Capitalist societies socialize stress-producing conditions while privatizing their cost

Evidence

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? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 42

Categorization

• XREF: ‘Privatization of stress’ resonates with the Frankfurt finding that industrial research data served management, not workers. — connects to: Mental illness is captured discontent that points toward a constructive austerity. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 164; Stress has been privatized, reframing systemic dysfunction as individual illness — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 42; Neoliberal policy privatised stress into individual mental illness — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1601 (+8 more)
• SEED: Article angle: the ‘privatized stress’ concept applied to how therapy culture individualizes systemic illness — compare with workplace survey data serving management.

Related

• Capital privatizes stress as illness then profits from treating it (similarity 0.93)
• Stress has been privatized, reframing systemic dysfunction as individual illness (similarity 0.91)
• Neoliberal policy privatised stress into individual mental illness (similarity 0.88)
• Post-Fordist restructuring privatised individual workers’ experience of systemic economic stress (similarity 0.87)
• Treating youth distress as individual illness rules out systemic political explanation (similarity 0.83)
• Workplace stress is social in origin but individualized through diagnosis (similarity 0.83)
• Medicalizing depression blocks political explanation of its systemic causes (similarity 0.82)
• Biologizing mental illness conveniently depoliticizes its social causes (similarity 0.82)
• Neoliberal welfare policy has privatized stress and depoliticized depression (similarity 0.82)
• Mental health problems are captured discontent that should be redirected at Capital (similarity 0.81)
• Neoliberalism converts political antagonisms into individualised medical conditions. (similarity 0.81)
• Treating mental illness as brain chemistry depoliticizes it and serves capitalist interests (similarity 0.80)
• Biochemical explanations of mental illness serve capitalism by depoliticizing suffering (similarity 0.79)
• Neoliberal capitalism exploits the psyche rather than the body as its central productive force (similarity 0.79)
• Capitalism’s boom-bust cycles mirror and produce bipolar disorder in populations (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal policy privatised stress into individual mental illness #exemplifies (0.92) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1601
• Privatizing state services produces bifurcated access to social goods #exemplifies (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1742
• Neoliberal capitalism exploits the psyche rather than the body as its central productive force #expands (0.78) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 63