Surveillance Therapy
How the mental health industry creates fear
Since Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance, the topic has lost significance. But our surveillance architecture has only grown more steadily.
We have become accustomed to being recorded through data-gathering because the digital power structure in which surveillance operates has become necessary for our survival. Living off the grid is no longer possible, unless one desires a life of seclusion that comes at the cost of connection or influence. In this sense, our society appears to have reached a state of indifference by not caring about surveillance at all. But it is merely a faux indifference. Even here, we see a quiet rebellion growing beneath the surface: self-destructive timers on our chats and anonymous online profiles are becoming the new norm. “Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth,” Oscar Wilde once said.
This statement is especially relevant to the mental health industry in ways that are not immediately apparent, and may even seem contradictory to its patients. Although the industry presents itself as a panacea that offers us comfort and a cure, it can produce the opposite. It can be weaponised against those who dissent from prevailing orthodoxy. Records are kept, and a judge can compel psychologists and psychiatrists to break their confidentiality to report a given condition that may help resolve a case. Therapists keep files not just for their own sake, but because they are legally required to do so, while declaring to their patients they hold an ethical duty to protect their privacy. If that were true, one should ask why they are compelled by the law to keep a record of that information in the first place. Why is it not a choice left to a therapist’s discretion? The answer is inevitably one that resolves around security, but security is often justified as a tool for control.
This overarching system has not been created without warning. Philosophers like Michel Foucault had theorized about the dangers of “biopolitics”, creating institutions of wellbeing where our lives are optimized and standards of behavior sanitized by expert opinion. He wrote:
The asylum reduces all manifestations of madness to symptoms. Everything becomes a sign to be read by the psychiatrist, who imposes meaning upon the madman’s words and behaviours from the outside.
He further argued about the effects on the patient:
Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him.
The ship, a supposed means for freedom, becomes the madman’s prison. He is confined to a space of mobility without destination, of decision without agency. Once he rides the ship, he is bound to it, without a means to escape. His homeland becomes alien to him because he becomes an identified patient, set apart from the “normalcy” surrounding him.
By definition, the madman’s deviance from the system means disobedience that requires compliance, softly or even forcefully. The very idea of mental health diagnosis and criteria implies that there is an aspiration of mental health that is perfect, or at least advisable. One defined by new operators of power who divulge this information to the public, and which the public accepts as given. These theories permeate legal, cultural, and social structures creating established modes of behavior.
Claiming that one needs help is now romanticized as an act of courage, a heroic gesture, and one must ask if there is a reason for it. We do, indeed, all need help, at certain stages of our lives, and in different modalities, by loved ones or otherwise. But in the mental health industry, it means that now others have a say over your life, and that knowledge can be one day utilized and examined by third parties.
Where previously we may have voiced our concerns and asked for help from family members, friends, loved ones, or spiritual institutions, there is now a well-designed path towards being “cured”. Advertisements for prescription medication in the US and supposed success stories of therapeutic engagement are ubiquitous. Individuals can be involuntary committed if the circumstances arise. These twin pressures—to increasingly scrutinize ourselves and confess deviations from the apparent “norm” on the one hand or to be forced through it against our will, and to solely seek support from mental health professionals on the other as agents of scientific knowledge—has led to an increasingly powerful industry that evades questioning.
Religious structures once offered the opportunity for confession and discussion of one’s sins and experiences. Priests often did not know who would enter the confession chamber: There was a punctured wall dividing one from the other to guarantee secrecy. The kind of help offered today by the mental health industry is no longer sanctified through privacy, the idea that you are an independent soul irrespective of your identity. It is “professionalized” with a medical figure in a position of authority who holds the power to pathologize your identity, and within a surveillance-infrastructure that can hold you accountable.
Let’s look at the legal implications, where mental health has become a critical factor in determining trials. If there is a legal case, the value of mental health tests becomes dubious at best, and manipulative at worst. The concept of a mental health diagnosis becomes unreliable for a few reasons. We’ve seen this most clearly with the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial, in which viewers were in awe at how a therapist hired by the latter was able to dismantle the credibility of the former. Likewise, a therapist hired by the former sought to discredit the claims of the latter. Was Amber suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or Borderline Personality Disorder? The answer to this question rendered her either reliable or unreliable, and depended on whether she was being defended or prosecuted. What was most evident in this case was that Amber Heard and Johnny Depp’s credibility was questioned not by the evidence provided, but by who was considered the “most sane”. A traumatized or personality-disordered woman against a drug addict and alcoholic. The battle became not one of proof, but of credibility. The categorization of each party’s mental health became instrumentalized in the service of revenge.
The problems presented by the intersection of mental health with the law are not the result of misapplied tests or misinterpreted results. The problems result from the system itself being fundamentally flawed. It creates a sterilized environment based on behavioral control, in which we are expected to follow specific, preordained patterns of wellbeing. A failure to conform to these patterns, and the categorization of non-conformity under any of the increasing number of mental health “conditions”, provides a legal basis for adverse decisions to be made against non-conformists. They lack capacity, become unable to make choices in their own best interests, and suffer a credibility loss. Their beliefs are acceptable only if they pass through a medical gaze.
Under these circumstances, it is easy to forget that our mental state is not proof of our trustworthiness. A person who seeks mental health support and is deemed mentally ill may be more truthful than a person considered sane for never having sought that support.
Take, for example, someone suffering from undiagnosed psychopathy. They are uninterested in seeking treatment and therefore not subject to the scrutiny it entails. They would appear to be a functional and trustworthy member of society. Despite an inclination towards deceit and lack of empathy, they may be considered more credible than a conscientious person who has sought help. In this sense, the psychopath doesn’t merely fall through the cracks of the mental health industry: He bypasses it entirely through its self-defeating logic. Take, also, an individual who suffers from narcissistic tendencies who lacks self-awareness of the nature of their behaviors. If they seek therapy, the therapist’s understanding of their condition is one-sided, and may be mistaken. Presenting mental health practices as scientific can discourage critical thought and create a false sense of objectivity.
As religious structures have fallen to the wayside, mental health support can become tricky, because it is not, by definition, confidential, nor is it fully reliable in terms of its scientific judgment. In this context, fragility can become a tool of power instead of support. Rather than creating an environment of trust and care, the mental health industry can create one of fear and control where profit is the end-motive, and where self-aware, and often innocent members of society become not only collateral damage, but the intended target. A helpful reminder is to remain aware that admitting flaws in this system may carry the risk of liability in high-stake contexts.
Mental health criteria are ever-evolving, with some claiming that most of the population would be categorized as “disordered” at some point in their lives. Human challenge becomes pathologized, locked into a definition that stains, rather than one that is transcended. The idea that you can become another version of yourself becomes elusive: You are a patient, and now, you can remain one. Suppose that they can “cure” you, the system itself will still be guarded if you deviate from the norm once again, and their version of cure is certainly one that doesn’t match trends in society: mental health treatments are on the rise, but so are individuals who need help. This suggests a failure in the system.
While there are laws to guarantee confidentiality, what matters is the power of the pen. It can be utilized to fit diagnostic criteria, and that label can be legally enforceable if the occasion arises. That is enough to make someone hesitant to feel like they can properly express themselves and obtain the help they truly need. And sometimes, individuals need more than family and loved ones, they need to simply confess their thoughts to an outsider, even ones that are not deemed acceptable in the realms of modern definitions of sanity. To have someone listen to them without fear of judgment. It’s not that they may necessarily have something to hide, it’s that anonymity, through the knowledge that there will be no record, allows them to feel free from control, rather than alienated from their identity, and the society they inhabit.
It is perhaps no surprise that spiritual healers are growing in our society. This trend is not merely because they offer a system of transcendence that the modern health industry lacks, but because they’re immune to the legal structure of surveillance surrounding it. Individuals feel protected by the spirituality that comes from being unencumbered by temporal institutions of control.
It is not by creating new systems of surveillance based on a conception of wellbeing that can be used as a targeted weapon, that individuals can be helped to overcome their troubles. They are yearning for freedom: They need privacy.
Alessandra Bocchi is the founder of Alata Magazine and Rivista Alata.
This essay ultimately points to how the techniques of the Soviet Andrei Snezhnevsky are emerging in Western liberal societies. And AB is correct. While there actually is a therapist-patient privilege ensconced in US law, it is rather easy to circumvent the privilege during trials by using expert witnesses (hired guns) for independent evaluations. But taking a wider angle, the rise of “surveillance therapy” in the West is even more ominous for another reason: it increasingly is emerging as a tool to repress political dissent and nonconformity, thus echoing the techniques of Snezhnevsky. There is a nonfiction work and documentary titled “On Madness and Dissent” that focuses on psychiatry as a weapon in the Soviet Union that may be worth a gander. (haven’t read). And there are film adaptations as well, such as the “Lives of Others” and an even earlier warning “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. Weaponized psychiatry also was at work with the attempt to destroy Daniel Ellsberg and, with that in mind, it is of little surprise that the CIA is full of psychiatrists, as CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou stated in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson. Freedom of Speech is the best defense but it’s eroding as well, in large measure by limiting reach via algo’s. And Trump embracing Palantir potentially signals the triumph of of the surveillance State that, in turn, will full enable “surveillance therapy”.