The poison in the cure: Neoliberalism and contemporary movements in mental health

Neoliberalism reaches beyond economic policy and material conditions and reformulates the subject and psychological life and therefore is best understood as an attitude toward science, knowledge making, and subjectivity. In a neoliberal climate, markets give us truth and individuals are encouraged to be self-concerned agents rather than members of a polis. Thus, at the very moment that neoliberal policies transfer responsibility to individuals, there is a simultaneous increase in surveillance in order to reinstall certain patterns of human behavior. Mental health research and practice risk becoming commodities dedicated to enforcing this logic. In this article, we explore medical neoliberalism in some of its recent manifestations: global mental health interventions, routine depression screening, and the monitoring of social media to assess mental health. We also consider the ways in which popular reforms in the mental health field are founded on neoliberal assumptions and may be abetting these ideological aims.