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…psychiatry assumes that society does not cause distress in biologically normal people, who are considered biologically normal at least in part because they are economically productive. This assumption permits the conclusion that if a person is distressed to the point of unproductivity, it is because that person—not society—is abnormal. Thus, psychiatry’s commitment to biological essentialism not only masks the role of the constructed sociopolitical environment in creating distress but depoliticizes it by characterizing that allegedly irrational distress as induced by biological abnormality.