There’s a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise: “Amory thought it was only the past that ever seemed strange and unbelievable.” After watching the new Passage Press documentary, Thank You For Sharing, you see how unbelievable the past – and the present – truly is.
The documentary focuses on the modern West’s treatment of mental illness, and begins with a montage of celebrities, reporters, and politicians decrying the mental health crisis. “Experts warn that many American kids and teens are now facing a full fledged mental health emergency,” one reporter remarks. “56% of white liberal women under the age of 30 have a diagnosed mental health issue,” another laments. And my favorite: “If you’re a black man in Britain, you are 17 times more likely to be diagnosed.” Mental illness targets white women in Bethesda with the same ferocity as black men in south London, and it’s coming for your kids.
Thank You For Sharing asks how that happened, and starts its story at the industrial revolution. When factories replaced homes as the epicenter of economic activity, experts replaced families as the main provider of healthcare. Mental issues – dealt with informally by families pre-industrialization – became commodified. The Asylum Industrial Complex was born.
The brutality of World Wars One and Two replaced asylums with pharmaceuticals. For the first time, troops were experiencing widespread mental illness – shellshock – because, as Dr. Andrew Scull explains in the film, “Industrialized warfare and human sanity are not compatible things.” Mental illness could now afflict anyone, so the military created an in-house clinical psychology program, replacing psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud’s therapeutic exploration of the unconscious mind) as the popular approach to treating mental illness.
The establishment line argues that industrial-scale drug prescribing after the World Wars constituted a tremendous leap forward in science. The savagery of Flanders Fields taught us that mental illness was inherent to our biological composition. Altering your biology is necessary if you want to stay sane.
But the establishment can’t see beyond its own self-flattering worldview. Industrialized warfare and industrial-scale psychiatry are in fact part of the same story. When factories and railroads swept Old Europe into economic materialism, the subsequent mass production of mechanized weapons caused the wars. In other words, war became the rational response to an arms race.
Similarly, when industrialization commodified mental health, advancements in pharmacology necessitated a use case. The drug wasn’t made to solve the problem; the problem was manufactured to sell the drug. “The intent of the individual agents in the system matters much less than the incentives of the structure in and of itself,” Cameron, who struggles with mental illness, explained. It’s no surprise that Benzedrine, the first commercially available amphetamine prescribed for fatigue, depression, and anxiety, came just 17 years after chlorine gas was first used in combat.
This is not to say all mental illness is fictitious, but it’s worth remembering the incentives at play. Mental healthcare was commodified in the name of objectivity – an expert was needed to diagnose your issue. However, experts justified their existence by the drugs they produced and prescribed, which beget the diagnoses which were curated to fit the problems. The problems, in turn, justified the expert class.
Thank You For Sharing alludes to that circular logic. One interviewee describes how pharmaceutical companies would test drugs on animals, record its effect, and have their marketing department choose which affliction the drug is best suited for. Panels of physicians would convene, leveraging their medical credentials to sell the drug further.
Debates over mental health completely ignore this. ADHD medications are a great example: Adderall comes from Teva Pharmaceuticals, a Massachusetts based company worth 43 billion dollars. Ritalin is owned by Novartis Pharmaceuticals, valued at over 300 billion. ADHD medication fills increased 23% since 2019. Drug companies, clinicians, and parents are all complicit in this catch-all diagnosis; a whole range of behaviors interpreted subjectively and pathologized. Your toddler who can’t sit still, a college student unable to study, funneled by an expert class into mind-altering pharmaceuticals.
Whether you believe mental health hysteria is caused by the 20th century’s full-throttled embrace of economic and scientific materialism, or if you simply blame a self-referential expert class (both can be true), there is no panacea. The documentary concludes: “The question of how to live a good life is extremely complicated… but I don’t think [it] is a different question than the question of how to be mentally well. That is the same thing.”
Thank You For Sharing is a valiant attempt at seeing the forest through the trees, but falls short of hitting a single, cohesive narrative.
Here’s one: You have the capacity for complex emotions to reflect the complex realities in which you live. Reducing the vicissitudes of life to vague, inalterable, genetic predispositions diagnoses agency out of existence. Just as war will follow the weapons; diagnoses will follow the drugs. So turn down the mental health hysteria, and venture forth with vigor.
The past is strange and unbelievable, but the future is in your hands.
Jack Verrill is a Senior Contributor at Young Voices. Follow him on X @jack_verri11