Links are collected at the end of the post.
Coconuts, get it?
Not a lot of people like today’s photo. We find it mesmerizing.
Hilary Held, a reader who introduced herself to us by introducing us to genre-fluid and avant-garde jazz pianist Matthew Shipp,1 has come up with another gem: Danielle Carr in the New York Times op-ed section on the futility of addressing “mental-health epidemics” without addressing social stressors at scale.2
Some social scientists have a term, “reification,” for the process by which the effects of a political arrangement of power and resources start to seem like objective, inevitable facts about the world. Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one; it’s how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become “social media addiction,” how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a “heat wave” — and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become “inflation.” Examples are not scarce.
For people in power, the reification sleight of hand is very useful because it conveniently abracadabras questions like “Who caused this thing?” and “Who benefits?” out of sight [emphasis ours]. Instead, these symptoms of political struggle and social crisis begin to seem like problems with clear, objective technical solutions — problems best solved by trained experts. In medicine, examples of reification are so abundant that sociologists have a special term for it: “medicalization,” or the process by which something gets framed as primarily a medical problem. Medicalization shifts the terms in which we try to figure out what caused a problem, and what can be done to fix it. Often, it puts the focus on the individual as a biological body, at the expense of factoring in systemic and infrastructural conditions.
Once we begin to ask questions about medicalization, the entire framing of the mental health toll of the Covid crisis — an “epidemic” of mental illness, as various publications have called it, rather than a political crisis with medical effects — begins to seem inadequate.
There’s a clarity of thought throughout the essay that you don’t necessarily see so often on the Times’s op-ed pages, and which is routinely lacking in the paper’s editorial decisions on the news side. What do you do about people who are anxious or depressed or numbed if you’re unwilling to effectively treat the stressors along with the symptoms they produce in the victims of them?
Solving the mental health crisis, then, will require fighting for people to have secure access to things that buffer them from chronic stress: housing, food security, education, child care, job security, the right to organize for more humane workplaces and substantive action on the imminent climate apocalypse.
A fight for mental health waged only on the terms of access to psychiatric care does not only risk bolstering justifications for profiteering invoked by start-ups eager to capitalize on the widespread effects of grief, anxiety and despair. It also risks pathologizing the very emotions we are going to need to harness for their political power to get real solutions.
Obviously this thesis plays to the biases of yr. editors, but it’s presented with a degree of simplicity and expertise and irrefutability that eludes us on the regular. We have felt this; we know what she’s talking about in terms of mental health conditions that generate stress, and stress that generates and exacerbates mental health conditions.
And we know, as do you, dear reader, that the further down the economic and social depths you dwell, the more pervasive and weighty those factors become, and we know, as do you, that our dominant politics and the politicians we plug into it are incapable of devising remedies or even acknowledging the problem.
The latter being one factor behind our enthusiasm for Socialism! We have problems, and neither private equity nor their representatives in Congress will solve them for us.
It’s a beautifully written, uncomplicated and as we said seems to us, irrefutable column. And it’s great when other people do our work for us, and do it better. Thanks, Hilary!3 Thanks, future-Dr. Carr!
Lookit what substack made for us.
The Fresh & Onlys, “Wolf Lie Down”—these guys remind us of several bands we like without sounding especially derivative, mostly, and they’ve been around long enough that some newer bands sound like them; it’s the circle of life, without the carnage, usually. Siskiyou’s “Not Somewhere” caught our eye because one of the tunes on it is called Unreal Erections///Severed Heads. You have to listen to something like that when you come across it; it’s the law. (It turned out to be somewhat anthemic in a folky-ambient kind of way.) James Harman’s “Bonetime” is straight-ahead harmonious blues, and now it’s done and so are we.
And that, comrades, is all we got. Be well, take care.
In my line of work, use of computers is destroying the process and the product. Solution—more computers! Do I understand reification properly?
Was it Rumsfeld who said you have to act with the army you have instead of the one you want, or words to that effect? The same reality is true here, I think. You may not think the governmental people in place can or will do anything about the stressors you point out. On the other hand, you're not going to get the socialists you want in the foreseeable future so you're well advised to fend off those who would make things worse and encourage those who would try to make things better even if not in precisely the way you would prefer.