Depression is reframed as a failure of flexibility, an illness of disaffiliation

Evidence

Depression is merely a form of what another sociologist, Robert Castel, calls ”disaffiliation.” In both cases, it is a question of suffering from exclusion, articulated as so many illnesses of flexibility. The depressed person, like the ”social failure,” evidently suffers from a lack of ”employability” and adaptability. The coincidence between current psychiatric discourse, characterized by a clear tendency toward the ”biologization” of psychical or mental disturbance, and the political discourse of exclusion, which presents the disaffiliated as individuals ”with broken connections,” is striking. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 157

Categorization

• QUESTION: If depression = failed flexibility, then the ‘treatment’ (reconfigure the network, restore plasticity) treats the symptom as an individual adaptability deficit rather than a social exclusion — worth chasing how this biologization legitimizes austerity.
• XREF: connects to: Depression is a philosophical disposition, not merely sadness or a state of mind — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 141; Melancholia is a conscious refusal to adjust while depression is accommodation to decline — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2289; Much depression has social and political causes, not individual ones. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2129 (+1 more)