Why do we have a mental health crisis?

I ended yesterday’s post, on the West’s economic decline, by speaking of a rapidly growing constituency, obliged by a once progressive capitalism ¹ to sell its labour but now increasingly unable – thanks to manufacturing having gone south, and to automations which in a political economy serving the many rather than the few would be a blessing ² – to find buyers for it. So huge a slice of society rendered economically superfluous is without precedent.

This is the elephant in the room, ignored by all mainstream parties and media. In that denial lies a problem more serious than the thing denied. It would still be possible – painful but possible, and bringing with it the seeds of a better world – to face into and adapt to the end of Western supremacy. But because we do not live under democratic rule, only hollowed out mockeries of it, and are not informed by truly independent media, the elephant continues to be ignored. One consequence being soaring levels of mental illness.

That may sound reductive. Mental illness – my mother had many psychotic bouts before taking her own life – likely has multiple drivers. But we have reason to suppose a society premised on lies, half truths, denials and distortions – for a metonym look no further than the normalisation of these things through advertising ³ – to be a sick society. To which, as many have said – some from within the mental health professions – madness is a rational response.

Writing today under the header, Happy New Year; Our Society Is Every Bit As Diseased As You Suspect It Is, Caitlin Johnstone begins:

Everyone kind of knows our society is profoundly sick. You can sense it. There are raging disagreements about what exactly it is that’s wrong, but everyone can feel that something freakish and unnatural is happening here.

Some say we don’t have enough religion, others that we have too much. Some say half the country has the wrong ideology, others that there are too many trans people or immigrants. Some say humanity is innately rotten, others that society is enslaved by Jews or Freemasons or neo-Marxist technocrats.

What we can pretty much all agree is that something is very wrong.

It’s hard to nail down because every part is designed to be hidden. We are ruled by unelected plutocrats and empire managers who actively avoid being recognized as our rulers. These oligarchs work continuously to manipulate our minds by propaganda disguised to look like news from trustworthy sources. This places ideas in our heads we are tricked into believing we came up with on our own. ⁴

These tricks work because they hook onto egoic tendencies within our psyches whose nature we are largely unconscious of.

This all works together to manufacture consent for a system which does not serve the interests of ordinary human beings, and most of it is hidden from immediate view. We find ourselves in a mind-controlled dystopia where we think, speak, vote, work, shop, spend and behave in more or less exactly the ways the rich and powerful want us to, all while believing we are free — because the mechanisms of control are hidden from us.

Too conspiracist? As touched on in footnote 5 yesterday, for the most part the mechanisms of control Caitlin refers to are self perpetuating. We needn’t assume conscious mendacity; simply self-serving credulity. Ruling class conspiracies do occur, yes, but as a rule only in extremis. For the most part the matrix runs itself.

With that thought in mind, and taking my two opening paragraphs as overarching context, let me offer the thoughts of a political economist I cite frequently but always with a caveat. Richard Murphy – in no particular order fenland bird watcher, professor, author of many a decent piece in liberal media, accountant, modern monetary theorist, tax specialist, Quaker, empire ingenue – manages to irk and please me in more or less equal measure. His worldview may blind him to the nature of imperialism – I recommend reading him alongside men and women, like Michael Hudson, Radhika Desai and Richard Wolff, with a complementary but broader perspective – yet within its confines the man speaks powerful truths. The most important of which, its submersion further evidence of the social sickness Caitlin speaks of, is that if economic ‘science’ does not place human health and happiness at the heart of its concerns, what exactly is the point of it?

Two days after Christmas, a post on his Funding the Future blogsite bore the header, Why do we have a mental health crisis? Professor Murphy begins:

Why do we have a mental health crisis in this country and, let’s be honest, around the world?

The Financial Times ran a series on mental health in the week before Christmas and asked people why they thought there was such a crisis and the answer came back, “There’s too much social media.”

Talk about missing the point. That was spectacularly wrong.

And we do have a mental health crisis. The number of young people needing help for mental ill health has risen dramatically, maybe by 50 per cent, since the time of the Covid crisis. The number of older people now likely to be suffering some form of mental ill health at any time is up to 1 in 4 of the population. This is serious stuff.

Ten per cent of young people who should be in work, education or training aren’t because they can’t face any of those things. This is people dropping out of society because of mental ill health.

So what is going on here? I want to talk about something that I discussed with someone quite recently. We were talking about quite young children who have anxiety, and anxiety is a major problem amongst children, even in primary schools now.

And what would [UK Health Secretary] Wes Streeting’s answer to that be, we wondered? If he had a perfect world, what would he provide? A counsellor in every primary school.

What would the counsellor do? Sit with the child for an hour, and then say, “this child has an anxiety disorder.” So now they have a diagnosis. Except it isn’t a diagnosis, is it? It’s a description. Nothing changed because the counsellor told the child they have anxiety. All they’ve given is a label to what the child already knew. They were frightened.

And at this point we have a choice. We either say the child shouldn’t be frightened of the world because the world is benevolent, or we look at the world and say the child should be frightened of the world because it is malevolent. I really do think that the choice is now as binary as that.

And I’m going to go with the choice neoliberal economics says I should make. I should assume the child is rational. Because remember, neoliberal economics assumes everyone is rational.

And if the child who fears the world is rational, and that fear is well placed, then the world they – and their parents and the people they know – live in is indeed malevolent. It is out to harm them. And let’s be clear. The evidence bears them out …

Read the full piece, it isn’t long …

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1. The historically progressive role of industrial capitalism in overcoming blocks to wealth creation posed by monopolies, unearned and non productive, on land and labour under feudalism and slavery is explored in Why read Michael Hudson?
2. Baby boomers like me, Beveridge escapees who left the working class via the education ladder, will likely recall ‘seventies tracts on the need to prepare for leisure. We must re-educate ourselves, they told us, to find meaning and fulfilment in a world where work has been cancelled by automation. This will be a good thing, they said, because there’d be no loss of affluence. On the contrary; greater productivity would make us all rich. They took our capitalist world to be technology driven. It’s profit driven, stupid!
3. I find another such metonym in our creepingly privatised public sector. Whether health or education, social services or criminal justice, the story is cognitive dissonance – mentally toxic in the absence of ameliorative agency – writ large. It’s bad enough that services are overstretched, underfunded and ‘monetised’. Worse though is the systematic denial that these things do not impact on (a) the “customer experience”, (b) the sanity of deliverers assured by their managers’ managers that “core values” remain unchanged.
4. Five years ago I devoted a post to how “ideas we are tricked into believing we came up with on our own”  link political propaganda to its twin sister, advertising. See, It’s a rum do and no mistake.