“The anti-capitalist scholar Joel Kovel has gone as far as saying that the US mental health industry has proliferated and grown exponentially because the diagnoses of individual disorders and their treatments are part of the same social process. Writing before the mindfulness boom, Kovel observed that the mental health industry had been handsomely rewarded because of its institutional role in smoothing over and masking the growing contradictions of advanced capitalist societies. This took place despite the lack of much conclusive evidence for treatments, scientific progress or mastery over mental illness and psychological disorders. As Kovel puts it: ‘A purely psychologic view of human difficulties is a handy way of mystifying social reality, and it requires no feat of imagination to comprehend capitalist society would come to reward the psychiatric profession for promoting a special kind of psychological illusion.’
“… Back on the MBSR [Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction] course, the next exercise was ‘mindful movement,’ or basic yoga. Being more of a Tai Chi practitioner, I sat this one out until they got to the end, a supine posture on the floor. Relaxing, I couldn’t help but think about how mindfulness interventions have a Puritan obsession with controlling emotions, especially anger that is cloaked in new psychological and neuroscientific garb. The labels for dysfunction change over time––immaturity, hysteria, neurasthenia, nervous breakdowns, lack of emotional intelligence, problems of emotional self-regulation, mindlessness––but the fundamental model stays constant, based on a cult of subjectivity.”
Ronald E. Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
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