Treating youth distress as individual illness rules out systemic political explanation

Evidence

It is not an exaggeration to say that being a teenager in late capitalist Britain is now close to being reclassified as a sickness. This pathologization already forecloses any possibility of politicization. By privatizing these problems – treating them as if they were caused only by chemical imbalances in the individual’s neurology and/or by their family background – any question of social systemic causation is ruled out. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 46

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School’s critique of psychology displacing social norms, and to the pathologization arguments familiar from anti-psychiatry and Mad Studies. — connects to: Medicalizing depression blocks political explanation of its systemic causes — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 46; Neoliberal policy privatised stress into individual mental illness — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1601; Stress has been privatized, reframing systemic dysfunction as individual illness — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 42 (+3 more)

Related

• Medicalizing depression blocks political explanation of its systemic causes (similarity 0.91)
• Stress has been privatized, reframing systemic dysfunction as individual illness (similarity 0.86)
• Capital privatizes stress as illness then profits from treating it (similarity 0.83)
• Capitalist societies socialize stress-producing conditions while privatizing their cost (similarity 0.83)
• Biologizing mental illness conveniently depoliticizes its social causes (similarity 0.80)
• Neoliberal policy privatised stress into individual mental illness (similarity 0.80)
• Post-Fordist restructuring privatised individual workers’ experience of systemic economic stress (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Medicalizing depression blocks political explanation of its systemic causes #corroborates (0.95) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 46
• Stress has been privatized, reframing systemic dysfunction as individual illness #corroborates (0.95) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 42
• Biologizing mental illness conveniently depoliticizes its social causes #corroborates (0.95) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 82
• Neoliberal policy privatised stress into individual mental illness #corroborates (0.92) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1601
• Consciousness-raising framed personal problems as political ones requiring collective action. #corroborates (0.82)
• Enforced obedience converts children’s suffering into psychosomatic illness instead of rebellion #corroborates (0.78) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 522