Capitalist pathology - Late neoliberalization, depressive critique and the cultural logic of mental health

Sedgwick-Jell, Evan (2025) Capitalist pathology - Late neoliberalization, depressive critique and the cultural logic of mental health. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

My intention here is to investigate the meaning of depression as political category through its representation in English language popular non-fiction over the last twenty-five years. My research question is: what are the political consequences of depression’s centrality as a contemporary diagnosis in its popular valences, beyond discussions of aetiology or neurochemistry? Within a shift of ‘mental pathology’ as having moved from addressing the minority to the majority of society, mental health is positioned as conceptually defining contemporary subjectivity. A corpus is created using rhetorical genre studies, situating depressive critique as combining elements of depression memoir, self-help, and socio-political commentary. I approach these through reading the texts in relation to their embeddedness in capitalist social relations and the conflicts and contradictions that produced them; a Marxist cultural theory informed by Fredric Jameson’s political unconscious. Through my own experiences with depression, its prevalence as a diagnostic category is related to the ongoing history of neoliberalisation, especially the tripartite crises of left-wing movements, the welfare state, and mental healthcare. The articulation of depression with political movements aiming at social transformation is viewed as implicated in desire, this category containing both a potential for change as well as a means of frustrating it. In viewing depression as a single moment within a broader concept of mental health, the tension between the ongoing social organisation of mental healthcare, and the cultural logic of mental health — a network of ideological expressions interpenetrating various cultural forms, the production of subjectivity, and political horizons — is highlighted. Over the four analytic chapters, an analysis is unfolded that examines moments of the political unconscious and the cultural logic of mental health across the corpus. I argue that in order to have a more productive discussion pertaining to the former, the latter must be comprehensively unpacked, analysed and thus demystified.

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