Psychic suffering in neoliberalism and the political dimension of the mental health diagnosis

Abstract

This work aims to demonstrate the political dimension of the diagnosis of the forms of psychic suffering, from the critique of neoliberal rationality. The methodology used was the work of a concept with a review of bibliographies, mainly on psychopathology and social theory. Historically, the clinical and social treatment given to subjects who present some type of psychic suffering is related to the culture of each time and the current way of exercising power. In modernity, the psychiatric paradigm about mental illness follows the logic of the biomedical knowledge-power device, which, within the individualizing neoliberal logic, holds each subject responsible for their illness and has at its maximum the self-improvement and not the cure. In this sense, the diagnostic categories of our time serve much more to capture the hegemonic forms of malaise and translate them into a grammar that can be normalized than to express the nature of a mental illness. Such a hypothesis has immense political weight, since a totalizing diagnostic reason corroborates the exhaustion of the capacity to deal with conflicts, contradictions, and reinventions, which generates a scenario of difficulties in coping with alterity and with the contingencies of life, which end up being pathologized.