Death, depression, and the logic of the workhouse

One hundred and fifty people died on Tuesday when a plane crashed into the French alps. The Daily Express communicated this fact in a revealing fashion: 

Lubitz and 149 people - including passengers and members of crew - died on Tuesday when Germanwings Flight 4U9525 crashed into the French Alps.

Those who themselves kill are not to be counted among the dead. They belong in a separate category. One such category is evil. Evil, on the tabloid understanding, is other-than-us, without cause or explanation, rare, and present only in monsters. The reassuring thought is, presumably, supposed to be that people like us are not evil, people like us - ordinary, decent, people - do not have it within themselves to maim, destroy, or senselessly kill. It is not a thought that would survive any time in the company of Freud or Arendt.

There are ways, other than being evil, in which someone can cease to be one of us. Top of the list is being mad. The mad lack what, even in as implausible a case study as that of Express journalists, is taken to be definitive of humanity - rational agency. As with evil, the suspicion has to be that ostracising the mad functions to hide the uncomfortable truth that this condition is rather more general than we might hope.

The British tabloid press has a less than exalted history as regards showing sensitivity towards those with mental illnesses (as we are now called, the word 'mad' wearing its ideology too much on its sleeves to be fit for decent use). Here's a couple of Sun front pages turned up by a Google search:

You get the idea. All the platitudes that are said in response to this sort of thing are true: that people with mental illnesses are far more likely to harm ourselves than others, that most are in no danger of harming anyone, and so forth. The only problem with this line of argument is that it assumes, naively, that the editors of tabloid newspapers number amongst their objectives the accurate presentation of medical truths.

Anyway, the Express excelled itself this morning:

Cue a well-meaning storm of outrage. The New Statesman quickly weighed in with a piece which, whilst making much-needed observations (1 in 4 British adults have a diagnosable mental health problem in any given year) homed in on one particular line of argument:

As prescient commentators were quick to point out, it’s statistically likely that the paper has a number of people on staff who suffer from one. All over the world, people with mental health problems manage to work reliably in important jobs: as doctors and nurses, in the police, as firefighters, as politicians.

 The truth is, most of us rely on people with depression all throughout our everyday lives – in the vast majority of cases, we don’t even spot it.

People with depression are, you see, useful. They do jobs. That in fact was the NS headline: "Shock news: contra to this morning's headlines, people with depression have jobs".

Mind echoed this:

There will be pilots with experience of depression who have flown safely for decades, and assessments should be made on a case by case basis. 

 We should not, in other words, rule out a priori that a depressed person can earn an honest living by being a pilot.

Now all of this is humane and no doubt well-intended. Its certainly preferable to the folk-devil making of the sewer press. But it leaves me troubled. This response to the stigmatising of people with mental illness -- that we are useful members of society, this being understood broadly in terms of our ability to sell our labour - starkly reveals the implicit terms in which human beings are valued in capitalist society. Our value is not intrinsic, we are not and in of ourselves deserving of recognition. Nor are we even valuable in virtue of the dazzling variety of human traits, capabilities, and vulnerabilities which lend life a rich texture (our personality, our interests, our capacity to make others happy, to challenge others...) We are valuable because we can produce value in the economic sense of that word.

Even were this not in itself an indictment of a cruel, philistine, society, there's a problem with this line of thought as a strategy for mental health advocacy. Because it's just not always true that people with illnesses - let's at this point abandon the problematic dualism of mental and physical illness - can work*. If I'm sleeping for two-thirds of the day, or randomly breaking into tears, or terrified of any other human being, I quite obviously cannot sign up for the day shift at Pizza Express. Only ATOS and Christian Scientists think otherwise. Perhaps I might go my entire adult life without being able to participate in the labour market.

That does not make me worthless, and it is playing with fire to deploy arguments that leave space for claiming otherwise. It gives rise to a political logic akin to that of the workhouse, one that looks nightmarishly close to the intellectual path to the door of a Dignitas clinic. By contrast, I suggest the way we think about this area begins with an axiom: people matter regardless of the use capital can make of them. The reason, of course, that mental health advocacy doesn't go down this route is that it leads inexorably to politics; politics in a more fundamental sense than mere tinkering with the benefits system.


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*By work here, I mean 'work' as in sell labour. People can do creative stuff that is not work, and might well be in a position to do this when they are not in a position to submit to the discipline of labouring for other people. It's no small fault of capitalism that this distinction is systematically elided.