Chaos breeds Conflict

"...aged care has become a ghastly warehousing of the old in poorly designed facilities."  ( Guy Rundle-The Saturday Paper-   April 11-17 )

"...aged care has become a ghastly warehousing of the old in poorly designed facilities."  ( Guy Rundle-The Saturday Paper-   April 11-17 )

There is an argument that strong denial mechanisms are essential to the attempt to survive our existential plight, our brief time on Earth.  The jogging and fitness regimes, the nagging need to find out what “superfood” will enhance our health; even the dangerous activities that convince us that we can outmanoeuvre mortality. Maybe the maintenance of such delusions is the secret of a happy life. Yet for many the thought won’t quite go away. So we are never quite at ease, because we are always working hard to divert our eyes from staring at the sun, symbol of our inevitable end.  We immerse ourselves in trivial distractions – online gaming and gambling, drugs, streaming music and the latest series, watching sport on screen, competing with others or ourselves on Facebook. Striving for superiority...  As the existential psychologist Rollo May observed: “Anxiety about nothing tries to become anxiety about something.”  That is to say, the anxiety about nothing-ness drives...

There is an argument that strong denial mechanisms are essential to the attempt to survive our existential plight, our brief time on Earth.  The jogging and fitness regimes, the nagging need to find out what “superfood” will enhance our health; even the dangerous activities that convince us that we can outmanoeuvre mortality. Maybe the maintenance of such delusions is the secret of a happy life. Yet for many the thought won’t quite go away. So we are never quite at ease, because we are always working hard to divert our eyes from staring at the sun, symbol of our inevitable end.  We immerse ourselves in trivial distractions – online gaming and gambling, drugs, streaming music and the latest series, watching sport on screen, competing with others or ourselves on Facebook. Striving for superiority...  As the existential psychologist Rollo May observed: “Anxiety about nothing tries to become anxiety about something.”  That is to say, the anxiety about nothing-ness drives us to attempt to f...

The key paragraph from our point of view is this: "The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de- politicization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital's 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, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political expla...