What Does Capitalism Feel Like?
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What Does Capitalism Feel Like?
interview with Mad World author, Micha Frazer-Carroll
Earlier this year I was asked by baddie Micha Frazer-Carroll to write a blurb for her upcoming book, Mad World. After rewatching the music video for the epic 1982 banger of the same name, I opened the PDF in the bath. Micha and I met through our work at gal-dem magazine (rip) and I was excited to see what she’s been up to. A few hours and some very shrivelled extremities later, I was warm with that giddy glow I get from literally nowhere other than radical mental health community.
Truth see-ers!!
Here’s what I wrote about it:
Wow! Thank you, Micha, for writing this honest, urgent and lovingly researched journey through the past, future and beyond of Mad Pride and alternative world-building. This book is an invaluable toolkit, not just for dismantling oppressive health structures, but for building the systems of care we desperately need. Refreshingly rooted in the disturbing history of the United Kingdom and crafted with so much care, Mad World is a much needed demand to consider the political, environmental and structural causes of Madness, and the ways community care can be utilized to support us all. This book welcomes you to rethink what you think you know about Madness. To stop thinking altogether, perhaps. To feel. Through her beautifully incisive critique of psychiatry, capitalism and self-care, Frazer-Carroll offers us a rare portal into the magic, mystery and misery of Madness. Mad World is a beautiful offering, proving what us Mad people already knew - that we're not the problem, it's the world that's sick.
This book is a gift and that gift is hope.
Anyway, get into this exclusive interview with Micha about her book-writing process, why you can’t talk about mental health without talking about capitalism, why England is so shit, and how we can still make time to dream of better days.
AM: Who titled the book Micha?
MFC: I came up with it — it was my working title and then I tried to get it changed but I was convinced to keep it…
AM: Thank God. Tell us what your book is about!
MFC: OK! Mad World is a book on the politics of mental health. It looks at how our mental health is harmed by capitalism (and connected systems of oppression like race, colonialism, transphobia, ableism and incarceration). But the book doesn't only look at how our current systems of social organisation make our mental health worse – it also goes further to argue that capitalism plays a large role in constructing what we even think of as 'madness' or 'mental illness'. What we consider to be healthy vs sick, orderly vs disorderly is hugely shaped by, for example, whether you are able to go to work and be exploited for your labour. We often think of madness/mental illness as this kind of internal, biologically discrete 'natural fact' – when, in actuality, our concepts of madness/mental illness are not stable across history or across cultures. So in the book I am critical of what is called the 'biomedical' approach to mental health and diagnosis, arguing that we need to break it apart and politicise it.
I also explore how capitalism has shaped how we 'treat' mental distress. In the 19th century, as this deadly economic system began to expand across England, we saw the rapid expansion of 'lunatic asylums' or 'mental hospitals'. The state needed somewhere to warehouse people who were disruptive to the emerging societal order. We often think of this system as consigned to history, but, in practise, tens of thousands of people are still incarcerated under the Mental Health Act each year. The NHS also prioritises cheaper and more individualistic treatments like meds and cognitive behavioural therapy, because they are 'quicker fixes' for getting people back into work. While some people have good experiences with these practices, they don't remedy the political origins of mass societal distress under neoliberal capitalism.
The final part of the book is focused on imagination and abolition. I try to think about what a liberated future might mean for mental health – a future beyond the medical and psychiatric industrial complexes, but also a future beyond the economic system that produced them. I am not certain exactly how this future would look, but I draw on the experiments and ideas of so many groups and thinkers to give this a go. I've been told it's 'quite utopian', but that's what I believe this political project demands.
AM: Word! Did you think you'd ever write a book?
MFC: I think I'd probably decided that I definitely wanted to write something longform the year prior. Writing has always been a really cherished form of communication for me, but until that point, I'd mainly been focusing on short-form journalism. By 2019, I was beginning to feel quite disillusioned with it, especially the hot-take opinion machine. So, I think it was really the right time to take on a different kind of medium.
AM: How long did it take to write and what was your creative process? Any rituals or routines? What were you listening to / watching?
MFC: It's a bit of a blur, especially because it was all happening in lockdown, but I don't think I started meaningfully writing for at least eight months after signing the contract. I researched all day every day. This was definitely tied into my fear of the blank page, my fear that it would be bad, and the challenge of working out how to structure everything as someone who has a weird relationship with linear spacetime, linear arguments etc. After this period of procrastination, I think I probably wrote daily for about a year.
My creative process was a mess – that's just how my mind works. I wrote multiple drafts of the entire book; the first incarnations make me cringe to think about now. Then I rewrote some specific chapters about ten times. To me, this creative process was quite mad in itself, because I wrote around and around in circles, in a way that wasn't 'logical' or productive most of the time. In this process of repetition, I now realise that I was striving for perfection too much. It was only towards the end that I started to make peace with the fact that there would be holes, contradictions and errors in the book. That's part of the form. There will also be arguments and word choices that are revealed to be a product of their time, because the text is a snapshot in spacetime. That's scary, but ultimately, you have to weigh those costs of speaking in public against the costs of saying nothing at all. I realised that it's a necessarily imperfect vehicle, but it felt right to use it.
I listened to the podcast Mad in America most days while I was deep in the first draft. It's linked to the publication of the same name, and critiques psychiatry. I was also watching Severance. I taught myself how to braid and twist and crochet my hair. I dog-sat and boat-sat. It was good to walk in Haggerston park and later look out of a porthole onto the water; just to interact with different spaces to the four walls that had surrounded me during lockdowns.
AM: How did the process of writing this book affect your mental health (or not)?
MFC: I don't think writing a book is good for a person's mental health. I was quite isolated while writing – I found that I couldn't really do it alongside usual work and socialising and so I kind of dropped off of the grid for a while to get it done. I also think that writing a book is inherently anxiety-inducing. It's a hugely vulnerable thing to do: to put yourself down on the page and then send it out into the world, aware that some people will hate it or find a typo or slate it on Goodreads or whatever. The publishing industry makes this worse – books sell on the basis that authors are individual experts, which is not how I locate myself as a ~writer~ at all. I write from my community, and I draw so many of my ideas and arguments from other thinkers and organisers. Publishing wants to make you exceptional, though, which is lonely. Writing publicly about this subject is also scary because it is still so up for grabs.
I really do think that in our movements we're still incoherently scrambling to develop a radical and robust politics of mental health.
For these reasons, and many more, the birth of this book has made me deeply anxious. My book-induced mental health struggles also sometimes became particularly meta – when I felt depressed, I'd then start thinking about different models of depression, the political debates around different treatments, and how to reconcile being an abolitionist with the current need to use certain services. I couldn't separate my experience of mental health from my book, because it was literally the subject matter.
AM: Oof, thank you for sharing. In the book you write about some of your personal experiences with depersonalisation disorder. Did it give you pause to mesh your personal experiences with your research?
MCF: As someone who’s been writing opinion for a long time, and started doing so during the personal essay boom, I reflect a lot on when and whether to incorporate my own experiences into my writing. It’s something that I think we’re all getting more critical of — the way that a focus on individual narratives can obscure the political contours of our lives; and the exploitative nature of these industries, which ask marginalised people to bare their souls and offer up their trauma for clicks and book sales. Simultaneously, I don’t ever want to write under the illusion of academic distance or scientific ‘objectivity’. I’m writing about mental health because it is a part of my daily reality. I perceive this subject matter through the lens of being a racialised person, a disabled person, a queer person, a woman. So it feels important to locate the subjective political position that I speak from, and share some of the experiences that radicalised me.
I also think that more personal stories can provide us with a gateway into the political. I talk about my own mental health in the introduction because I felt that it was genuinely important to delve into the question of “what does capitalism feel like?” How does it inscribe itself on our bodyminds? This feels particularly important when we’re talking about mental health — how our material realities lead to the embodied experience of suffering.
I discuss my experience of ‘depersonalisation’, a state of being where you feel like you aren’t real, not from a place of confession, but because I look back now and think there was something distinctly political about this experience. I was entirely disconnected from my body, and in the introduction to the book, I start to delve into the question of how and why someone might become disconnected and dissociated from their surroundings.
Dissociation is often a response to trauma — your circumstances may feel more manageable if they feel like they’re happening to someone else. And I think that this speaks very well to our economic and political conditions. The bodyworker Lisa Fannen describes capitalism itself as a dissociative state, pointing out that we are forced to sit still in the classroom and suppress our impulses to fidget, play and daydream. In the workplace, we are forced into other kinds of split consciousness — Karl Marx called it ‘alienation’, Arlie Hochschild describes gendered ‘emotional labour’, bosses refer to ‘professionalism’. So my own experience was a way into this bigger structural analysis.
My hope is that by asking what capitalism feels like, we can also start to interrogate what revolution might feel like, and how we might experience it in our bodies, as a means of trying to imagine that future and bring it into the present.
AM: Why was this book important to write?
MFC: In the moment where I started talking to Pluto about this project (2019), these ideas were just not out there in the 'mainstream' — whatever that means. I still think that’s the case; it’s hard to point towards a work that you can get on the high street that grapples with these ideas in any depth, particularly from a firmly leftist position. I hope that I have made a bit of a contribution in that domain – something concise but also robust, that is accessible enough to be an introduction, but also adds some new and in-depth analysis. My hope is that when people want to recommend a book on the social dimensions of mental health, they are able to recommend this instead of settling for a kind of liberal memoir. I also feel that it is crucially important that there is a book out there in mental health that adopts an intersectional, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, abolitionist and disability justice-informed approach to mental health.
AM: What are some of the most striking things you learnt while researching for this book?
MFC: Learning about the history of ‘lunatic asylums’. There was one in every county in Britain at one point in history, but this is barely acknowledged at all. In my research, I discovered lots of buildings around the country that used to be asylums — luxury gyms, spas, hotels and even Liverpool Street station.
I also became quite interested in the overlap between queerness and mental health — and the way that queerness has been framed as a mental illness itself throughout history. The depathologisation of homosexuality (in 1973) is often celebrated as a straightforward historical victory, but in my research I actually found that many queer people felt apathetic or ambivalent about this, and that trans people were also left abandoned by this project. Most trans people in the UK still have to get a psychiatric diagnosis of gender dysphoria to get access to gender-affirming care — and so are coming up against the same system that Mad/Mentally Ill people are facing. In the book, I argue that there are lots of opportunities to think about solidarity here, and history might help guide us in the best way to do this.
AM: Why do you think the UK is lacking in terms of radical or even mainstream mental health understanding or sensibilities e.g. accepting the link between oppression/capitalism and poor mental health?
MFC: I open the book with a chapter on what were once called ‘lunatic asylums’ or ‘mental hospitals’ because this history is very neglected and misunderstood. Asylums mostly appear in our pop culture as eerie gothic settings in horror, or you might see jokey plotlines about padded cells and straitjackets in shows like The Simpsons. I think this is partly because we think of asylums as a remnant of the past. I try to show that there is real continuity between that system, which expanded in the 19th century, and the one we have today. Fifty-thousand people are sectioned under the Mental Health Act every year. When you look at the history of this system, you can also see that it expanded as a direct response to the emergence of capitalism. I think this is important to note, because it shows us that getting rid of capitalism is the only way to create truly healing mental healthcare. History also shows us that mental illnesses are not discrete and objective biological categories — they’re shaped in political context.
People used to be committed to asylums for things like ‘novel reading’ and ‘politics’. The categories we have now are equally political. Our history also shows us lots of incredible resistance and patient activism, which is not really that well-remembered in political spaces.
I think we’re lacking radical and political analyses of mental health in the UK partly because of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism supports the privatisation of major businesses, cuts to state welfare, and an ideology focused on ‘individual responsibility’. The cultural theorist Mark Fisher argued that around the time that Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, we also started to ‘privatise’ the idea of stress.
We started thinking of mental illness as an individual and chemical problem in the brain, rather than a response to our social world. Strike days went down and stress-related sick days went up. Psychiatry became really biological in its approach. It became each person’s individual responsibility to look after their mental health, rather than the state’s or the community’s.
I think this has left a really big imprint on how we think about mental health today. We talk about it as something individual, rather than something that is always political. You see this in our cultural discourse. The whole ‘get therapy’ mantra has become so ubiquitous, as has the emphasis on mindfulness, yoga, journalling, meds, all that stuff. None of it is bad — these can be healing tools for many of us, and we’re out here surviving. But we’re seeing a really exclusive focus on doing these things as an individual responsibility, and a moral duty as citizens or even just ‘good people’ in our communities. Obviously it’s not in the state’s or capital’s interests for us to start thinking bigger, and trying to also address many of these problems at the root.
AM: What does the future of mental health care look like in the UK?
MFC: Community and patient-controlled, non-coercive, accessible and free. There isn’t one ‘answer’ regarding the ‘right’ mode of healing — e.g. meds vs therapy. As Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant write, it would be ‘all care for all people’. It would be completely individualised based on what the individual person needs, including decolonial and spiritual approaches, if that’s what that person wants. It would also have to embrace complexity, mess and tension — because our mental health is really complicated. There are no quick fixes, which is what incarceration and forced treatment are often framed as. We need patience, to sit with each other, and to accept that moving through struggle might be really slow. We also need mental healthcare to be adaptable and willing to continually change and evolve — the writer Liat Ben-Moshe argues that this experimental approach is crucial to an abolitionist mindset.
I also think the future of mental healthcare won’t really look like the things we recognise as mental healthcare today. It will spill out into the streets and into our homes, and lots of it will be rooted in mutual aid and community care. That stuff has done so much for my mental health personally, and if we had better material conditions, many of us might not need to access mental health ‘services’ at all.
AM: Do you have any recommendations for other media that approach some of the same issues you write about in your book, or inspire you?
MFC: Mad Zines! These are zines made by people with experience of madness, mental illness, trauma or distress. I loved reading lots of these when I was researching for the book, they can be so gentle, caring, personal and mad — a window into how other people experience and move through their mental health. Sometimes I find it really comforting to read stuff where people acknowledge how hard it really is.
AM: What worlds do you dream of?
MFC: A world beyond state control, a world where ‘health’ or healing does not just mean the kinds of drugs or therapies you get by engaging with the medical industrial complex — but is actually embedded in our lives. So a world where we all have access to clean air and water, nourishing food, the space for creativity, connection, community, autonomy, freedom from incarceration and oppression. So many of these things would prevent us from sickness and suffering in the first place.
AM: Would you like to shout out any people or organisations who inspire you?
* Healing Justice London (which is, for transparency, my place of work)
* Sisters Uncut, BLMUK, Project LETS, the Fireweed Collective
* Campaign for Psych Abolition
* NSUN
AM: What coping mechanisms have you developed for being alive in this world?
MFC: I still don’t think I’ve worked it out. I think accepting my neurodivergence has been a big part of it, because it allowed me to give myself a lot more grace for finding certain things difficult or impossible. I now become less frustrated at myself, and acknowledge that maybe this is just how I am and that’s ok. This applies to the bad mental health times too. I think the compulsion to be ‘normal’ or ‘better’ is sometimes a huge extra layer of pressure, and so I try not to give into that, and am forgiving and patient with myself. Life is really hard for most of us right now, and I think it is completely understandable to be struggling lots of the time. I try to also surround myself with weird, mad, neurodivergent and disabled people too — people who are thinking like this and grappling with the same problems.
AM: When are you most happy?
MFC: I am most happy when I have time. When I feel like I can simply exist on Crip time and queer time, have time with my friends and my co-conspirators and my family. I think a lot about what art and organising and connection and weirdness might be possible if we only had the time. Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes that part of the violence of prisons is that they extract people’s time — something that they can never get back. I think this is just one particularly stark example of the ways that capitalism steals our time. Wage labour is inseparably intertwined with clock time — Marx writes that we sell our ‘labour power’, which doesn’t really mean that we sell our *labour* to employers, but that we sell our *time*. So I feel joy and relief when I have the time to be creative or unproductive or illogical, or even, paradoxically, depressed. In a radical and liberated future, I hope we all have more time to rest and play and be with one another, whether that’s through moments of struggle or of joy.
Mad World is out on July 5th. Pre-order here :)