Mental Health Is Political | Danielle Carr | TMR

Emma is joined by Danielle Carr, Assistant Professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, to discuss her recent Op-Ed piece for the New York Times “Mental Health Is Political”. Danielle Carr then walks through the problem of medicalizing our view of mental health without also understanding the greater systemic and political intersections that can often be underlying causes. Next, they explore the rise of telepsychotherapy as an exploitative gig-economy institution that works to further medicalize the issue and detach it from social issues, before wrapping up the interview by exploring what kind of diseases mental health issues really are, and the failure of the DSM-type medical perspective in actually understanding how to approach them.

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Check out more from the MR crew:

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Emma Vigeland ESVN

Matt Lech LEFT RECKONING

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Dr. Danielle Carr, assistant professor at The Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA wrote an essay in the New York Times on mental health is political. Danielle thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. of course. so mental health is political now you know you asked the question in the piece are we really in a mental health crisis. and for a lot of people, they'd be like of course right my mental health is suffering right now. but for that, you use the term medicalization of mental health. There is a lack of the kind of maybe intersectionality and political understanding of mental health in this country that leaves a ton of gaps in our understanding. Just talk a bit about the biggest picture part of your idea about this and then we can zoom in more on some specifics. yeah definitely. So I think the underlying or overarching point of the piece is that a crisis that affects mental health is not the same thing exactly as a crisis of mental health. and what I mean by that is certainly not the position that mental illness is fake. or even that mental illness is non-biological. but that when we are thinking about what kind of a problem it is and what forms of causality are at work here there's a difference between saying everyone just weirdly happens to have the same biomedical disease on an individual level and saying that there are structural systems in place that are producing these biological conditions that correspond to you know deteriorating mental health states.