Despair

The current ruling ontology often denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. Considering mental illness as an individual chemicobiological problem has enormous benefits for the machine. First, it reinforces the drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels which multiple large studies have proven otherwise, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin.

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