Description
This paper explores mental health awareness campaigning and interventions in the United Kingdom as a tool of neoliberal governance. Through a critical analysis of mental health discourses in these programmes, this paper shows that government sponsored mental health awareness interventions constitute an important aspect of the contemporary neoliberal governance which seeks to naturalise the experience of mental distress under austere conditions. My focus on awareness-raising as a public health measure in the everyday challenges the disciplinary bias of IR to study mental illness within the usual realms of war, post-/conflict, and trauma. In particular, the discourse of awareness points to the legitimisation of hegemonic structures through the pathologisation of behaviours which can be interpreted as refusing or resisting the standards of expected labour productivity. In this manner, the insecurity that is caused by a decline in welfare funding and the detrimental economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic is re-framed as a burden for the population to bear through self-care and resilience. This paper interrogates the intersection of psychiatry and neoliberalism in the production of in/security in populations by revealing how attempts to 'secure' population mental health during crises legitimise the economic insecurity caused and perpetuated by neoliberal capitalism.
