Capitalism and Insanity: Is there a causal relation?

[RedMaterialist]

US society (of which I am a member,) by popular agreement of the rest of the world, is insane. Guns of almost every description are allowed to be possessed by practically anyone who has the cash to buy them. Murders in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands. Wars based on blatant and transparent lies. Refusal to even admit global warming exists, let alone do anything about it; now on the verge of destroying the world economy, and on and on.

There must be a relation between late stage capitalism and social mental health. Is it a Foucault kind of relationship? Power, sex, and punishment?

I am just wondering.

[Luisrah]

Well, unemployed people, due to the fact that they feel useless because they have no job, have a bigger tendency to get depressed.

And since when capitalism progresses, unemployment rises, more people have a depression, sometimes even suicide (since feeling useless is one of the major contributing factors to suicide)

[argeiphontes]

I might go so far as to say that people require some form of productive labor to be happy. In a hunter-gatherer society or by those Mountain Men (the TV show), survival itself fills this role. They're not alienated from their productive activity. But in capitalism, they are. The recent polls about how masses of people hate their jobs and a large portion even work to actively sabotage them speaks to alienation. That's not going to be good for mental health, not a good influence at least, even if it doesn't cause mental illness in and of itself. (Though I think it does.)

edit: Treatments for mental illness in capitalism follow profitability. Patients are drugged up rather than going through some kind of long-term therapy. Insurance doesn't like long-term treatments. So it favors one modality of treatment over another. A great example of science not being value neutral in a capitalist system.

edit2: Or think about retired people. If they have something to energize them, they can still live long and prosper, avoid dementia, etc. It can be physical activity too.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I think there are connections on several different levels.

First is that conditions in capitalism do create stresses on people in different ways than other societies: alienation creates a different kind of insecurity in our lives; inequality also causes stresses; having to conform to the demands of capital and work is maybe one of the biggest unique stresses. These factors can directly be linked to people flipping out; being fired, workplace speed ups, competition among middle class professionals all have been primary causes of shootings, sucicide, and depression... Much like military or school place discipline and pressure.

I think there are indirect pressures too... Feelings of worth or worthlessness, stress of a busy and frustrating life, bing crowded and isolated in cities at the same time. I think probably poverty and economic insecurity causes something like post-traumatic stress for some people.

On another level, I think capitalism probably exposes mental issues that may only really matter in capitalism. Having to sell our labor means that if we can't keep pace, we have to "suck it up" whereas in feudal and other societies, sometimes people with physical, mental, or emotional issues might be taken care of in the family and might contribute as much as they can or in unique ways.

[synthesis]

I really think that mental health is the invisible bigotry of the modern day. It's obviously not comparable to slavery, but I'd argue it's sort of analogous in that in a hundred years or so, our society is going to feel really, really ashamed about how we dealt with it today.

That said, I'm not of the opinion that mental illnesses can be entirely created in a person by conditions; they can certainly be activated and exacerbated by them, of course. I think it's more productive to talk about how a capitalist society ignores mental illnesses than about how it causes it.


In a hunter-gatherer society or by those Mountain Men (the TV show), survival itself fills this role. They're not alienated from their productive activity. But in capitalism, they are. The recent polls about how masses of people hate their jobs and a large portion even work to actively sabotage them speaks to alienation.

One thing I always remember about Ghana is that the people with waged jobs lived in significantly better and more stable conditions than the people who sold food and merchandise on the roadside, who would be considered petit-bourgeois in the Marxian analysis. But the latter group, far more numerous and less secure, were invariably much, much happier and more engaged than the former.

This is just personal experience, of course, and it's definitely not an argument for regression of modes of production; just something that really proved to me how different it is, psychologically speaking, when you spend most of your waking life working and being divorced from the fruits of your labor, as opposed to when you're not.

[Magic Carpets Corp.]

OP is a dumbass. 16,259 homicides occurred in the United States last year. 11,078 firearm homicides. Murders in the hundreds of thousands?