Skip Navigation
neurodiverse @hexbear.net

Today Neurodivergency, Tomorrow NeuroInsurgency!! - GENERAL MEGATHREAD for Saturday, 16th of January 2021

553 comments
  • "The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRls). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.

    Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?"

    -- Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher

    Rest in Power to a king.

  • I love that every time the minimum wage is discussed CHUDs will throw away their "it's supply and demand bro" angle and state that businesses will fire people and charge more as if it is a given. Love to be a successful capitalist by hiring people I don't need and charging a price below that which would maximize my profits.

553 comments