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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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Mental health is inseparable from worldview, so it gets co-opted in various ways to push the dominant ideology and that means a corralling effect under capitalism; if you stand out, it's meant to draw you back in and functioning "appropriately" under its world model.
But that doesn't mean all of the disorders (which are essentially repeating clusters of behavior and cognition brought under a specific label) are made up, or aren't observing real things. It just means that the way those labels get applied and categorized is tainted by the dominant model. A person who has chronic anxiety isn't bothered by this because capitalism, but because they want to stop feeling that way all the time. But capitalism could very well be the cause for them in various ways. But then there are things like ADHD which are shown to be at least partly the brain itself, not just a reaction to the environment. And there is also the transition aspect of things to keep in mind. If capitalism was replaced with fully automated luxury gay space communism tomorrow, there'd still be people acting like disorder categorizations that developed under capitalism and many of them would still be suffering in various ways because the ingrained behaviors and thought processes and belief systems are still there.
i think there's a lot of truth to your post, but this in particular is something i want to challenge because it is a pillar of bourgeois psychiatry.
as dialectical materialists, we know that all things are subject to change. but, out of all of the organs and systems of the human body nothing is as subject to change as the brain. neuroplasticity is backed up by plenty of research and is a scientific fact: if you haven't read norman doidge's "the brain that changes itself" i would highly recommend it, there are several incredible stories.
and so, pointing to the fact that some disorders are associated with physical changes in the brain is not the slam dunk you might think it is. correlation does not equal causation. for example, i was recently researching the neurobiology of those with bipolar disorder, and while there is a lot of variance in how the disorder presents both physiologically and behaviorally, it's commonly accepted that those with bipolar disorder are more likely to have less-developed regions of the brain associated with emotional regulation, and that those regions of the brain are less likely to be as connected to other regions of the brain.
neurons that fire together wire together, but by the same token neurons that don't fire together don't wire together. and so, it is perfectly plausible to suggest the hypothesis that, in the case of bipolar disorder, a lack of emotional regulation skills (especially in early life) leads to a less-developed and interconnected brain, which can then lead to what we call bipolar disorder. this may or may not be true, but it is a hypothesis worth testing. bourgeois psychiatry does not even consider testing this hypothesis, its mechanical materialist framework ignores the fact of neuroplasticity and still treats the brain as immutable, as something primarily derived from DNA, if not entirely. in addition to the fact that the profit motive gives them no material incentive to test such a hypothesis.
like all bourgeois science, i think bourgeois psychiatry is both fundamentally progressive and fundamentally flawed, it's just a matter of piecing which parts are which. i feel like this, the idea that physical changes or abnormalities in the brain are necessarily inherent to someone's genes, and furthermore that these changes are necessarily immutable (i.e. irreversible), is a fundamental flaw because it flies in the face of basic neurobiological research. it is an idea worth challenging, but it will never get challenged by bourgeois psychiatry.
I sort of agree and disagree. That bourgeois science and psychology is not informed by a dialectical materialist view is a problem. That part I 100% agree with and I don't think it's necessarily obvious at a glance to what extent all of the consequences of this are.
Well, this is a complicated thing to get into, isn't it? First, in my impression of it, even bourgeois science does not think it is immutable, but rather liberalism and individualism blanch at the idea of forcing someone to "not be themself" in matters of personality and the like. This isn't necessarily a bad thing while we're stuck under a system like capitalism because if liberalism went full "we can change your brain", what happens? "Radicals" get targeted for making changes. Historically marginalized groups in mental health (such as those with autism) get targeted for making changes. Predispositions which may not be inherently a bad thing, but get associated with the development of disorders, could get targeted and then we're starting to get into eugenics-like territory.
I don't think there's any denying that predispositions are a thing and that types of them get passed down genetically. To what extent this informs anything we call a mental health disorder in modern day is more difficult to say. Partly because it's such a touchy subject to be getting into people's behavior, personality, and so on. If somebody has a genetic condition that effects them physically but not mentally in a noticeable way, people don't tend to bat an eye about the implications of that in the same way because the tendency to view the brain and body as separate means we're just talking about the mechanical part, not the "soul" part. It may be this is a very flawed view of a human being, but that's what tends to happen.
I think I have mentioned this on here before, but I remember reading years back about this person who grew up in a communal culture, who "heard voices" (in the sense associated with schizophrenia) but for them the voices were helpful and supportive. It's been so long, I don't even know where I'd begin with finding the source, so take it with a grain of salt. But I bring it up because it is a good example of how predisposition does not mean deterministic in outcomes.
That said, the reason I used ADHD as an example is because the research makes me doubtful that an ADHD person can simply apply therapy tactics and "fix" their brain. It is theoretically possible from the dialectical materialism view of change that the brain (perhaps with some future technology/medicine) could somehow be changed sufficiently in order to make the symptoms permanently go away, but there are more complicated questions tied up in that, like: would the person still be the same in personality or would they seem like a different person now and what are the ethical and societal implications of this? Is it possible to isolate the areas that cause them abnormal distress and heal those without impacting other areas of cognition? What even is abnormal distress under a system like this?
It gets fucky fast and I don't trust the shameless fascists standing nearby the hokey liberals, salivating over the idea of eugenics and the like.