Opinion – Luiz Felipe Pondé: Mental health is one of the great frontiers of capital in this century

Mental health is one of the great frontiers of capital in this 21st century. But that doesn’t mean that all professionals in the area are pickpockets, as the hurried ones on duty might think.

This means that, from the point of view of those who make use of mental health professionals, you, as a user —and it can be an individual or an institution here—, begin to doubt when this professional says that it is necessary to “invest” in health mental. Because he doesn’t know if he’s thinking scientifically or financially, from the point of view of a supplier — he — of the mental health goods and services market. Difficult?

Yes, difficult, much more difficult than our vain philosophy thinks. Yes, today there is a market for mental health goods and services. It includes professionals such as psychologists, psychiatrists, psychopedagogues and institutions and companies organized by these professionals to offer treatments and training of more professionals in schools, clinics – in short, general goods and services of the mental health market.

And, of course, when it comes to a market, we also talk about marketing it all. Therefore, there are still professionals in marketing, advertising, media, social networks, writing, journalism. All of them can be “players” in this mental health market.

It also includes diagnoses of all kinds that plague schools and families in contemporary times. And, let’s not forget, it also adds the gigantic pharmaceutical industry and its medicines.

Here’s a parenthesis. It’s not about cursing the pharmaceutical industry. Remember she gave us vaccinations and longevity in general. It is about understanding, first of all, that science is not a place full of scientist-monks who work because they are people especially dedicated to the good of the world, but that science is the pharmaceutical industry — universities only really take off when they have capital support of this sector, in the vast majority of cases.

Science has always been designed to be an industry because it is expensive. Having said that, let’s get back to the topic: mental health as a frontier of capital.

More and more there will be young people on medication, diagnosed students, desperate parents —in fact, this is one of the underlying reasons for young people’s decision not to have more children— and health insurance that is increasingly expensive. In short, a huge network that brings together numerous “players” in the mental health market.

In fact, one of the ways you can identify when a segment of society has become a frontier of capital is when it begins to generate increasing and accumulated demands for goods and services, as is the case in question today.

Schools, currently immobilized between students, teachers, tuition-paying parents and the emerging judicialization of relations between schools and these parents, will have to invest money in the specific training of faculty, since they, the schools, have been elevated to the category of partners in caring for the mental health —which today only gets worse— of its enrolled students.

The analysis of this historical and economic symptom must also be carried out in a plan that differentiates the various “players” of this emerging market.

From a practitioner’s point of view, successful psychiatrists, emerging from public academic brands in medicine, tend to be the most powerful link in the chain.

It is no wonder that psychiatrists have become commonplace in ignoring ongoing psychotherapeutic treatments and referring their colleagues to patients, in order to eliminate the weakest competition in the chain, which are psychologists.

In fact, psychologists, in general, are the “retailers” of this market, receiving payment by the hour of work. Psychiatry is an important link in this circle of the pharmaceutical industry, as it holds the powerful medical discourse in its hands and pens.

Parents and schools, both in a panic, increasingly infantilized in the face of the power of medical and scientific discourse, love to see their children and students medicated.

It is always safer to have a doctor’s approval. If it fails, he will be important to another link in this chain: the lawyer. There is no way out on the horizon. It will only worsen the violence of capital in the world of mental health.