Manuel Romero Fernández Director of the Institute for Cultural Studies and Social Change
A few days ago, on March 17, if I remember correctly, two years have passed since that deputy of the Popular Party, Carmelo Romero, urged Íñigo Errejón to go to the doctor sitting in his room in the Congress of Deputies. the context is well known to all. Errejón gave a speech about the pandemic of mental problems that plagues us. Then the proconsul, a tyrant himself, seeking conscience and laughter on the bench, and in it from the outside, scolded him: Go to the doctor! Then, when he realized that he was reaching the bottom, there were all excuses, but that infamous voice rang out from his guts. After that day it rained a lot, and many of us (and many, and above all many) who went to the doctor during the two years. the failure does not seem to be better, at least the statistics do not say otherwise: more anxiety, more depression and more destruction. In the meantime, the focus of this type of question continues to expand, which is something that, broadly speaking and unequivocally, is positive, but focused on at least two aspects, which I will try to develop below.
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Fallacy
Last month I was reviewing some texts to teach the genre of mental health, politics and neoliberalism, and some of them moved me inside and made me think about the current state of affairs, as in black things sprouting in the ranks of anxiety. by Eloy Fernández Porta, we are disturbed by Javier Padilla and Marta Carmona, 24/7. Don’t be critical of Jonathan Crary or North American’s attack on the capitalist dream. Notes in a tired age, the philosopher, journalist and friend Eudaldi Espluga. I think these books are so that we take everything that is happening very seriously. Books to read in book clubs with working people, with neighbors, with our groups, etc. Books that warn us of the dangers we face help us explain how we got here. The three texts, each in their own way, locate in space and time, and therefore in the present mode of production, the sources of our episodes of anxiety and depression. This Jamesonian is “always historicize”. that which pushes us to confront the terrors and dangers that I mentioned in the previous paragraph: the tendency to organize against political trouble, on the one hand, and the games of visibility and concealment of certain disadvantages.
Everyone knows, and when I talk about the whole world, I’m talking about a small handful of militant remnants in myself, because making a visible problem does not come together with its subsequent politics. So some of us wanted to make the best of it and interpret depression, along with a long series of other economic and cultural determinants, as a sounding blow to neoliberalism. That’s how unfortunate some of us are living in a permanent state of anhedonia. What we experience is quite different, but no less interesting and sometimes encouraging: the tension between the organization of failure and politics in the emancipatory sense. Now, I think it’s fair to say, they beat us again. They usually have more money, more resources, more social media and, as if that were not enough, the means of production. Popular books continue to pile up the shelves of resource books, podcasts and triumphant influencers, repeating over and over again the solution to your problems. In addition, the hegemonic and dominant form of clinical psychology inoculates us with the belief that depression or weakness are completely normal states of mind and body and therefore we must learn to live with them. but we cannot ignore the economic and socio-cultural determinations that drag us to the precipice. In case of interest, I cannot but recommend following the work of one of the sweetest young voices in the line of anti-capitalist anti-psychiatry: Alberto Cordero Martín (@AlbertoCMart on Twitter).
Before moving on to the next point, I would like to make a note about psychology. Marta Carmona and Javier Padilla, perhaps unknowingly, emulate the old Marx Brothers joke in their book and, facing confused falsities between going to the psychologist or the union, answer: Yes, I will love! I feel now, and perhaps I am a little wrong, that I have recently been disconnected from the outside world, that the idea of multiplying the cost of psychological care and care has sunk that other person down. who wants to go to the root of our problems. We are well aware of the difficulty of imagining, building, and deploying the planning capabilities that provide a solution to these, and that’s why some empty slogans go beyond, but until we do, we’ll just be. placed unevenly. Something that needs to see the urgency of moving in this direction is that Vox wants to jump on the bandwagon of mental health and make its story known, of course using psychiatrists with smeg in their mouths to denounce the most serious psychological consequences. of trans- law
The second thing I wanted to highlight is the question that gives the title to this article: Who responds to the voices of madness? This is to say, what life is put on the grid by myths and what pathologies, and what others are overshadowed and subordinated. Perhaps it is reasonable to think that talking about anxiety or depression automatically leads us to talk about other diseases or pathologies such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. José Saramago wondered in the New Cain: who is this devil of God who exalts Abel and despises Cain? When I wrote or spoke about my mental problems, I always tried to be honest, which implies not only being transparent, but also talking about your experience as a situated experience, passed through a series of factors very specific social structures that help us indicate whenever it is from a certain place we do This is not something we should beat ourselves up for, but at least it should move us and push us further to ask ourselves other questions. Before I conclude, I wanted to point out something that particularly stands out to me. Ever since I learned psychoanalysis, all the obsessions of transparency give me favors. We know, at least since Freud and the discovery of the unconscious, that absolute transparency is nothing more than an inexplicable ideal: they could open us up and not even find our secret there. Sometimes, however, I will be the first to show the networks, as if to say: come out, we have nothing to hide, we live in a po-ideological horizon! I feel even then, especially when I do it myself, that this openness of speaking about the inconvenience is nothing else than a polite concealment of concealment in plain sight, since you are certain that no one will go; go, seeking him. Perhaps, and to put forward a hypothesis, the most interesting thing about my generation and subsequent ones is not what we try to say clearly, but what we try to hide from everyone.
