12. The Trauma Economy: How Mental Health is Exploited for Profit and Compliance
Modern mental health systems do not heal—they normalize suffering. Therapy and medication can be life-saving, but they are also structured to keep people functional within a broken system rather than questioning the system itself. Healing that leads to compliance is not true healing.
Mental Health as an Industry, Not a Solution
Mental health care should be about liberation. Instead, it has been transformed into an industry that profits from human suffering while keeping people dependent on the very system that made them sick in the first place.
Therapy focuses on coping with stress, not questioning why stress is so constant.
Medication is prescribed to keep people functional in exploitative conditions, not to remove those conditions.
Disorders are medicalized while the systemic causes of suffering—poverty, overwork, isolation—are ignored.
The goal is not to heal people. The goal is to make sure they remain productive workers and obedient citizens while managing their suffering just enough to keep going.
How the System Creates Mental Illness
Society is structured in a way that actively generates mental illness. The conditions most people live under—financial instability, job insecurity, social isolation, and chronic stress—are unnatural, yet they are treated as personal, individual problems.
1. The Economy of Anxiety and Depression
The modern economic system is designed to keep people anxious and exhausted.
Jobs demand long hours, low pay, and high stress, leading to burnout and breakdowns.
Debt traps people in a cycle of fear, making financial instability a constant source of stress.
The pressure to be productive and successful creates chronic anxiety and self-doubt.
Rather than addressing these conditions, society frames mental illness as a personal failing. The message is clear: If you’re struggling, you need to fix yourself—not the system that made you suffer.
2. The Corporate Takeover of Mental Health
Corporations and governments have co-opted mental health discourse to maintain control while pretending to care.
Workplaces promote "self-care" and "mental health awareness" while continuing to exploit employees.
Therapy is pushed as a solution while workplace abuse, toxic environments, and economic stress remain unchallenged.
"Resilience" is glorified, as if adapting to suffering is the same as healing.
This is why mainstream mental health discussions rarely mention capitalism, systemic oppression, or the deep structural causes of suffering—because real healing would mean dismantling the system itself.
3. Medication as Compliance
Medication can be life-saving. But it is also heavily influenced by profit motives and used as a tool to maintain compliance.
Pharmaceutical companies profit from lifelong customers, not cured patients.
Doctors prescribe medications for stress, anxiety, and depression without questioning why these conditions are so widespread.
The focus is on treating symptoms, not eliminating the root causes of distress.
People are medicated into tolerating conditions they should be resisting. If healing meant dismantling an unjust system, the system would rather keep people sick.
The Danger of Pathologizing Resistance
One of the most insidious ways mental health is weaponized is through the pathologization of resistance.
Anger at injustice is labeled as a disorder.
Dissociation from overwhelming stress is treated as an individual problem, rather than a symptom of societal dysfunction.
Apathy toward an exploitative system is framed as depression, instead of a rational response to an oppressive world.
When the system is the source of suffering, true healing is not about adapting—it’s about rejecting the conditions that made healing necessary in the first place.
How to Break Free from the Trauma Economy
Healing should not mean becoming more efficient within a broken system. It should mean finding ways to exist outside of it.
Shift from coping to questioning. Instead of just managing stress, ask: Why is this stress so normal? Who benefits from my suffering?
Recognize that your pain is not just personal. Mental health struggles are not just chemical imbalances—they are often rational responses to an oppressive world.
Reject productivity as a measure of worth. Your value is not determined by how much you work, produce, or achieve.
Seek healing that leads to freedom. True mental health should empower people to challenge and change the conditions that create suffering, not just survive within them.
The system does not want you to heal. It wants you to function just enough to keep serving it. But once you recognize that, you can stop trying to adjust to a broken world—and start creating something better.
Sources:
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.
Ehrenreich, B. (2001). Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Metropolitan Books.
Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press.
Moncrieff, J. (2008). The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment. Palgrave Macmillan.
Hari, J. (2018). Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions. Bloomsbury.
