Bruce Levine questions the "medical model" of mental illness--does that approach really help people with their difficulties or does it work to the benefit of those who control society?
While researchers have not linked any psychiatric condition to neurobiological variables, there are many links between these conditions and socioeconomic variables. Results from a 2013 national survey, issued by the U.S. government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), provide extensive evidence that unemployment, poverty, and involvement in the criminal justice system are highly associated with depression and suicidality.
Moreover, in the late 1990s, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study revealed a powerful relationship between childhood trauma (including physical and emotional abuse) with later adult emotional difficulties and behavioral disturbances. An alienating and dehumanizing society such as ours that creates extensive anxiety, powerlessness, resentment, and rage is a society that creates adults who, in their interactions with children, have little frustration tolerance; and this lack of frustration tolerance makes abuse and trauma of children more likely—resulting in the adverse childhood experiences that create later adult emotional difficulties and behavioral disturbances.
The ruling class could not care less whether psychiatric treatment consists of bloodletting, lobotomy, electroshock, SSRI antidepressants, or psychedelic microdosing. As long as the "ruling idea" of society is that our emotional difficulties and behavioral disturbances are caused by our medical defects, this keeps us diverted from just how much shit we have to eat in order to survive and how extraordinary our good luck need be for us to find joy.
As Marx stated, "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas," and you would have to be an especially stupid member of the ruling class not to see the value of the "ruling idea" that emotional suffering and behavioral disturbances are the result of medical individual defects—and not the result of a society that is a good deal for the ruling class but is alienating and traumatizing for many of the rest of us.
