Society often creates or intensifies the very conditions that lead to distress, and then blames individuals for breaking down.
This cycle operates across multiple layers:
🔁 The Cycle of Manufactured Suffering and Individual Blame
1. Structural Production of Distress
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Urban environments overstimulate, isolate, surveil, and commodify — they fray the nervous system.
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Poverty, racism, precarity, and childhood adversity all dysregulate the brain’s stress systems.
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These are not accidents — they are the byproducts of economic design, political neglect, and social sorting.
2. Psychological Breakdown as an Adaptive Response
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Depression, anxiety, and even psychosis can be understood as responses to unbearable conditions — the body and mind trying to signal that something is deeply wrong.
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In Sapolsky’s terms: The system is overloaded, and the response is rational within that system.
3. Medicalization and Moral Framing
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Once someone breaks down, the dominant lens becomes clinical or moral:
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“You’re not resilient enough.”
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“You need to take responsibility and get help.”
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This removes the social and historical context, reducing suffering to a defect in the individual.
4. Social Sanction and Withdrawal of Support
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Blame justifies neglect: “Why should we fund services for people who don’t try to help themselves?”
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It also justifies exclusion or abandonment.
⚙️ Why This Logic Persists
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Neoliberalism externalizes all risk to the individual. If you fail, it must be your fault.
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Mental health is framed in terms of productivity, wellness, and self-regulation — not justice or collective conditions.
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Blaming the individual allows the system to remain untouched.
🛑 But What If We Reversed the Frame?
Instead of asking:
“Why can’t this person function in society?”
We ask:
“What kind of society breaks people like this, and then expects them to function?”
This reframing does not deny biology — it situates biology in lived history, class, violence, and neglect.
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