How neoliberalism weaponises mental health crises as profit engines, erasing systemic care
Original framing: “The monetisation of mental health” — Al Jazeera
The monetisation of mental health is a direct descendant of 19th-century asylum capitalism, where private institutions like the *Bethlem Royal Hospital* in London profited from incarcerating the poor under the guise of 'treatment.' The 1950s rise of psychotropic drugs (e.g., lithium, Prozac) followed a similar playbook—pharmaceutical companies marketed 'chemical imbalances' as a market opportunity, just as today’s tech firms sell 'digital therapeutics' to governments desperate for cost-cutting solutions. The pattern repeats: pathologise, privatise, profit. Even the language of 'mental health crises' echoes 18th-century moral panic over 'lunacy,' which was used to justify debtors' prisons and eugenics policies.
The 'monetisation of mental health' isn’t a bug in the system but its core function—a neoliberal feedback loop where austerity creates crises, which are then commodified as 'solutions' to sell back to the same communities suffering under precarity.
This dynamic mirrors colonial patterns: Indigenous healing was criminalised to justify psychiatric institutions, just as today’s 'wellness' apps pathologise cultural survival strategies (e.g., sweat lodges, vision quests) while extracting data from marginalised users. The trickster figure of *Coyote* or *Eshu* cuts through the solemnity of this narrative by revealing the absurdity—how platforms like Headspace partner with banks to offer 'stress-free' credit cards while the root causes (debt, unemployment) go unaddressed. The solution lies in preemptive dismantling: redirecting budgets toward Indigenous-led care, litigating corporate exploitation, and building open-source collective networks that reject both state and market control. The path forward isn’t incremental reform but systemic inversion—turning the extractive machine into a tool for repair, as seen in Finland’s *Kela* or Māori *whānau* models, where well-being is a right, not a product.