Bipolar disorder is the mental illness proper to capitalism’s interior

Evidence

Marazzi is researching the link between the increase in bi-polar disorder and post-Fordism and, if, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, schizophrenia is the condition that marks the outer edges of capitalism, then bi-polar disorder is the mental illness proper to the ‘interior’ of capitalism. With its ceaseless boom and bust cycles, capitalism is itself fundamentally and irreducibly bi-polar, periodically lurching between hyped-up mania (the irrational exuberance of ‘bubble thinking’) and depressive come-down. (The term ‘economic depression’ is no accident, of course). To a degree unprecedented in any other social system, capitalism both feeds on and reproduces the moods of populations. Without delirium and confidence, capital could not function. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 75

Marazzi is researching the link between the increase in bi-polar disorder and post-Fordism and, if, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, schizophrenia is the condition that marks the outer edges of capitalism, then bi-polar disorder is the mental illness proper to the ‘interior’ of capitalism. With its ceaseless boom and bust cycles, capitalism is itself fundamentally and irreducibly bi-polar, periodically lurching between hyped-up mania (the irrational exuberance of ‘bubble thinking’) and depressive come-down. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 75

Categorization

• XREF: This builds on chapter 5’s depression-as-conditioned-by-late-capitalism thread from the book so far, giving the mood-system link a diagnostic label. — connects to: Biologizing mental illness conveniently depoliticizes its social causes — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 82; Post-Fordist capitalism both depends on and destroys the family — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 70; Capitalism is structurally bipolar, feeding on population mood cycles — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1409 (+6 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 75

Related

• Capitalism’s boom-bust cycles mirror and produce bipolar disorder in populations (similarity 0.93)
• Capitalism is structurally bipolar, feeding on population mood cycles (similarity 0.89)
• Psychiatric disorder rose with industrial capitalism’s onset around 1750 (similarity 0.86)
• Capitalism structurally requires collective mood swings to function (similarity 0.85)
• Biologizing mental illness conveniently depoliticizes its social causes (similarity 0.79)
• Biochemical explanations of mental illness serve capitalism by depoliticizing suffering (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Capitalism is structurally bipolar, feeding on population mood cycles #expands (0.95) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1409
• Capitalism is constitutive crisis, so depression and unemployment do not threaten it. #corroborates (0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 580
• Industrial capitalism both produces inattention and pathologizes it #expands (0.78) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 61
• Neoliberal policy privatised stress into individual mental illness #qualifies (0.72) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1601
• Psychiatric disorder rose with industrial capitalism’s onset around 1750 #qualifies (0.72)