Depression is now the most-treated condition in Britain’s NHS
Evidence
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. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 42
Categorization
- QUESTION: Check the actual current NHS prevalence ranking for depression — this claim may date from the late 2000s.
- XREF: Commonness-as-the-issue echoes the noise research: chronic ambient distress normalized to the point no one notices the pathology. — connects to: Biologizing mental illness conveniently depoliticizes its social causes — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 82