vagaybond:

queeranarchism:

chelonianmobile:

queeranarchism:

realphilosophytube:

rotisseries:

Like most people don’t like to admit this, but one of the reasons a lot of us have so many mental health issues is because we live in a world that has basically become untenable. People can’t afford basic necessities, let alone to cultivate their interests or take breaks and rest or do any of the things necessary for good mental health. People my age are wracked with debt, working at jobs they hate or studying topics they hate, living in a shitty apartment with five roommates. We live in a world that’s very hard to be healthy in. So while yeah, a lot of people obviously do have mental illnesses that would need medication no matter what, they are greatly exacerbated by these issues, and a lot of people have basically just been thrust into an eternal situational depression. So if that doesn’t change, medication is just a band-aid. 

the philosopher Frantz Fanon resigned from his job as a psychiatrist in 1956 during the Algerian War for Independence because he reasoned there was just no point making Algerian freedom fighters well again if they were going to walk out into the same world where they’d be tortured, shot, bombed, and sent right back again, or else making French people well enough to do the torturing. He walked out and joined the revolutionaries

We need that band-aid though, we can’t change the world if our own lives are not worth living. We need space and time and focus on mental health among revolutionaries and we need revolutionary care takers that break through oppressive doctor-patient relationships and commit themselves to facilitating the healing of their comrades on a nonhierarchial nonstigmatizing basis.

But is this new? Are we only just now developing mental illnesses because the world is shit and so many of us are trapped, or are we only just recognising them? Has mental illness been with us since we as a species got smart enough to realise how shit the world is?

It is neither a matter of ‘all mental illness is caused by the injustices in our world’, nor a matter of ‘all mental illnesses would have happened anyway’‘ nor a matter of ‘every rise in mental illness is because we’re diagnosing more’. It’s all those things at once. 

Some mental illnesses are just being noticed, some will probably always exist but we are more likely to have a bad mental health, more likely to develop mental illness and less likely to recover because we are exploited, poor, stressed, oppressed, working a job we hate, exposed to a violent system that barely considers us human and given no or inadequate mental health care in a mental health care system designed for profit and to contain us, not to help us live good lives.

Just like humans are still diagnosing new physical illnesses and will probably always have bad physical health and physical illnesses, but we are more likely to have a bad health and are more likely to get sick and less likely to recover because we are
exploited, poor, stressed, eating bad food, living in poluted areas, exposed to a
violent system that barely considers us human and given no or
inadequate physical health care, in a physical health care system designed for profit, not to help us live good lives.

It’s not that our species one day got smart and realised that the world was shit, it’s that capitalism is making our world shit and that is very bad for our bodies and very bad for our minds. It’s not a shit world and we do not have ‘shit life syndrome’, it’s capitalism.

More stuff relevant to this topic:

Social Determinants of Health
World Health Organization

“The social determinants of health are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources at global, national and local levels. The social determinants of health are mostly responsible for health inequities – the unfair and avoidable differences in health status seen within and between countries.”

Descendants of Holocaust Survivors Have Altered Stress Hormones 
Scientific American

“

The adaptation makes sense: reducing enzyme activity keeps more free cortisol in the body, which allows the liver and kidneys to maximize stores of glucose and metabolic fuels—an optimal response to prolonged starvation and other threats. The younger the survivors were during World War II, the less of the enzyme they have as adults. This finding echoes the results of many other human epigenetic studies that show that the effects of certain experiences during childhood and adolescence are especially enduring in individuals and sometimes even across generations.”

There is no way to remove the social aspect from these things as an influence. Even our genetics are fundamentally different and adapt to try and accommodate certain social factors which impact our ability to live. Things like food scarcity, not being able to ask for help outright without being shamed for it, constant vigilance, etc. is something that people are easily trained to do and it takes a lot to rewire that as being a necessity. 

It’s hard to get healthy when your environment is not conducive to that, and it requires disproportionate effort to change your circumstance to a better environment so that you can rewire yourself to learn to take it easy in some situations. Too often there are things beyond our control where we are at the mercy of people who have the energy and power to change things. 

And with intergenerational trauma, it will take generations for our genetics to heal even if there were no ongoing oppressions towards certain groups of people.

The point is not to say that illness would or wouldn’t exist with or without certain social factors, because you cannot remove that. No person is without social influence (who could be healthy without it). 

But that there are serious disparities and inequalities in health, and we need to change things on a greater scale just as much as individually.