Streeting announces reduction in share of NHS spending for mental health

The problems people face at the hands of a society organised into a political arrangement of power hierarchies and income/wealth inequalities which leaves most people struggling and powerless to change their circumstances will not be solved by more counsellors and psychotherapists. The medicalisation/psychologisation of social organisation problems (largely into one of individual pathology – faulty thinking and or biology) is one more part of the neoliberal capitalist turn. The solution to the problem is a different society – egalitarian, caring, cooperative. To call what people are experiencing problems with their “mental health” is to misconstrue cause and effect – the problem is intolerable living conditions, the effect is overwhelming distress that manifests in many ways – fear, misery, madness, obsession, overactivity, passivity, confusion, agitation, distraction, exhaustion and so on – the stock.in trade of “symptoms” arranged into fantasy psychiatric “diagnosis”. People’s problems are very real, but diagnosis occludes and mystifies the underlying cause and gives them an ultimately meaningless label ,(i.e. some DSM name or other). Once someone has a label, the political dimension of their distress is neutralised. If the NHS spent 10 times what is currently spent, things would improve, in part because the economy would benefit from the extra money circulating, in part because people would have more supportive conversations, and that there would be more counsellors involved in meaningful supportive contact. But not because any mental health problem was being treated. And not because more tablets would be prescribed. This crisis will only be solved by a radicalky different social structure, one which is non-hierarchical, without centralised power, where all are involved in decision-making, and coercion doesn’t operate. Electoral politics, and rule by a cabinet of corrupt “elites” is a key part of the problem. For instance, Wes Streeting – one person – gets to devide the health priorities that affect all. That is utterly absurd (and contains the seed of fascism, right there).