18/04/2026
"It is impossible to be healthy under capitalism. Removing the social sources of sickness is not an option under capitalism because it would interrupt the flow of profit." Professor of Medical Psychology Susan Rosenthal's penetrating analysis of the social determinants for mental health and illness, and the relationship between Marxism and psychology.
"Marx and Engels described Capital as a relationship and capitalism as a system of relationships. Did they mean that every aspect of our relations with ourselves, others, and society is shaped by capitalism, so that a socialist revolution would transform all of these relationships? Or were they being too general? Are some aspects of human experience unaffected by society, so that we need something other than marxism to understand them and something more than socialism to transform them? This is the core of the conflict between marxism and psychology.
Context
The marxist method considers human experience in social-historical context. Psychology, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, medicine, genetics, and most other disciplines consider the individual (or parts of the individual) separate from the social context. The assumption is that the individual (or the part) has enduring biological or psychological qualities that are governed by different rules than those that govern the larger society. Therefore, these qualities can be changed only at the level of the individual or the part.
Separating the individual from the social in order to emphasize the individual is capitalist ideology, not science. Prioritizing individual factors absolves the system of responsibility. And if individuals can choose what happens, they can be blamed for choosing badly, again letting the system off the hook.
Science tells us that the social and individual shape each other in dynamic interaction. If one has more weight, it is the material and social environment out of which our species evolved and which capitalism has poisoned.
Environmental toxins cause the vast majority of cancers, yet cancer victims are blamed for making unhealthy choices and for having ‘cancer personalities’ or ‘cancer genes.’ Similarly, alienation creates mental distress, yet ‘mental illness’ is blamed on wrong thinking, wonky brain chemistry, or defective genes. Blaming the victim protects the system by keeping the focus on what individuals are doing instead of what the system is doing to them.
Oppression
‘Mental illness’ used to mean insanity. The 1918 American compendium of psychiatric disorders contained 22 diagnostic categories, 21 of which referred to forms of insanity. Since then, the category of ‘mental illness’ has ballooned to include a broad range of deviant and rebellious behaviours, different ways of processing information (neurodiversity), emotional responses to isolation and deprivation, and trauma-related symptoms. The label of ‘mental illness’ is used to pathologize those who protest, those who suffer, and those whose needs undermine productivity. Whether limitations are physical or mental, the less-productive are stigmatized as socially defective and more or less expendable.
People labelled ‘mentally ill’ form an oppressed group. Like all forms of oppression, ‘mental illness’ affects people from all classes. However, as with other forms of oppression, the burden falls most heavily upon the working class. The mentally distressed suffer legal, medical, social, and housing discrimination. They can be forcibly confined in institutions, drugged against their will, and denied the right to make decisions regarding their lives. They are over-represented among the incarcerated and are more likely to be unemployed, poor, and homeless.
Oppression is essential to capitalism. Subjugating oppressed groups enables a small ruling class to divide and rule a much larger working class. In particular, oppressing the ‘mentally ill’ enforces conformity of thought, feeling, and behaviour in society as a whole.
Defiance
Psychiatry serves capitalism by treating defiance as a mental disorder. Through the 1950s, the label of ‘schizophrenia’ was mainly applied to discontented housewives. The anti-racist revolts of the 1960s prompted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to change its description of schizophrenia from primarily depressed moods to hostility, aggression, and delusions of persecution, that is, from White suburban housewives to rebellious urban Blacks. Today, Black Americans are three times more likely than White Americans to be labeled ‘schizophrenic.’
Psychiatrists and psychologists have pathologized the protests of slaves and political dissidents. They have lobotomized rebellious women and tried to convert homosexuals. They have campaigned for the euthanasia and sterilization of ‘social defectives.’ They assist at interrogations and torture. They drug soldiers to keep them killing. They drug old people and prisoners to keep them quiet. And they drug rebellious children.
As families sink into crisis, parents are less able to meet children’s emotional needs. Schools contribute to children’s distress by confining them in closed rooms for long periods to memorize information that has no connection to their lives. When children protest by acting out, professionals label them as mentally disordered and their parents as inadequate.
Once children are labelled, parents can be legally compelled to drug them. In 2013, more than eight million American children under age 17 were prescribed psychiatric drugs. One million of these children were under age five, and a quarter of a million were less than a year old.
Pseudoscience
Socialists stand up for the oppressed. We reject the argument that women should raise children because they are genetically programmed to be nurturers. We reject the argument that Black people are more likely to be poor because they are less intelligent. We understand that such biological arguments are not based on science; they are pseudoscience – propaganda disguised as science.
Capitalism systematically confuses science and pseudoscience, replacing what is true with claims of what is true. An example of pseudoscience is the claim that ‘mental illness’ is rooted in biology.�The biological model of mental distress reduces the mind to the brain, which becomes the object of study and treatment. (A variation of this model is Freudianism, which reduces the mind to the ge****ls.) Such crude materialism should not be confused with marxist materialism, which views mental distress in its social context — the individual expression of a society made sick by alienated labour.
The fact that social conditions generate mental distress is so obvious that a psychiatric industry is required to convince us otherwise. The 1952 edition of the DSM described ‘mental illness’ as a reaction to some external event, situation, or biological condition. This description was removed from all subsequent editions. The failure of the DSM to identify an external cause for ‘mental illness’ implies that the cause is internal to the individual (faulty thoughts, behaviours, chemistry, or genetics), and the treatment is to change the sufferer, not the conditions that cause the suffering. The emphasis on drug treatment and gene research flows from the biological model. And the practice of directing patients to change their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours implies that the central problem is the patient’s failure to function adequately.
Psychosis
Some concede that adverse conditions might cause child distress and emotional disorders like anxiety and depression, but perceptual disorders like psychosis must have a biological cause. This is faulty logic.
Human perception is socially constructed. The ideas that dominate society shape what people think, what they want, who they trust, who they fear, who they blame, and what is and is not acceptable. Mis-perception is also socially constructed. Psychologists, advertising consultants, and management experts are employed to ‘sell’ a system based on deception (“it’s a free country”), contradiction (war as humanitarian intervention), denial of lived experience (hard work is always rewarded), and threat (work or starve). While most people accept the unacceptable, they do not like it. Some rebel openly. Others protest through physical and mental symptoms, addiction, and su***de. Some escape to a different reality.
Psychosis typically develops during the transition from adolescence to adulthood, when the conflict between the way the world is and the way that it should be is most keenly experienced. Inability to resolve this contradiction causes some people to become highly anxious and deeply suspicious. The world makes no sense, so they ‘break with reality’ and hide in fantasy realms where imaginative metaphors communicate what cannot be articulated. We all talk to ourselves, but psychosis disrupts the relationship with the self so that internal voices are mis-perceived as coming from outside. Visual cues are also mis-interpreted to form the shapes of people and things that are not actually present.
The social basis of psychosis is dismissed by biologists and psychiatrists who treat the psychotic individual as a checklist of deficits to be corrected. The person’s experience, perspective, and social needs are ignored. No attention is paid to what the person is trying to communicate through speech, emotions, body language, and behaviour patterns. The emphasis is on manipulating brain chemistry, countering defective genes, and controlling behaviours.
Social support
The best treatment for mental illness is social support. A large American study found that ‘psychotic’ patients who received less medication and more individual and family support fared much better than patients who got the usual drug-focused treatment. The social-support model has been used successfully in Australia, Scandinavia, and elsewhere. The fact that social support can remedy disorders of perception tells us that these disorders are socially based.
Social support is also effective in treating mental illness on a societal level. A Canadian study of more than 2,000 severely mentally-ill homeless people found that providing stable housing was more effective than any other treatment.
Raising living standards can actually cure mental illness. An eight-year study in the United States found that poor children were being diagnosed with more than four times as many psychiatric symptoms as children who had never been poor. Midway through the study, a new gambling casino began paying financial bonuses that lifted 14 percent of the families out of poverty. Psychiatric symptoms among children who were no longer poor fell to the same level as children who had never been poor. In contrast, psychiatric symptoms remained high among the children who remained poor. Rising incomes enable parents to meet their own needs so that they are more able to meet their children’s needs.
Misery
It is impossible to be healthy under capitalism. Growing daily misery is compounded by the horror of perpetual war and environmental destruction. If you open your mind to the barbarism of capitalism, you are traumatized. If you close your mind to it, you lose your humanity.
The World Health Organization reports that the global su***de rate has risen 60 percent over the past 45 years, accounting for half of all violent deaths in men and 71 percent of violent deaths in women. Su***de is the leading cause of death in adolescent girls aged 15 to 19. In the United States, the su***de rate for Black boys aged 5 to 11 years has doubled since the 1990s.
Over the past 15 years, the inflation-adjusted income for American households headed by a high school graduate dropped 19 percent. This income drop has been accompanied by a 22 percent rise in the mortality rate of less educated middle-aged White Americans, primarily due to alcoholism, drug addiction, and su***de. If the mortality rate for this group had stayed constant, 96,000 deaths would have been avoided. If it had continued to decline at its previous rate, half-a-million lives would have been saved.
Removing the social sources of sickness is not an option under capitalism because it would interrupt the flow of profit. Instead, the system strives to improve people’s ability to function under the existing toxic conditions. To that end, scientific research is limited to the study and manipulation of individual factors. This is as true for cancer and heart disease as it is for ‘mental illness.’
It is impossible to separate the influence of environment and biology in a social system that poisons every aspect of life, down to the molecular level. After we eliminate capitalism and establish a health-promoting society, it will be easier to determine what role biology plays in the remaining problems. Until then, socialists must emphasize collective solutions for social problems, not indulge the delusion that they can be solved by scientists and experts at the individual level.
Integral
The conflict between marxism and psychology is not really about psychology or ‘mental illness.’ It is about understanding capitalism as an all-encompassing system of social relationships where individual experience changes in the process of changing society.
In the 1980s, workers in Poland organized themselves into the world’s largest union, containing one-third of the working-age population. As strikes spread and demonstrations grew, hospital psychiatric beds began to empty of workers and fill with sick government officials. This happened because rising class struggle opens the door to solving individual problems collectively. Decades of working class retreat have undermined confidence in collective solutions. Socialists are not immune to this discouragement.
It is extremely difficult to raise class solutions in a society dominated by individualism and the ‘yes-but’ stance of reformists who promote individual solutions ‘in the meantime.’ This ‘meantime,’ where the class struggle is suspended for the comfort of the few, is a fantasy.
There is no ‘meantime’ for the majority who must fight today or be crushed tomorrow. To win those fights, we must reconnect the socialist tradition with the working class, and we must do it now.
We build health in the process of fighting for better working and living conditions. We build health in the process of laying the foundation for a socialist society that engages everyone’s abilities and meets everyone’s needs."
To read the full article please click here: https://susanrosenthal.com/oppression/psychology-psychiatry/marxism-and-psychology/
