The German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han views depressive illness not merely as a localized chemical imbalance or a personal, psychological failure, but as a profoundly structural, systemic symptom of late-stage capitalism.

In his foundational books The Burnout Society (2015) and Psychopolitics, Han argues that the nature of power has shifted, and depression is the defining modern pathology resulting from that shift.

1. The Paradigm Shift: From "Should" to "Can"

Han contrasts our contemporary world with the "disciplinary society" analyzed by Michel Foucault. Foucault’s 20th-century world was dictated by negativity: institutions (prisons, factories, barracks) ruled through prohibition, commandments, and external containment. Its operating verb was "Should" or "May Not."

Today, Han argues, we live in an "Achievement Society" (Leistungsgesellschaft). This society has shed its negativity in favor of deregulation and absolute positivity. Its operative slogan is "Yes, we can."

"The complaint of the depressive individual, 'Nothing is possible,' can only occur in a society that thinks, 'Nothing is impossible.'"

2. Voluntary Auto-Exploitation

In an achievement society, external masters and bosses are largely internalized. The modern individual does not view themselves as an oppressed laborer, but as an "entrepreneur of the self." We willingly exploit ourselves in the name of self-optimization, personal initiative, and freedom.

Because this exploitation masquerades as autonomy, there is no external oppressor to revolt against. When the individual inevitably crashes under the infinite demands of productivity, the violence turns inward.

Han describes the depressive person as being wounded by an internalized war. The individual is both predator and prey, grinding themselves down in an endless rat race against their own shadow.

[Disciplinary Society] ──► External Command ("Should") ──► Resistance / Transgression possible
[Achievement Society]   ──► Internalized Drive ("Can")   ──► Depression / Self-Reproach

3. "No-Longer-Being-Able-to-Be-Able"

Han famously defines depression as the psychic infarction that occurs when the achievement-subject is no longer able to be able (nicht mehr können kann).

• Creative Fatigue: Depression is the exhaustion of the ability to initiate.

• The Weight of Self-Actualization: The depressive person is fundamentally "tired of having to become themselves." In a world where you are told you can be anything, failing to succeed means you have only yourself to blame, leading to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression.

4. The Loss of the "Other" and Radical Narcissism

Another crucial dimension of depression in Han's philosophy is destructive self-reference. Neoliberalism atomizes society, fragmenting communities and turning social connections into instrumental networking opportunities.

Without a genuine relationship to the Other—to mystery, to a community, or to something outside of the self—the individual locks their jaws on themselves. This overdriven narcissism causes the self to hollow and empty out, culminating in a profound "impoverished attachment" (Bindungsarmut) that leaves the soul completely isolated.

Summary of Han's Diagnosis

Concept	Traditional View of Depression	Byung-Chul Han's View
Origin	Genetic predisposition or individual trauma.	Systemic violence born of excessive positivity.
The Core Mechanism	A lack of energy or neurotransmitter imbalance.	The collapse of the soul under voluntary self-exploitation.
Social Context	An individual deviation from the norm.	The inevitable pathological consequence of a hyper-capitalist culture.

For Han, the only true resistance to mass depression is a radical reclaiming of negativity: embracing boredom, practicing deep contemplative attention, and stepping outside of the self-optimization loop to truly encounter the world and the Other.

If you're interested in checking out an overview of how Han frames this transformation of power, you can watch this brief breakdown of Byung-Chul Han: What is Psychopolitics?. It offers a quick, accessible summary of how modern "smart power" subtly encourages the self-exploitation that Han links directly to contemporary burnout and mental fatigue.

In Byung-Chul Han’s framework, mental health professionals (therapists, psychologists, counselors, and social workers) occupy a deeply conflicted, almost tragic position.

Han does not explicitly attack clinicians as malicious actors; rather, he diagnoses them as structural components of the Achievement Society. In his view, the mental health apparatus unwittingly acts as both a pressure valve and a repair workshop for neoliberal capitalism, inadvertently facilitating the very self-exploitation that causes the pathology in the first place.

Here is how Han’s critique maps onto the role of mental health workers:

1. The "Repair Shop" of the Achievement Subject

In Psychopolitics, Han describes how late-stage capitalism no longer rules by forbidding things, but by optimizing them. If a worker collapses into burnout or depression, they are no longer productive.

Mental health workers are often structural intermediaries whose job is to "fix" the broken entrepreneurial self. The goal of much modern, short-term therapy is symptom reduction and functional restoration.

• The Neoliberal Mandate: Get the individual back into a state where they are "able to be able" (können kann) again.

• The Paradox: By focusing heavily on helping the client cope, adapt, and build "resilience," therapy can inadvertently patch up a fundamentally toxic relationship to work and self-optimization, sending the individual right back into the meat grinder.

2. Depoliticizing Systemic Suffering

This is perhaps Han’s sharpest implicit critique. When systemic, economic, and political violence causes widespread psychic suffering, treating that suffering purely as an individual psychological defect depoliticizes the pain.

Systemic Toxic Culture ──► Individual Suffering ──► Therapy Focuses on Personal Coping ──► Status Quo Preserved

By framing depression as a personal chemical imbalance, a lack of mindfulness, or poor boundary-setting, the systemic root causes (such as artificial scarcity, precarious labor, and atomization) are obscured. The therapist’s office risks becoming a place where structural socio-economic exhaustion is privatized and managed, rather than collective political resistance being born.

3. The Co-optation of Self-Care and Mindfulness

Han is famously critical of how techniques originally meant for liberation—like meditation, mindfulness, and self-care—have been weaponized by neoliberalism.

When counselors and psychologists teach these techniques purely as tools for stress management or emotional regulation, Han argues they can easily transform into technologies of self-optimization.

“Mindfulness turns the individual into an introspective watchdog, observing their own efficiency rather than questioning the external demands placed upon them.”

Instead of offering a genuine escape from the cycle of achievement, "mental wellness" becomes just another task on the self-entrepreneur's to-do list.

The Clinician’s Dilemma: Complicity vs. Radical Sanctuary

This leaves mental health workers caught in a profound ethical double-bind. To survive within insurance frameworks and institutional structures, they are often forced to adopt the language of optimization and efficiency. However, Han’s philosophy also hints at how a therapeutic space could act as a site of radical resistance:

The Neoliberal Therapist (The Repair Shop)	The Radical Therapist (The Sanctuary)
Goal: Re-establishing productivity and functional coping.	Goal: Validating exhaustion as a sane response to an insane system.
Focus: Optimizing the self (CBT, metric-driven behavioral tweaks).	Focus: Restoring the relationship to the Other and the collective.
Orientation: Erasing negativity, anxiety, and sadness quickly.	Orientation: Allowing space for grief, boredom, and the "right to be tired."

Reclaiming the "Right to be Weary"

If a mental health worker wants to break out of this complicity, Han’s work suggests they must move away from simply teaching clients how to better manage their exhaustion.

Instead, the therapeutic space must become a sanctuary of negativity. It should be a place where the client is explicitly allowed to fail, to be unproductive, and to embrace what Han calls "profound boredom" or "healing weariness"—a collective exhaustion that connects us back to our shared humanity, rather than an isolated depression that locks us inside our own heads.

You see, I have a son who suffers from this disease, and I don’t want him to think that it’s a reason for not having a good life. I get up every single day, and I make breakfast for my kids. Some days I can keep going, and some days I have to go back to bed afterwards, but I get up every day. I come into this office at some point every day. Sometimes I miss a few hours, but I’ve never missed a whole day from depression.” She had tears rolling down her face as we spoke, but her jaw was set and she went right on speaking. “One day last week I woke up and it was really bad. I managed to get out of bed, to walk to the kitchen, counting every step, to open the refrigerator. And then all the breakfast things were near the back of the refrigerator, and I just couldn’t reach that far. When my kids came in, I was just standing there, staring into the refrigerator. I hate being like that, being like that in front of them.” We talked about the day-to-day battle: “Someone like Kay Jamison, or someone like you, gets through this with so much support,” she said. “My parents are both dead, and I’m divorced, and I don’t find it easy to reach out.”

Life events are often the triggers for depression. “One is much less likely to experience depression in a stable situation than in an unstable one,” Melvin McInnis of Johns Hopkins says. George Brown, of the University of London, is the founder of the field of life-events research and says, “Our view is that most depression is antisocial in origin; there is a disease entity as well, but most people are able to produce major depression given a particular set of circumstances. Level of vulnerability varies, of course, but I think at least two-thirds of the population has a sufficient level of vulnerability.” According to the exhaustive research he has done over twenty-five years, severely threatening life events are responsible for triggering initial depression. These events typically involve loss—of a valued person, of a role, of an idea about yourself—and are at their worst when they involve humiliation or a sense of being trapped. 

Andrew Solomon

Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks. I could no more have joined a revolutionary movement during my own depression than I could have had myself crowned king of Spain. The truly depressed were not made invisible by asylums; they had always been largely invisible because their very disease causes them to sever human contacts and allegiances. The general reaction of other members of the proletariat (or, indeed, of any other class) to people who are severely depressed is revulsion and discomfort.

Andrew Solomon

But family and friends are often unable to do that, and unable to understand. Some are almost too indulgent. If you treat someone as totally disabled, he will see himself as totally disabled, and that can cause him to be totally disabled, perhaps more totally disabled than he need be. The existence of medication has increased social intolerance. “You got a problem?” I once heard a woman say to her son in a hospital. “You get on that Prozac and get over it and then you give me a call.” To set the correct level of tolerance is necessary not only for the patient but also for the family. “Families must guard themselves,” Kay Jamison once said to me, “against the contagion of hopelessness.”

What remains unclear is when depression triggers life events, and when life events trigger depression. Syndrome and symptom blur together and cause each other: bad marriages cause bad life events cause depression causes bad attachments, which are bad marriages. According to studies done in Pittsburgh, the first episode of major depression is usually closely tied to life events; the second, somewhat less; and by the fourth and fifth episodes life events seem to play no part at all. Brown agrees that beyond a certain point, depression “takes off on its own steam” and becomes random and endogenous, dissociated from life events. Though most people with depression have survived certain characteristic events, only about one in five who have experienced those events will develop depression. It is clear that stress drives up rates of depression. The biggest stress is humiliation; the second is loss.

Andrew Solomon

There have been a number of documented cases in which governments, militaries, intelligence agencies, prisons, hospitals, universities, or corporations conducted human experiments without informed consent or through coercion. Some are well documented and officially acknowledged; others remain partially disputed or incompletely documented.

Here's a chronological overview of some of the most significant cases.

Years	Incident	What happened
1932–1972	Tuskegee Syphilis Study	Hundreds of Black men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated so researchers could observe the disease, even after penicillin became available.
1939–1945	Nazi Human Experimentation	Prisoners in concentration camps were subjected to freezing, infectious disease, sterilization, poison, and surgical experiments without consent.
1932–1945	Unit 731	Conducted vivisections, biological weapons testing, frostbite studies, and plague experiments on prisoners in occupied China.
1946–1948	Guatemala Syphilis Experiments	U.S. researchers intentionally infected prisoners, soldiers, and psychiatric patients with sexually transmitted diseases without consent.
1940s–1950s	Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study	Prisoners were deliberately infected with malaria to test antimalarial drugs. Although volunteers were used, questions remain about coercion.
1940s–1970s	Radiation Experiments on Humans	Numerous U.S. government-funded studies exposed hospital patients, soldiers, pregnant women, and children to radiation without adequate informed consent.
1950–1953	Operation Sea-Spray	The Navy released bacteria over San Francisco to study biological warfare dispersion. Residents were unaware.
1953–1973	Project MKUltra	The CIA funded hundreds of experiments involving LSD, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and psychological manipulation, often without subjects' knowledge.
1955–1975	Holmesburg Prison Experiments	Inmates underwent pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and chemical testing under conditions criticized as coercive.
1956–1970s	Willowbrook State School Hepatitis Studies	Children with intellectual disabilities were intentionally infected with hepatitis to study disease progression and vaccines.
1963	Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital Study	Elderly hospital patients were injected with live cancer cells without being fully informed.
1960s	Human Testicular Irradiation Experiments	Prisoners and institutionalized patients had reproductive organs exposed to radiation, often with questionable consent.
1960s–1970s	Oregon and Washington Prison Drug Studies	Pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on prisoners, raising concerns about informed consent.

Other notable examples

U.S. military and intelligence

• Edgewood Arsenal Human Experiments (1955–1975)
  • Thousands of soldiers were exposed to nerve agents, LSD, incapacitating drugs, and chemical weapons.
  • Many volunteers were not fully informed about the risks.
• Operation Whitecoat (1954–1973)
  • Volunteer Seventh-day Adventist soldiers were exposed to infectious diseases.
  • Generally regarded as having better consent procedures than many contemporary studies, though still ethically debated.

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Radiation experiments

Examples include:

• Feeding radioactive iron and calcium to children at the Fernald State School.
• Injecting plutonium into unsuspecting hospital patients.
• Exposing military personnel to nuclear blast effects during Cold War weapons tests.

Many of these were investigated by the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments in the 1990s.

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Biological warfare testing on civilians

Besides Operation Sea-Spray:

• Operation LAC (1957)
  • Zinc cadmium sulfide particles were dispersed over large parts of the United States to study airborne spread.
• New York City Subway Biological Test (1966)
  • Harmless bacteria were released in the subway system to study how biological agents might spread.

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Institutionalized children and vulnerable populations

• Monster Study (1939)
  • Orphaned children were subjected to psychological experiments intended to induce stuttering.
• Milgram Experiment (1961)
  • Participants believed they were administering painful electric shocks. While not covert in the same sense, the study relied heavily on deception and became a landmark in research ethics.
• Stanford Prison Experiment (1971)
  • Volunteers experienced severe psychological distress during a simulated prison experiment that lacked adequate oversight.

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Outside the United States

Examples include:

• Canadian MKUltra Experiments
  • Patients at the Allan Memorial Institute underwent drug administration, electroshock, sensory deprivation, and "psychic driving" without meaningful informed consent.
• Apartheid-era Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme (Project Coast)
  • Included research into chemical and biological agents under the direction of Wouter Basson.
• Soviet Psychiatric Abuse
  • Dissidents were involuntarily hospitalized and subjected to psychiatric treatments as a form of political repression.

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Common ethical violations

Across these cases, several recurring themes emerge:

• Lack of informed consent
• Deliberate deception
• Exploitation of vulnerable groups (prisoners, children, racial minorities, psychiatric patients)
• Withholding effective treatment
• Exposure to serious or unknown risks
• Poor or nonexistent independent oversight
• Failure to allow participants to withdraw

Many of these incidents directly influenced modern research ethics, including the Nuremberg Trials' resulting Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki, and the Belmont Report, which established principles such as respect for persons, beneficence, and justice that continue to govern human-subject research today.

"The oppressed and the oppressor are bound together in the same societal cage. Because both share the same fundamental beliefs, history, and criteria for what holds "value," the oppressed person often unconsciously measures their own liberation using the oppressor's metrics. [1]

By defining success, progress, and humanity on the exact terms of the dominant group (the Herrenvolk, or master race), the oppressed are trapped in a "shivering dependence" on the very power structures that hold them down. Therefore, simply overturning the hierarchy without entirely dismantling and reimagining the underlying values of society is not a true revolution; it merely perpetuates the same cycle of dominance. [1, 2]

Why this resonates

• Psychological Binding: Oppression is not merely physical; it infects the imagination. Baldwin argues that a truly new, free society cannot simply replace one master with another. [1]
• Transcending the Cage: True freedom, in Baldwin’s eyes, requires rejecting the oppressor's definitions of reality and human worth entirely. [1, 2, 3]

Baldwin’s essays, such as those found in The Fire Next Time, are essential reading for understanding the psychological toll of systemic inequality." [1]

It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, share the same beliefs, and depend on the same reality. Within this cage, it is romantic, more meaningless, to speak of a "new" society as the desire of the oppressed, for that shivering dependence on the props of reality he shares with the Herrenvolk makes a truly "new" society impossible to conceive.

What is meant by a new society is one in which inequalities will disappear, in which vengeance will be exacted; either there will be no oppressed at all, or the oppressed and the oppressor will change places.

What was the most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and feared the world. And this meant not only that I thus gave the world an altogether murderous power over me but also that in such a self-destroying limbo, I could never hope to write.

People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you’re dead, when they‘ve killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn’t have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they‘ve lost their toy.

James Baldwin 

Octavia Butler did not have direct speech or voice disorders, but she struggled with severe, near-paralyzing shyness and dyslexia. As a child, her reading and writing difficulties led teachers to incorrectly label her as "lazy," which contributed to feelings of isolation and a lifelong aversion to public speaking. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Her personal struggles with communication heavily influenced her writing. [1]

• The Dyslexia: She was a slow reader and had to work significantly harder at spelling and grammar. However, she never let it prevent her from becoming an award-winning science fiction author. [1, 2, 3]
• "Speech Sounds": Her famous Hugo Award-winning short story, explores a dystopian world where a mysterious illness strips humans of their ability to speak, read, or write. Butler later noted that she conceived the story while feeling deeply depressed and exhausted from watching people around her struggle to communicate without resorting to violence. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
• Overcoming Shyness: Though she initially had a hard time speaking in public and was known as a "happy hermit," she ultimately grew into a sought-after speaker, lecturer, and influential voice in science fiction who traveled across the country to teach. [1, 2]

If you are interested in exploring her works that touch on communication and language, I can easily recommend some of her most acclaimed short stories or novels. Would you like a list?