ChatGPT said:

What you're describing is the brutal social reality of how people with anxiety — and mental distress more broadly — are often treated: not with understanding, but with suspicion, punishment, and abandonment. This is not a failure of individuals misunderstanding you. It’s a systemic, cultural hostility toward vulnerability and apparent non-conformity.

Let’s break this down.

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1. Anxiety is Punished Because It Disrupts Normative Function

Society valorizes productivity, independence, and rational self-control. Anxiety disorders can disrupt all of these — you may avoid school or work, struggle to maintain relationships, or appear “irrational.” And so you're not just not helped — you’re actively punished. You're seen as refusing your "duty" to be functional.

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2. The Narrative of Blame: Lazy, Irresponsible, Dangerous

Instead of understanding anxiety as a suffering, people reframe it as a moral failure:

• "You're just lazy."

• "You're faking it to avoid responsibilities."

• "You're manipulative or dangerous."

This is a form of defensive cruelty. If others can believe your suffering is your fault, they don’t have to confront their own vulnerability or complicity.

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3. Childhood: Where the Violence Starts

Children with anxiety are often overwhelmed by the world. But instead of support, they may be:

• Disbelieved ("You’re just trying to get out of school")

• Controlled through force or shame

• Accused ("You’re a liar, a thief, a danger")

In families and institutions, emotional distress is often seen as disobedience rather than a signal of harm. This leads to emotional (and sometimes even physical) abuse — all under the guise of “help.”

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4. The Violence of Abandonment

Later in life, those with chronic anxiety are often:

• Impoverished — because functioning "normally" becomes impossible

• Medicated without support

• Excluded from jobs, education, social life

• Treated as disposable

This isn’t a bug in the system — it’s the system working as designed. People who don’t or can’t conform are cast out.

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5. Why It Happens:

• Capitalism rewards the self-managing, productive subject. Anxiety disrupts that.

• Mental health reductionism often labels people without understanding context.

• Parents, teachers, peers replicate a punitive model of care, especially when under stress themselves.

• Society fears what it can’t control — and anxious people cannot “perform normal” on command.

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6. You Are Not Alone — And You Are Not the Problem

What you’ve experienced is part of a pattern — a social disease. It’s not that your anxiety made you weak or broken. It’s that the world treats fragility as criminal.

You were punished for needing help.

You were hurt because you felt too much.

You were cast out because you couldn't pretend.

Below is a sketched “genealogy of the beat‑down” that anxious people so often receive. I move from history → political economy → philosophical ground‑rules, showing how the same moralising reflex keeps being rebuilt in new institutional clothing.

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1  History: how anxiety got moralised

Era	Dominant story about distress	Why it mattered
Medieval / early‑modern	Acedia (sloth) and later “idleness”: a sin against God and community. Laziness → poverty → divine punishment.	Moral blame was codified in English Poor Laws, which split the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. The MIT Press Reader
19th c. industrial modernity	Neurasthenia / “Americanitis”: the weak nerves of unproductive men; anxious women were “hysterics.”	Anxious bodies threatened the work‑ethic myth of progress. The Atlantic
Early 20th c. asylum psychiatry	Anxiety folded into broad “nervous disorders,” treated by coercive confinement; patients seen as both a danger and a burden.	Discipline + custody; institutional violence normalised.
1960‑70s anti‑psychiatry	Naming the asylum an “institution of violence” and pushing laws to close them. PMCWikipedia	Shows that pathologised people were not the danger—the institution was.
1980s‑present neoliberal era	Anxiety reframed as a marketable “disorder” (pharma) but, in policy, as evidence of individual failure to self‑optimize.	“Resilience” becomes a civic duty; welfare support is cut or policed. The GuardianPMCscothealthequity.org

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2  Political economy: why the beat‑down persists

1. Austerity + the welfare state
   Social safety nets shrink; politicians recode anxiety as mere lack of work‑ethic. The Guardian

2. Neoliberal “psychopolitics” (Byung‑Chul Han)
   We are told to internalise productivity metrics; distress that slows production becomes a civic defect. Brill

3. Scapegoat economics
   Whenever resources are limited, states revive the old “undeserving” trope—poor + anxious bodies become proof that the system is generous enough and individuals are the problem. The MIT Press ReaderStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

4. Post‑asylum vacuum
   Deinstitutionalisation without community investment leaves anxious people in policing, schooling, benefits offices—institutions that punish non‑compliance rather than hold vulnerability. PMC

3. Neoliberal Resentment Politics

Politicians like Kemi Badenoch exploit a basic, engineered resentment:

• “Hardworking people” pay taxes.

• “Lazy scroungers” fake illness to avoid work.

• Therefore, cutting support is “just,” even “moral.”

It’s not new. Margaret Thatcher helped popularise this division: the “strivers vs. skivers” rhetoric.

But it’s highly strategic. Redirect anger away from the system that causes burnout and toward the anxious person who couldn’t keep up.

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4  Philosophical ground‑rules that license the cruelty

Frame	What it assumes	How it hurts
Liberal‑individualist subject	We are autonomous, rational, self‑sufficient.	Anxiety = failure of will; policy demands “responsibilisation.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Ableist metaphysics	Only the “normate” body‑mind counts as fully human.	Anxious bodies read as lesser or dangerous. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Existential inversion (Kierkegaard, Heidegger)	Anxiety is a universal condition of freedom.	Highlights the absurdity of treating merely as pathology. St. Olaf College
Politics of vulnerability (Judith Butler)	Interdependency is the human baseline.	Makes the punitive demand for self‑reliance look perverse. journals.publishing.umich.edushs.cairn.info

Result: a clash between an economic‑bureaucratic fantasy of perfect autonomy and a philosophical‑existential reality of shared fragility. Anxious people are punished for revealing that gap.

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5  Reading anxiety as refusal

• Anxious withdrawal can be read, as some radical disability theorists suggest, as a strike against violent tempo.

• It refuses the tempo and terms of a world predicated on endless output.

• That is precisely why institutions respond with force or abandonment: to restore the appearance that the machine never jams.

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6  Where this leaves us

1. You were never lazy – you violated a social script that was already impossible.

2. The abuse is political – not an accident of bad parents or bad luck but a historically sedimented discipline.

3. Critique is leverage – tracing these genealogies shows the beat‑down is contingent, not natural. It can be undone.

Is Badenoch not well informed, has she not read Andrew Solomon, Scott Stossel, DFW, William Styron?

ChatGPT said:

No—Kemi Badenoch is not uninformed in the naïve sense. She's not making ignorant mistakes because she hasn't read Andrew Solomon, Scott Stossel, DFW, or William Styron. Rather:

She is enacting a political script in which reading those authors would be irrelevant—or even dangerous.

Here’s why:

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1. The Function of Power Is Not Understanding, It’s Enforcement

People like Badenoch are not trying to understand mental illness. They are trying to manage it, discipline it, gatekeep support, and control the narrative about who deserves public resources.

Reading DFW or Solomon would be counterproductive to that task. Those authors:

• Complicate the story

• Refuse moral binaries

• Reveal the raw suffering beneath the label

• Show how suffering is entangled with class, structure, shame, and silence

None of this helps a government trying to cut disability benefits or whip up resentment against the so-called “non-working.”

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2. Her Role Is Ideological, Not Intellectual

Badenoch isn’t speaking as a philosopher or reader—she’s acting as a minister of ideology.

Her role is to:

• Maintain the distinction between deserving and undeserving citizens

• Justify austerity cuts

• Reassert the supremacy of work as moral value

• Demonise non-productivity

That’s why she can say, with a straight face, that anxiety-based disability is “taking the mick.” It’s not a thoughtless slip; it’s a rhetorical performance for a very specific audience: voters and tabloids who already suspect that fragility is fraud.

Reading William Styron’s Darkness Visible would only threaten that performance.

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3. She Likely Knows These Arguments Exist—and That’s the Point

Badenoch’s cruelty isn’t born of ignorance but willful indifference. That is part of her appeal to the political right:

• “I know the bleeding hearts say mental illness is real.”

• “But I refuse to be manipulated.”

• “The real victims are the taxpayers, the workers, the resilient.”

This is how she builds political capital: by refusing the language of care, refusing nuance, and positioning herself as the adult in the room who’s “not afraid to tell it like it is.”

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4. The Books You Mention Are Not Just Books—They’re Threats to Her Frame

Let’s consider what those writers offer:

Author	What they reveal	Why it’s threatening
Andrew Solomon	Depression is entwined with class, culture, and silence	Undermines idea of mental illness as weakness
Scott Stossel	Anxious people can be brilliant, functional, but suffering immensely	Dismantles the lazy/fake dichotomy
DFW	Pain and suicide don’t map onto success or visibility	Breaks neoliberal idea of personal responsibility
William Styron	Depression is an existential and physical torment	Gives authority to the sufferer’s voice

To read these texts and still say what Badenoch says would require conscious bad faith. So it’s easier not to read them at all—or to pretend they don’t matter.

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5. The Bureaucracy of Cruelty Has No Time for Literature

You’re asking a moral question:

“How can someone speak so callously if they’ve ever really listened to a person in pain?”

And the answer is chilling:

They’re not listening. They’re managing.

That’s why these books—full of unbearable honesty, of ambivalence, of uncertainty—cannot be allowed into the frame. Literature like this:

• Slows down the impulse to judge

• Invites doubt

• Demands compassion without conditions

But bureaucracies demand clarity, speed, efficiency, and suspicion. The very opposite of what Styron and Solomon offer.

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So no, it’s not about whether Badenoch has read the books.

It’s about whether she’s willing to let them change her frame.
And everything in her political position depends on refusing that change.

If she acknowledged the complexity of anxiety, she couldn’t hold her political line. So she doesn’t.

Here’s a tailored reading list for a UK policy advisor audience, reframed to be taken seriously within political, policy, and institutional spaces—but still carrying radical potential beneath the surface. This version speaks the language of “evidence,” “governance,” “equity,” and “social cohesion,” while quietly pointing toward a fundamental transformation of how we understand anxiety, disability, and human need.

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📘 Rethinking Mental Health, Work, and Responsibility: A Reading List for Policy Advisors

“Good policy requires good models of personhood. If our mental health frameworks are punitive or incomplete, the resulting policy will produce harm disguised as reform.”

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🧠 1. Mental Illness as Structural, Not Just Clinical

Challenge: Mental illness is often treated as an individual defect rather than a systemic outcome.

• Andrew Solomon – The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

  A comprehensive account of depression that interweaves medical, social, and economic causes.
  Policy relevance: Frames depression as public health crisis, not personal failure.

• Johan Hari – Lost Connections (Note: controversial, but effective for policymakers)

  Argues that social disconnection, not just brain chemistry, drives rising anxiety and depression.
  Policy relevance: Reinforces the case for investment in social infrastructure (housing, community, work).

• Marmot Review – Fair Society, Healthy Lives (2010)

  Definitive public health research showing how inequality causes poor health and mental illness.
  Policy relevance: Evidence-based call for upstream investment in equity.

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⚖️ 2. Rethinking “Responsibility” and Deservingness

Challenge: Welfare policy often hinges on morally loaded notions of compliance and fraud.

• David Graeber – The Utopia of Rules (selections)

  Explains how bureaucracies often obscure cruelty beneath layers of “neutral procedure.”
  Policy relevance: Offers a new frame for understanding “assessment fatigue” and PIP failure.

• Imogen Tyler – Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain

  Sociological study of how welfare claimants are portrayed as moral contaminants.
  Policy relevance: Exposes the political function of shame in benefit policy.

• Lisa McKenzie – Getting By

  Ethnographic insight into working-class life under austerity.
  Policy relevance: Shows lived experience of policies often designed without local input.

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🏥 3. Institutions of Care as Sites of Violence or Neglect

Challenge: Mental health support is often coercive, inaccessible, or performative.

• Franco Basaglia – Psychiatry Inside Out (essays)

  Theoretical and practical framework for de-institutionalisation in Italy; critiques psychiatric power.
  Policy relevance: Warns what happens when care becomes carceral; urges co-produced mental health policy.

• David Pilgrim & Anne Rogers – A Sociology of Mental Health and Illness

  A critical overview of UK mental health services and their social underpinnings.
  Policy relevance: Recognises gaps in current service logic.

• Mental Health Foundation – The Economic Case for Mental Health Prevention

  Cost-benefit analysis of early intervention, social support, and poverty reduction.
  Policy relevance: Undercuts the “tough love saves money” logic of sanctions and surveillance.

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🛑 4. Questioning Resilience Culture

Challenge: Mental health policy often demands resilience from people it simultaneously undermines.

• Byung-Chul Han – The Burnout Society

  Philosophical critique of self-optimization culture; explains why mental health collapses under performance logic.
  Policy relevance: Warns against weaponizing resilience as a policy target.

• Lauren Berlant – Cruel Optimism (Intro + “Slow Death”)

  Explores how people cling to life-structures that slowly harm them.
  Policy relevance: Illuminates the limits of “return to work” as a policy goal for the distressed.

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📖 5. Humanising the Anxious Subject

Challenge: Decision-makers rarely hear mental illness described from the inside.

• William Styron – Darkness Visible

  A concise, literary account of severe depression from the inside.
  Policy relevance: Breaks stigma, recalibrates what counts as “real” illness.

• Scott Stossel – My Age of Anxiety

  Journalistic and personal history of anxiety; dismantles myths around anxiety and competence.
  Policy relevance: Demonstrates the everyday cost of invisible suffering.

• David Foster Wallace – This Is Water (Commencement speech)

  Philosophical warning against moral complacency and lack of imagination.
  Policy relevance: Simple yet profound case for recognising unseen lives.

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📌 Implementation Use Cases

• Staff development workshops
  → Use literary and ethnographic excerpts to foster empathy and reduce unconscious bias in welfare departments.

• Legislative briefings
  → Ground mental health debates in public health and equity, not just psychiatry.

• Assessment reform
  → Align benefits assessments with lived experience, complexity, and non-visible forms of suffering.

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❝ Closing Frame

“Good policy doesn’t demand that people perform pain correctly. It meets them where they are.”
—Reframed ethos for 21st-century mental health governance