentially collectively "haunted" by the possible futures that failed to materialize. I've yet to read it, but I've heard it's fascinating.
- ak39 8y agoAh, thank you for these two points and the book suggestions! I too am not an original thinker and I often synthesize ideas on this matter incoherently. But how is it that it is not universally accepted that the structure of employment, even in its most compassionate incarnation, is a structure that is designed to humiliate and strip the dignity of the employee? And then we have the modern employment contract that explicitly forbids talent to be shared with other employers, or for allegiance to be enunciated in corporate culture slogans drummed to death as though attempting to wash away the employee's identity. Maybe things are different in different cultures vis-a-vis the structure of employment. Japan for example where Salary Man choose to willingly marry his corporation for a lifetime.
- elvinyung 8y agoI think about this a lot, too -- usually using (slightly-insane) poststructuralist thought as a starting point. For example Deleuze and Guattari have written a lot about basically what I'd like to cheekily call "structure as stricture" -- the idea that the structured systems in our society serve mainly to oppress us and repress our affects, Freud/Oedipus-style [1]. (I'm not an anarchist, but nevertheless this thought is a good starting point.) Japan is an interesting place. I want to think of Japanese corporate employment as basically equivalent to citizenship in other countries. For example they have very little social insurance programs, instead relying on corporations to provide such benefits (社会保険). For better or for worse, in the neoliberal era, this idea of corporate employment as the new citizenship might be being exported overseas. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Oedipus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Oedipus
- emodendroket 8y agoI mean the US also devolves a lot of social welfare handling to employers; most obviously insurance.
- ak39 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fisher_(theorist)#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fisher_(theorist)#Death Fuck! He took his own life. :-(
- elvinyung 8y agoYeah -- this is precisely why this idea of the privatization of mental health is so important, at least in my mind.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]