Contemporary Western culture locates psychotherapy problems within individuals, often ignoring social and cultural contributors. Neoliberalism commodifies mental health by framing it around productivity, pleasure, reduced suffering, and stress-management. Market-oriented actors, including popular self-help figures and proponents of standardized, trademarked treatments, profit from these framings. Societal norms often undervalue service professions, expecting low wages for mental health workers while rewarding profit-driven careers. Individual decisions to pursue mental health care become contingent on perceived value and cost within market systems. Collectivist perspectives, such as co-actualization, provide alternative frameworks that emphasize shared social contexts and mutual flourishing.
Contemporary Western culture strongly prefers locating the problems that bring people to psychotherapy within the individual. When we conceptualize mental health as an individual problem without adequately considering the social and cultural components, it becomes easy to reduce mental health to a product that can be marketed and sold. This simplified version of mental health becomes a commodity of neoliberalism, a philosophy that emphasizes capitalism, free markets, individual rights, and private property rights, amongst other values (Harvey, 2005).
This distorts mental health, often equating it to individuals being productive, increasing pleasure, decreasing suffering, and letting go of stress and distress. Those who are willing to align with the values of individualism and neoliberalism, including many mental health gurus, authors of self-help books, and those who seek to standardize, reify, and trademark mental health treatments and strategies, reap the profits.
Too often, the implicit belief of Western society is that people in the service professions and those who dedicate their lives to the greater good should live in poverty as a sign of their commitment and genuineness. Meanwhile, those in careers and professions focused on profits, selling goods, and big business should be paid big salaries without criticism. These assumptions say much about the values of our society and where mental health falls in this hierarchy of values.
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