"Who am I, that you should love me?"

…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.

went into a wine shop the other day to buy pasta and they did not have pasta but they were doing a wine tasting so i thought what the hell. and got to chatting with the other woman there because we had both just come from the library and were comparing our books and sipping wine and turns out we’re both teachers so we got on the topic of phones in classrooms—and the guy pouring our wine was like ‘that’s actually a point of contention in one of my divorces right now.’