Systematic Stress: Mark Fisher and mental health in lockdown

“Come in later. Leave earlier… Even if you feel you don’t need to, I need you to. It’s good optics”.

I’m not the biggest fan of Industry – the BBC’s new drama, co-created with HBO – but I do like its incisive cynicism. The above quote is spoken by a manager, to her subordinate Gus, after Gus’ co-worker, Hari, has just died. Hari dies from working for roughly 72 hours straight, and the response from management is that his immediate colleagues at work should work fewer hours. But not for their sake. For the sake of the company. For the company’s optics. So the company can be seen to be acting on mental health.

Gus is expected to change himself to solve the company's problem. The company culture won’t change; they’ll just change their optics and then, once things simmer over, return to crushingly long hours. Gus privatises his losses. No one else carries his burden. It’s like he is being held responsible for the death of his friend at the hands of … is there any other way of putting it? No. At the hands of systemic problems. Problems in the system.

I’m not the biggest fan of Industry. But I am a big fan of systems-thinking: looking at the way things are and considering the role of society’s systems and structures in making and maintaining those particular things. They called it structuralism, back in the day: people think and act and behave a certain way because of the thought processes that society (consciously or not) nudges them towards. That was De Saussure, and later Levi-Strauss. And then there were the post-structuralists, deconstructing the privileged notions of one particular structure over another, looking at how society might be reformulated if one or two walls were torn down. Derrida. Deleuze. Fisher. It always comes back to k-punk.

This, it turns out, is a piece about Mark Fisher’s concept of the “privatisation of stress”. In his book Capitalist Realism, Fisher explored how the current political environment “denies any possibility of the social causation of mental illness”. Lumped onto the individual, stress and distress are marked as problems not just of a neurological nature but a neurological cause. In a later Guardian article, Fisher highlighted how “mental illness has been depoliticised, so that we blithely accept a situation in which depression is now the malady most treated by the NHS.” He goes on: “where once workers would have turned to trade unions when they were put under increasing stress, now they are encouraged to go to their GP or, if they are lucky enough to be able to get one on the NHS, a therapist”.

Statistics from Fisher’s favoured source, The Selfish Capitalist, show that rates of distress have almost doubled in the space of a generation. Fisher notes that increasing job instability and precarity of welfare since the late 70s have created a situation where the individual is forced to take responsibility for their own distress, because the systems that once offered assistance in taking control of one’s life (trade unions, state benefits) have broken down at the same time as a broader communitarian sentiment. The systems that replaced them reinforce the privatisation of stress: Universal Credit pushes people into interviews and reviews, prodding and interrogating personal lifestyle instead of encouraging self-actualisation. Counsellors at work insist that talking through mental health issues can help resolve them – but they will deny that there is anything that can be done to change the overarching culture – the structure, the system – that exasperates the problem.

Right now, in a more-or-less lockdown, one fifth of the most vulnerable people in society are considering suicide or self harm. The Centre for Mental Health is forecasting that an extra 500,000 people suffering poor mental health through to next July. Two thirds of adults and three quarters of young people with pre-existing mental health conditions have reported that they have got worse since March. Things are, for lack of a better word, dire – even compared to Fisher’s chosen statistics.

There are two tropes around mental health that I can’t stand. One is that everyone should have a therapist. I like the idea of going into a room and talking to someone about all the times I’ve been depressed. But that’s not economically sustainable, even under a Bastani-like luxury communism. It also implies that therapy is some kind of saving grace, a best option, as opposed to a necessary symptom-easer in a system that gives people mental health problems. That’s not to say that therapy can’t be incredibly helpful. We are living through a mental health crisis, and it takes many forms: purposelessness in young people, loneliness in older people, and stress in anyone living precariously. Therapy can help all of these people. But what can also help them is dismantling the privatisation of stress. And if we can manage that, it mightn't be the case that everyone needs a therapist.

The other trope is almost the opposite – that everyone is a little bit fucked up. This is more sinister, because it is almost an apologia for misfortune. It is an embodiment of a melancholia that could even come off as English. In folk tales it’s called the English Curse. Never quite being allowed to exist, always being just out of sorts, just out of reach of happiness, connection, stability. Again, I appreciate the value in the original phrase: it holds a sympathy for the difficult times any given person may suffer in their lifetime. But when combined with the universal therapising outlined above, we see through the constellation:

1) everyone is (implicitly: individually) a little bit fucked up, so

2) everyone needs a therapist.

It’s a simple synthesis. And it’s left unsaid but heavily implied that until then, each person should aim to overcome the hardship that comes their way, individually, attributing their hardships to their own personal state of affairs. It’s the burden borne, for being a little bit fucked up. Stress is even privatised by discourse about stress.

So, the crisis in mental health is overwhelmingly systemic. This systemic problem isn’t unique, however; given enough time, countless examples appear, and mirrors multiply the number of worlds. On climate change, the developed world continues to follow market dogma with respect to transport, energy and agriculture even as habitat destruction and pollution push the planet closer to “tipping points”. On inequality, universal basic income is murmured over and over like a platitude in countries with welfare systems that are simultaneously Kafkaesque and Orwellian. And on the biggest question, the what-is-it-all-for question, self-actualisation, post-Fordist labour structures increasingly distance the worker from that which they create. Most modern, society-wide problems are not personal. They are systemic.

A country-wide lockdown is another example of a system that has challenged our mental health. That should be intuitive: it is not a personal, individual thing that mental health is particularly knackered at present. It is the result of society-wide government decision-making, for better or worse. Lockdowns (unlike capitalism) may be a necessary evil, but in any case, they are a systemic thing, a condition outside individual control. They can generate Fisher’s “social causation of mental illness”. They are not unlike capitalist structures. So any politician, left or right, who dares mention the crisis in mental health with reference to the impact of lockdowns, must accept that lockdowns are systemic. They are a systemic thing, so vast as to lie outside the control of the all-powerful neoliberal individual. These politicians must acknowledge the quid-pro-quo: that lockdowns, quarantines and general despondency can do great harm to the psyche. More importantly, they must accept that said harm is not necessarily the individual’s responsibility to solve, if it can be solved. People aren’t only “sick because of their brain chemistry”. To claim that lockdowns impact mental health requires an acceptance of systems thinking.

By way of a conclusion, allow me to cover another trope I don’t much like. Sentences that start with “there’s no easy solution to x”. X takes many forms: climate change, inequality, mental health. The implication is always that x is such a monstrously large problem that the public shouldn’t expect politicians to try and actually solve it. These problems, however, are really more like trying to fit an unbecomingly large dog into a tiny car. Politicians might suggest tinkering around the edges: policies that address the symptoms, not the cause. Announcing £500m for mental health services; extending green energy grants. Getting the big dog to sit down; leaving the boot ajar. It’s always a hardship to speak ill of these policies, because they are good in principle; they are moves in the right direction. But at the end of the day, someone has to admit that it simply isn’t possible to fit a big dog in a tiny car. The problem isn’t the dog. It’s the car. The problem isn’t individual; it’s the system. And if we can say that about lockdowns and mental health, we should say it about late capitalism too.

No wonder big dogs always look so sad.