flore laurentienne

Once I had left the Parc des Bastions and begun my long walk towards a less affluent quarter, I could not shake from my mind Püras's final comments about the politics of mental health - about how both capitalist and communist systems had exploited and promoted different mental health narratives for their own particular ends. For communism, mental illness was characterised as a Western disease from which its own superior social system was mercifully exempt, while for new capitalism, it was a problem to be reframed and used to economic advantage. While the communists would bury and deny suffering, the new capitalists would medicalise, depoliticise and profit from it; they would turn it into a productive threat, and exonerate neo-liberal policies for causing it.