What if mental illness is not the residue of our current system, but its hidden infrastructure? What if, in every organisation, a subject is silently elected—a "lightning rod"—compelled to embody the collective’s alienation? A sacrificial figure, made to carry the unassimilable surplus—the objet petit a of the social bond—absorbing the psychic excess that the community cannot face. The suffering is not accidental, but functional: it displaces the Real that threatens the group, so the Symbolic order remains intact.
It is here, in this dark transfer, that the wellness industry offers its bandages—#therapy, #mindfulness, #wellness —not as liberation, but as a technology of pacification, suturing the subject back to the Other’s demand. Burnout is not pathology but cost: the inevitable expenditure through which the machine sustains itself. The faster the order accelerates, the more psychic containers must be fabricated: yoga rooms, therapy apps, wellness seminars. The therapist risks becoming not witness to truth, but a technician of adaptation—an operator of the University discourse.
Revolt is converted into illness. Breakdown, which might disclose a Deleuzian line of flight, is foreclosed—pulled back into the circuits of productivity. The scream is redescribed as “symptom,” the crack as “disorder.” Dissent is pathologized, desire returned as deficit.
The lightning rod holds open the void, but its force is continually neutralized: the howl domesticated into managed resilience.
As Foucault and Gilman remind us, madness and health are never innocent; they are historical technologies of power. Madness marks the subject who absorbs what the collective cannot symbolize.
The mental health regime is the crowning achievement of a world that seeks not care, but displacement. Illness is not only generated but recycled—a renewable surplus, managed and monetized. Psychic pain becomes the hidden labour of the social: endlessly converted into a resource for control.
This is the soteriology of our age: not rupture, not redemption, but infinite placation. The clinic is the confessional. The patient, a penitent enjoined not to indict, but to endure. The system does not want to save us; it wants us just well enough to suffer again.
Yes, fragile counter-sites exist—places where care becomes refusal, where the analyst preserves lack rather than forecloses it, where solidarity flickers. But these spaces are marginal, forever threatened by the gravitational pull of commodification. Elsewhere, the Real is intercepted before it can strike; the lightning rod secures the house, and the lights remain on.
What would it mean to refuse? To reject the pharmakological role, to return the current rather than ground it, to allow madness to resound as indictment rather than symptom?
Refusal would mean burning the house rather than preserving its glow—allowing the Real to rupture the order that lives off our suffering.
Selected Q&A
Q-“Wellness” has become a convenient bandage to conceal the deeper atrocities beneath. In a world designed around anti-human systems, it is nearly impossible to remain truly well-adjusted. What passes for ‘wellness’ today often demands a grotesque contortion of the self - an accommodation with illness, anxiety, and exhaustion - just to be recognised as ‘normal.’ The tragedy is that wellness itself has been rebranded as compliance with dysfunction.
A- Well put!"
Q- It’s unsettling how easily organisations rebrand harm as healing. A manager burns people out, the system whispers “go download a mindfulness app.” A team becomes the vessel for everyone’s unspoken anxiety, and we hand them resilience training as though the real issue were their coping skills, not the conditions that corrode them. That’s the tarnished virtue: the very practices we market as “care” often serve to re-stabilise the same structures that produced the suffering. Therapy becomes a productivity tool. Mindfulness becomes a patch for meeting overload. Wellness is deployed not to liberate, but to keep people just functional enough to keep going. The wiser move is to see what’s hiding beneath. If illness is carrying the system’s unspoken contradictions — the fear, the grief, the impossibility — then the question isn’t how quickly we can get people “back to normal.” It’s whether leaders are willing to treat those fractures as signals. Sometimes the crack in the wall isn’t damage to be plastered over. It’s the place where truth is trying to break through.
A- Yes!
Q- Yes mental health is political: a surplus of the social projected into and internalised by marginalised or sensitised individuals and groups .... much cemented on by RD Laing, Biffo Beradi, Delueze and Guattari. Yes rage is repressed and quietened by ideology - wellness techniques to individualise and personalise societal violence.... techniques brought into the workplace including mindfulness, coaching and other personal development and well being techniques (Foucault, Nicholas Rose). However writing as a psychiatric nurse and psychotherapist, I have witnessed terrible personal and family suffering from mental health issues. Mental illness is personal as well as social, it is not either or. There are biological, physical, psychological, genetic and individual trauma and stresses that lead to a wide range of mental health issues. Even when the causes are economic, political, and social, individuals suffer and compassion, help/treatment and love are required. We also have to be wary of a idealising madness as a way of getting things done.... Whilst at the same time I totally agree that systemic violence and the capitalist appropriate of wellness/therapy to absorb and individualise need confronting.
A- Great points!