Every Tuesday, The duty offers a space to the creators of a periodical. This week, we offer you a text published in the New Notebooks of Socialismnumber 30, published October 24.
Our time is seeing a proliferation of publications and gurus who promise to teach us in three Zoom sessions how to intelligently manage our emotions, prevent burnout, etc. An entire well-being industry has in fact developed over the past forty years.
But, paradoxically, we have perhaps never been further from living in the harmonious way promised. Mental health problems are increasing and diversifying. We are now talking about performance anxiety in young people, and even depression which breaks out in children in primary school. We talk less about other discomforts, which are no less present, such as the way in which women are always forced to control their emotions and their bodies or the microaggressions that racialized people suffer, whether immigrants or not.
The file of the last issue of New Notebooks of Socialism on plural unease therefore wishes to draw attention, as we sound an alarm, to the way in which we are trapped by – and even consent to – an ideological discourse and social representations which constitute the trademark of this neoliberal era, and who demand a total, and above all excessive, commitment to work and studies; who order us to behave autonomously while monitoring us more than ever thanks in particular to the algorithms of digital platforms and various social networks; ultimately, which lead us to devalue ourselves, to always feel below the objective to be achieved even though we give our “110%”.
Two phenomena, sides of the same coin, can account for the extent and influence of the productivist and commercial logic which now colonizes even our privacy.
On the one hand, we see the medicalization of social behaviors progressing, a means of depoliticizing these behaviors and attempting to empty them of their uncontrollable critical substance. Far be it from us to imagine that there would not be mental illnesses, a source of significant suffering, such as depression or bipolarity. Moreover, in reality hardly a surprising paradox, these diseases are no more accepted today than forty years ago, which constitutes at least a sign of the still strong influence of norms and population control.
In recent years, we have fortunately seen the emergence of work in various disciplines, which calls into question the tendency to only consider mental health problems from the angle of pharmacological intervention. We are also witnessing the emergence of collective actions and social movements concerned with mental health such as the Youth and Mental Health Movement and the Mental Health Movement Quebec, which denounce the medicalization of social problems and behaviors, and which demand new intervention approaches.
“Work on yourself”
On the other hand, the psychologization of the social, mentioned in the introduction, has been widely deployed: from psychoanalysis or existential philosophies such as yoga originally, we only retain toolboxes to carry out “work on oneself “. And here we are summoned to know how to manage our stress or our anxiety without dwelling on the social, economic, cultural situations with which mental health is constructed and interacts.
The sociologist Robert Castel had foreseen the drift of psychic practices in this generalized therapy of “normal” people in the name of “the maximization of [leurs] potentialities”. Exit restrictive social norms, work relations and managerial logic, the mental burden of the ever-present double working day for women, the stigmatization of migrants without status, the unemployed, those on social assistance, etc. There are only individual problems left, and it is the individual who bears the burden of achieving the objectives by adopting the “right” behaviors. Psychology is thus put at the service of the “normalization” of human beings, as Eugène Enriquez denounced.
However, we allow ourselves to be trapped, because is it not attractive, this discourse which promises success and the admiration of peers to all those who dare to take risks by becoming a “self-entrepreneur”?
However, the COVID-19 pandemic has once again demonstrated to us across the planet that there are multiple and systemic inequalities, and that we are therefore not equal in the face of the mental burden that the pandemic and confinement have placed on us. We. Through this file on plural ill-being, we wish to stimulate a broader discussion on ways to build a society respectful of well-being, by emphasizing the importance of an intersectional approach to systems of inequalities to understand the impact differentiated from capitalism on the mental health of women, minorities, young people and indigenous communities.
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