It's Not Just In Your Head

A listener shared with us that they felt that in episode #030 it sounded like we were shaming people who take psych meds. We wanted to clarify our stance with this brief response for anyone who has felt shamed when we speak critically about the pharmaceutical industry and biologically driven approaches to mental health treatment. 

The speaker in this trailer is Roy Grinker, cultural anthropologist and author of Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness. Get early access to this episode at patreon.com/itsnotjustinyourhead.

Max interviews author of the polemical book Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu, about the ways the so-called Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) uses fake empathy, mental health language, and superficial discourse on trauma to protect its material interests at the expense of lower wage workers.  The mental health field itself is positioned within the PMC strata and tends to lack class consciousness - part of what sparked the creation of this very podcast. But the PMC as a whole appears to deny any class positionality to the point of dissociation so that it lives in a world of fantasy to explain society, making it "the most delusional class" according to Liu. Near the end, conversations about psychoanalysis and today's cognitive-behavioral "customer satisfaction survey" therapies turn into cackling and managed grief.  

Catherine's references:

-Coming Up Short: Working Class Adulthood in An Age of Uncertainty, Jennifer Silva

This is a teaser clip of a full patrons-only episode we did on Sigmund Freud, the "father of psychotherapy." In our patrons-only discord chatroom, we were asked to answer questions about Freud such as: In what ways were Freud's ideas used to liberate vs oppress? Is psychoanalysis still needed? What material conditions helped create Freud's analysis? Why is psychoanalysis so inaccessible? What would Freud say about our culture if he were alive today?

Get early access to full episodes at patreon.com/itsnotjustinyourhead.

Kristen Ghodsee joins us to talk about sex and sexuality across the varied socialist experiments that took place for most of the 20th century in Eastern Europe. She acknowledges the well-known atrocities (purges, famines, secret police, gulags) - but cautions listeners to understand that  "heavy handed state socialism" was not the only form of socialism from 1917 to 1991 across Eastern Europe. Based on decades of ethnographic research, Ghodsee argues that despite some of the failures of socialist experiments (state socialism, goulash communism, market- and "self management" socialism, and many more), women consistently self-report having enjoyed sexual relationships more than women self-report in capitalist countries.

You can get Ghodsee's book "Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence" anywhere books are sold.

Get early access to our full interview with Kristen Ghodsee, author of "Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence," at patreon.com/itsnotjustinyourhead.

In this episode, we take a deeper dive into the origins and psychological and international implications of the existence and widespread use of the DSM - Diagnostic Statistical Manual - which is the bible of mental disorders used by psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, social workers and psychotherapists. When you seek therapy through either public or  private insurance, you must be diagnosed with something from the DSM for insurance to pay for services. Psychiatrists prescribe medication as treatment based on diagnoses within the DSM.

Where did this model of understanding human suffering come from? Why are biological/individual explanations for mental, emotional, and behavioral phenomena dominant in the field of mental health? How much do culture, politics, economics, and power influence our conceptualization of mental health within the USA and around the world? Does imperialism find ways to use the DSM its adjacent industries as an instrument of "soft power" to maintain and spread US cultural  hegemony?

-Wiki page on the DSM-5:

Get early access to full episodes at patreon.com/itsnotjustinyourhead. Email us at [email protected]

Tati Cosper contacted us to raise awareness about the connections between hunger, poverty and mental health in America - so we did an episode on it with her! Why are people malnourished in the richest country on Earth? How is it that people can work a full time job or multiple jobs, and not be able to feed their children? We explore stats such as "school-aged children who face severe hunger are 56.2% more likely to have PTSD and 53.1% more likely to have severe depression," and question how it is that 40% of food gets thrown in the trash in America. Is capitalism the best economic system for the production and distribution of food for children and working families?

Why are people malnourished in the richest country on Earth?

3 Devastating Effects of Hunger on the Body

To be thin but not healthy - The body-image dilemma may affect health among female university students in China

Weight status and body image perceptions in adolescents: current perspectives

Food Insecurity and Bulimia Nervosa in the United States https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6555671/

As Thanksgiving Approaches, Fewer Than Half of Households With Kids Very Confident About Affording Needed Food