Depression increasingly gets defined as illness, not difficulty, through biological reframing.

Evidence

The depressed person is indeed frequently ”apathetic,” characterized by ”holding back, stiffening, braking, and suspension of activity.” Nevertheless, ”mental disturbance no longer concerns a person’s difficulties; [it becomes] an illness that cuts a patient off from his aspect as agent.” This redefinition of an ill person as cut off from his possible actions on the cognitive level as well as on the emotional and purposive level corresponds to the biologization or ”rebiologization” of disturbance mentioned above. From such a perspective, therapy consists first and foremost in analyzing the mechanisms blocking transmission of information in the neuronal systems. Antidepressants, in their great diversity, all seek to stimulate neurochemical transmission, with the avowed goal of ”restoring and protecting the plastic capacities of the brain.” But plasticity ought not to be confused, as we will see, with the mere capacity to act. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 162

Categorization

• DEFINE: A key move — the passage anticipates that plasticity means more than capacity-to-act, which is central to the plasticity/flexibility distinction.
• XREF: Connects to how therapeutic rhetoric co-opts neuroscience terms, echoing the wellness-app substitution the reader wants to catch. — connects to: Medicalizing depression blocks political explanation of its systemic causes — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 46; Biochemical explanations of mental illness serve capitalism by depoliticizing suffering — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1408; Much depression has social and political causes, not individual ones. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2129