The outcry of declaring the contemporary age as the age of a mental health epidemic has been made constantly over the last few decades. While the argument surely has significant substance, the response towards this epidemic has been neither socially informed nor inclusive. The response has been largely the chemico-biologisation of mental health, which entails the conspiracy to individualise the struggles faced by individuals with common identity markers, thereby robbing the element of ‘social’ from such struggles. This reduces the battles that were meant to be fought collectively into personal struggles of individuals.
In the study conducted by Ashish Gupta and Diane Coffey, the data collected and analysed concluded that the Scheduled Castes and the Muslims reported worse mental health than upper-caste Hindus. The further analysis revealed that “merely redistributing wealth, and even helping Scheduled Castes or Muslims get more education, may not close gaps in mental health” and this observation is further explained by the everyday inhuman discrimination that Dalits face, and the same explanation can be extended to minorities, including Muslims, who face the hate propelled by Hindutva forces daily. This indicates the need to understand mental health issues in conjunction with social identities and in the larger social sphere.
Reducing socio-political struggles to personal lives
However, psychiatry emphasises the chemico-biologisation perspective, which extends the reductionist reasoning of explaining behavioural disorders in terms of neurology. Psychology, on the other hand, tends to resolve mental health issues by understanding life history and accessing the subconscious domain of the subject, often viewing and resolving such struggles not as the consequence of the larger structure but rather the individual’s failure. The two most dominant fields of enquiry to understand and address mental health issues thus ignore and undermine the ‘social’ character of mental health.
Reducing the socio-political struggles to the domain of personal lives is not a new phenomenon. The same can be traced back to hundreds of years of commonly held beliefs – the karmic theory to justify the exploitation by the caste system, the religious sanctity of the monarchical and feudal structure or the divine ordinances to follow a demonic custom and many more such examples which usually have a religious character. However, the rampant secularisation and modernisation had severely damaged such reductionist individualising tendencies ascribed to the realm of religion but it survives and revives itself nonetheless. Nevertheless, the war against the collective and the wider prevalence of reductionist individualism can also be credited to the contemporary structure of neoliberalism as well. The very structure which also traces its roots in the great project of modernity.
Mental health and the dominant narrative of individualism
Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history after the disintegration of the USSR to mark the triumph of neoliberalism and to further translate this victory as the inevitability and invincibility of the contemporary economic structure. The estrangement and the bureaucratisation which characterise contemporary times, along with the widespread consumerism, produce a system which puts emphasis on the ‘innate merit’ and ‘hustle’, outrightly not acknowledging the social positionality of an individual. Merit and ‘hustle’ become the obsession of the privileged, the instruments of demarcation and distinction that naturalise the privileges. In such a structure, in the absence of a paradigm aimed at understanding such issues in the context of their social character, individualism becomes a widespread tendency.
Reducing the socio-political struggles to the domain of personal lives is not a new phenomenon. The same can be traced back to hundreds of years of commonly held beliefs – the karmic theory to justify the exploitation by the caste system, the religious sanctity of the monarchical and feudal structure or the divine ordinances to follow a demonic custom and many more such examples which usually have a religious character.
From climate change to the mental health epidemic, everything is challenged at the personal level. Psychiatry and psychology also become the tools of the contemporary structure which ascribes mental health issues as the result of an individual’s inefficiency, the subconscious mind and serotonin levels.
The politics of collectivity are threatened by the individualising tendencies of the neoliberal structure and the realm of the spiritual, which creates an illusion to hide the socio-political character of exploitation and repackage them as personal problems.
Carol Hanisch popularised the slogan “The personal is political” in the 1960s to understand the seemingly personal problems of exploitation of women as a wider pattern across society and to understand the political nature of the same. Every great reform movement and revolution starts with the destruction of such individualising tendencies, which reduces political struggles to banal personal problems. Be it the Ambedkarite movement or the feminist movement, every major movement tends to uncover and expose the socio-political nature of exploitation.
Myths of self-made success and classism
The contemporary structure propagates the belief in the myth of a self-made man and the hustle culture, glorifying the exceptional one-in-a-million stories of hustle while hiding the most prevalent stories of marginalisation. The seeming infallibility of neoliberal structure makes classism a harsh yet invincible truth. Classism does not operate alone; instead, it operates along various other identities – caste, gender, religion and sexuality. The scriptural revelations further maintain the status quo by legitimising the inhuman and unjust experiences by validating the marginalised status based on the identities aforementioned. Even when the realm of the spiritual weakens, the modern structure maintains the identity-blindness via its mechanistic understanding and individualising of such experiences, including the mental distress.
The contemporary structure propagates the belief in the myth of a self-made man and the hustle culture, glorifying the exceptional one-in-a-million stories of hustle while hiding the most prevalent stories of marginalisation.
We have invented the vocabulary to identify and classify mental disorders; however, the understanding of such disorders is limited to the neurological and psychoanalytical sphere. The social character of mental health has been ignored, as Emile Durkheim established almost a century ago. The rich vocabulary of mental health then actively serves medicalisation.
The chemico-biologisation perspective ignores the struggles faced in the realm of socials by individuals, which also includes the struggles based on the individuals’ set of identities. The sole enemy therefore becomes the neurological factors and not the rotten structure that is stained with the inhuman instances of every kind. Class, caste, religion, gender, sexuality and many other identities thus become irrelevant in the larger scheme of mental health discourse. The political thus becomes personal; Carol Hanisch’s slogan then needs to be reclaimed to find the political commonness in the seemingly banal personal issues.
