What We Talk About When We Talk About Mental Health: Towards an Anthropology of Adversity in Individualistic Society

Abstract

The French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg, author of The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (1998), reflects on the anthropology of adversity in individualist societies in his contribution. He argues that in societies in which autonomy is the supreme value, mental health ‘functions as a discursive space in which many of the core tensions and conflicts of our individualism can be represented and find solutions’. Mental health, he writes, ‘is the name individualistic society has given to our style of dealing with passions, the social and moral equivalent of magical rites for the modern autonomous individual’. Conditions such as depression and burnout may thus be seen as a reaction against adversity and contingency, and constitute forms of psychosocial suffering organised by the idea of inadequacy. Ehrenberg concludes that ‘we have seen a change in the social status of psychic suffering, and an extension of its uses, particularly in the political sphere’.

One should neither laugh nor cry at the world, but understand it.

Baruch Spinoza

This was the subject Albert O. Hirschman had to deal with in philosophy for the French Baccalauréat he took in Berlin in 1932. Quoted by Cass Sunstein, ‘An Original Thinker of our Time’, The New York Review of Books, May 23 (2013).

To recall Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (London: Vintage, 2009), and in tribute to Raymond Carver’s short story, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’, in Where I’m Calling From: Selected Short Stories (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 138–51.