ABSTRACT
What is the relationship between psychiatry, mental health, and capitalism, and how can these connections be understood historically? This final, more speculative chapter explores the way critical interpretations of capitalism have used psychiatric concepts to critique the effects of the marketplace on the practice of psychiatry, as well as to conceptualise capitalism as a form of totalising ‘psychopolitics’ inflicted on the psyche. The chapter offers two examples of how these tendencies might be made concrete: via the ‘psychiatrisation’ of work and in particular the concept of ‘burnout,’ and in the marketisation of new digital technologies for the provision of mental health care.
