The Soviet system used psychiatry as a weapon by diagnosing political opponents as mentally ill in order to confine them as patients instead of trying them in court. Anyone who challenged the state such as dissidents, writers, would-be emigrants, religious believers, or human rights activists could be branded with fabricated disorders like sluggish schizophrenia. This turned normal political disagreement into supposed medical pathology and allowed the state to present dissent as insanity.
Once labeled in this way, people were placed in psychiatric hospitals where they could be held for long periods without legal protections. Harsh treatments were often used to break their resolve. The collaboration between state security organs and compliant psychiatrists created a system where political imprisonment was disguised as medical care, letting the Soviet regime suppress opposition while pretending it was addressing illness rather than silencing critics.
Kinda how it works in our late stage capitalist societies to be honest, except that it’s collective pressure/belief instead of state-imposed.
You have trouble accepting the shitty state the world is in? You don’t want to be exploited and end the month with not enough to pay your rent? You’re fed up with that human crushing machine that keeps on destroying the planet because There Is No Alternative?
Well, you should consult you might be a tiny bit depressed. Take antidepressants and shut the fuck up. Learn to see and focus on the beauty in life and the little things instead. Take small hobbies, a lover or a cat. How you deal with all of that is your own individual problem.
Does it seem so normal that you really can’t see any other way? Congratulations, you are well programmed. Those problems aren’t to be delt with on an individual level, they are political.
In the past, most people formed unions and parties and did strikes, political rallys, protested and burned the landowners’ manors as a way to process those kind of feelings.
France - April to August 1906 - Fressenneville - The locksmiths’ strike: The town square and the castle burned down (Begun in April 1906, this movement lasted 5 months. The workers at the Riquier locksmiths’ factory wanted employers’ organizations to respect union rights. The strike reached a rare level of violence in the face of the employers’ intransigence and repression. The burning of Édouard Riquier’s castle was a prime example.)
Stoicism has become commoditized as a way to convince people that their lot in life is just their attitude, and the more they put their shoulder to the wheel to produce for the top of the pyramid, the more it works out for them, rather than questioning the wheel. The hustle and grind culture is just as much the goal of something like the heritage foundation as “deport the brown people.”
Which is weird because stoicism evolved out of cynicism and inherited it’s philosophical hatred of authority at least historically.
see also that nihilism’s origins were not in destructive apathy as the term is frequently used to mean though, but instead to mean that if someone finds themselves not believing in any pre-existing meaning they have the power to assign their owo meaning to life. we exist in a world that always tells us to find our purpose in life. nihilism tells us to stop waiting for meaning to find us and instead to determine one for ourselves
One must imagine sisyphuwus happy
Fucking hilarious. twanx
As someone who works as a therapist in the mental health system in America, this is not at all how it works.
It’s not what you are doing. It is how it has evolved though.
Apart from fringe activist groups, who thinks of politics as something they have to make happen on a daily basis?
The political way to process through the various clashing forces that make our societies has almost totally given way to the individualized injunction of dealing with the consequences. It’s in the zeitgeist, all the injunction to self-care, self-improvement and so on. If you are centered on yourself, you won’t priorize the collective.
And saying that doesn’t negate the usefulness of psychology and therapy work at the individual level. Nor does it imply a big conspiracy or something of the sort.
Lots of people actually. The comparison you’re making between many people being generally uninterested in politics vs mental illness being criminalized by the state is, frankly, ridiculous.
You seem to have misinterpreted my point.
It’s not about people being uninterested in politics, it’s about most people losing the ability to even see politics as something else than some topic you could be interested in or not. To feel like they might be able to have any kind of meaningful effect on their environment. And it’s not about mental illness being criminalized it’s about mental illness being used (conscientiously or not) as a tool to fight against dissent.
And why would it be ridiculous? Culturally enforced and internalized rules are way stronger than the ones enforced by coercion. I agree that it’s worse on a personal level to risk being arrested for a thought crime and institutionalized or sent into some camp as a result of it. But as a society it’s less effective and pernicious than the collective apathy and political impotence we’re swimming in.
Under the Soviet union people saw or knew other disappeared. They knew something was happening and that they’d better shut up about it. When you were caught as an enemy of the state or of the ideology, you at least had a clear indication of what outside force is at work against you. Psychologically it’s very different.
Nowadays apart for the few percents that are actually politically active (and even some if not most of those are not spared on the inside), people feel that it’s their fault if they don’t fit in, they feel or are told by the ambient noise that they have to fix themselves, that the problem is them. That there is a disconnect from reality, from the world. The classical “what is wrong?”. And to be happy, to fix that, all they have is to consume, focus on themselves, find themselves, improve, or just look like they’re doing that. Like rats taking electrical discharge after discharge with no way to get out or even understand what’s causing it in sight.