The Market Forces of Mental Health

Many people have needed and received mental health treatment enabling them to overcome serious obstacles to their survival and without such aid some may have met disastrous ends. The regular occurrence of crimes committed by people driven to madness by their mental state under material conditions beyond their capacity to understand or survive is only a most obvious case of how important mental health services are and the tragedies provoked by inability to gain help in dealing with them. But as in every other aspect of market society, where some live comfortably in homes and others live uncomfortably on the street, the downside needs to be considered when, like physical health, mental health comes to depend on the intervention of practitioners in an environment of private profit before public good, the prevailing mindset having it that the second can only happen if the first is realized.

Who needs mental health assistance and how do they get it? Almost all of us might benefit from a supposed objective, specially trained friend to listen to our complaints about life in order to help us overcome what supposedly keeps us from happiness. This never seems to involve social forces but only those in our personal lives in individualist labs in which we are bred, usually families whether genetic or not. Foster homes and adoption are other forms which bring happiness and firm foundations to many but all too often continued social patterns of alienation in keeping with the overall dynamic of individual-ism before social-ism. The political and economically originating conflict that results when we are cut off from a natural inclination to connect with other humans becomes a need to check for what is wrong with “me” that keeps “me” from being whatever it is prevailing social forces based on marketing say “I” should be. Welcome to psychology, an important and quite lucrative industry growing in significance to some of the affluent while, too often and as usual, being denied to those who can’t afford it. In some cases, they might be better off and if only provided with the help they need socially, individual therapeutic shopping might not be necessary at the psycho-neurotic ward, whether at upscale private practitioners, the diminishing outlet malls of public aid, or what’s left of social responsibility.

The lucrative nature of a mental health market cannot be denied; it can be relied on for at least monthly and often weekly purchase of service by consumers. Some serious cases need to be dealt with seriously but far more cases become more serious as supply increases to meet demands which become more expensive and increase debts which must grow in order to keep the supply moving, as with automobiles, weapons, cosmetics, pet food, taco-pizza-burgers, yoga studios or any other products. There are new mental maladies discovered every year, all needing new therapies and pharmaceuticals in the booming drug business, both legal for the affluent and illegal for those with less income. But the most booming market is among those of us taught that almost all problems we suffer that are not totally physical need to be dealt with by therapy of a mental nature, with hardly a question about the material and social conditions which cause most, if not all such mental problems.

Having nightmares, cold sweats, frustrations and angry outbursts possibly based on your experience in the military? Might it be due to being put in situations causing you to murder other humans? Well, we’ll get to that later, if ever; meanwhile, let’s see what’s wrong with you and how we can avoid confronting the despicable degeneracy of mass murders by focusing on your individual weakness in not being able to adjust to bludgeoning, shooting, stabbing, burning, bombing and starving other humans. And by the way, if you capture the people we’ve arranged for you to do all those terrible things to, please remember not to hurt them or you’ll be called a war criminal. Got that? While this may seem an extreme situation, it is the reality of tens of thousands of veterans of war who differ from veterans of the marketplace, the struggle for survival, the economic and other social problems in maintaining a family, only in degree. Is it any wonder that the mental heath business has grown beyond anyone’s conception at its invention when something called the unconscious was discovered and then “monetized” by some “conscious” market entrepreneurs?

This service to many and hindrance to possibly many more now sees to it that children of relatively affluent background are seeing therapists at ever-earlier ages and some continue throughout their lives. The weekly session uncovers many problems of that magical mysterious unconscious but usually without any connection made to the social reality that may well play the biggest role in their creation, as in the case of the extreme example of war veterans. But the rat race marketplace, the need for success and the fear of failure and countless other problems larger than an individual ego are displaced by the I-me-mine nature of material reality, especially among western oriented people who sometimes find themselves pursuing eastern “wisdom” to achieve inner mindful or mindless ability to block out not only their inner pressures but also any idea that there is anything but a stream which they must flow with, in peace, in order to survive. Of course if it’s going over rapids there might be a need to notice but if all goes according to personal therapeutic teachings, they’ll be less likely to even confront such crises. Otherwise, why pay all that money to find peace? Or any other product, for that matter.

When we begin prescribing personal therapy for, say, people suffering panic attacks when their villages are shelled, or who can’t sleep due to grumbling bellies because they have no experience of three meals a day due to the dreadful poverty they live in, we may have reached the bottom of the problem of driving people mad with social policies that they are then convinced are problems of their individual making. But there may be many more problems before we find a solution, one of them being the near hysteria among some groups of mostly affluent people suddenly re-discovering – frequently via personal therapy – that they have been abused in the past and must wreak present vengeance on their abusers. This modern form of righteous indignation that warrants no judgment other than an accusation made to burn the witch, lynch the negro or what becomes a more polite form of the same misguided social policy when it is put in modern language as finally responding to the secrets I have kept about those women, those Negros, and those newly found to be rapists when guilty of gross or piggish behavior then nurtured by lifetimes of therapy which become greater needs for vindication the longer they are discussed, nurtured and prepared for explosion. Excuse me, I'm late for my therapist visit.