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🪵 The Threshold

Depression mirrors capitalist realism, rendering collective problems as personal failures

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tagsja-picks, addendum, deepthinking, xref, seed, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@fisher_k-punk_2018, loc. 2217

4 min read

Depression mirrors capitalist realism, rendering collective problems as personal failures

Evidence

This is a crucial question. The way in which social and political problems are converted into individual pathologies, to be explained via chemical imbalances or family history, neatly sums up so much of what has happened under capitalist realism. It’s what I’ve called the privatisation of stress. Depression has been described as a pathology of responsibility: you feel intensely responsible for the state that you’re in. The excruciating paradox is that, while you feel that only you can get yourself out of depression, the condition consists precisely in your inability to act. There’s more than an analogy with the political hopelessness and fatalism that have characterised capitalist realism. Depression, after all, is a pathology which centrally involves a sense of realism (indeed, there’s a phenomenon called depressive realism): the depressive thinks that they are being realistic, that they have perceived the real state of things, denuded of illusion. This describes the post-utopian tenor of capitalist realism perfectly: other societies had their illusions, their dreams of something beyond capitalism, but we have come to terms with the inevitability of competition and precariousness. Yet depression shows the extent to which people — even during the boom years — could not come to terms with this. With precarity increasing and welfare programmes eroding, it’s not surprising that there should be an increase in depression and anxiety. But this increase in distress has been pathologised, neuroticised and commoditised over the past thirty years. Instead of looking to unions when our workload becomes unbearable, we’re invited to look for a medical solution. Stressed by too many working hours? Take this medication, which will restore the balance of your brain chemistry. Worried about losing your job? Tell me about your mother. This is a major example of the naturalisation process I talked of earlier. What we need is a denaturalisation (and consequent politicisation) of mental illness. I think the formation of a dedicated pressure group could work towards this. We need something like a revival of the Anti-Psychiatry movement of the Sixties and Seventies. Well, not so much a revival as a re-occupation of the terrain that Anti-Psychiatry fought on; you could argue that the receding of Anti-Psychiatry correlates very closely with the rise of capitalist realism. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2217

Categorization

  • ADDENDUM: Directly extends the privatisation-of-stress thesis: social/economic precarity gets converted into individualized medical pathology, trading union action for medication. This feeds a broader essay on how capitalist realism pathologizes and depoliticizes systemic distress.
  • DEEPTHINKING: The claim that depression’s inner logic—pathological realism, intense self-responsibility coupled to paralysis of action—isomorphically models capitalist realism’s political fatalism is a dense, paradigm-shifting frame for reading both mental health and political despair together.
  • XREF: Connects to Fisher’s own capitalist realism thesis and to Byung-Chul Han’s later work on the burnout society and the achievement-subject who internalizes systemic pressure. — connects to: Capitalist realism and depressive realism share a drudgery-based notion of fairness — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1858; Capitalism couples harsh self-blame with a therapeutic myth that individuals can fix everything — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1887; Capitalism’s required realism is essentially a normalized collective depression — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1907 (+10 more)
  • SEED: Angles: ‘Depressive Realism’ as a political epistemology ranking low consciousness; what a revived, re-occupied Anti-Psychiatry movement would fight for under the current mental-health economy.

Broader Connections

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