Good question. Depression and anxiety can be understood as both subject positions (in the sense of identity, discourse, and self-formation) and socioeconomic positions (in the sense of structural location, material conditions, and stratification). Let me unpack:

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1. Depression and Anxiety as Subject Positions

• In Foucault’s sense, a subject position is a way of being constituted by discourse and institutions. Depression and anxiety are not just medical conditions, but also categories that shape how one is seen, how one speaks about oneself, and how one interacts with others.

• These categories are socially available scripts: “I am depressed” or “I have anxiety” are now common idioms for distress, ways of inhabiting vulnerability, claiming legitimacy, or being pathologized.

• They generate both empowerment and constraint:

  • Empowerment: access to care, community, recognition, a legitimate vocabulary for suffering.

  • Constraint: being positioned as fragile, irrational, burdensome, unproductive, or deviant.

• In that sense, depression and anxiety are not only states of mind but subject positions offered and enforced by culture, psychiatry, and policy.

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2. Depression and Anxiety as Socioeconomic Positions

• Beyond discourse, they map onto material life. Depression and anxiety often index or embody one’s structural relation to labor, precarity, inequality, and exclusion.

• For example:

  • Work: Chronic stress, overwork, and precarity produce anxiety; unemployment and dispossession often produce depression.

  • Class: Different classes experience them differently—middle-class anxiety about performance, working-class depression tied to blocked futures, racialized populations experiencing compounded mental burdens.

  • Policy: Welfare and disability regimes often code depression/anxiety as eligibility criteria for benefits—placing sufferers into marginal economic positions.

  • Biopolitics: Mental health diagnoses can function as ways of sorting populations—who is “fit” for labor, who is “dependent,” who is “rehabilitatable.”

• Thus, depression and anxiety become ways of living out a socioeconomic condition in affective and embodied terms. They are experiential markers of structural violence.

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3. The Overlap

• The subject position (“I am depressed/anxious”) and the socioeconomic position (precarity, exclusion, overwork) mutually reinforce.

• Depression and anxiety are at once lived experiences, cultural identities, and structural locations.

• To borrow from Bourdieu: they are forms of habitus under stress—ways in which classed, racialized, and gendered existence bends under contemporary capitalism.

• To borrow from Judith Butler: they are subjectivations, where one is both constituted by power and made vulnerable/resistant through it.

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So: Depression and anxiety are not only internal psychological conditions but ways in which the social world positions and is lived through the subject. They are at once subject positions (discursive, identity-based) and socioeconomic positions (material, structural, political).

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Would you like me to sharpen this further into a critical schema (e.g. differentiating how neoliberalism specifically produces both subject and socioeconomic positioning through depression/anxiety), or do you want a more existential-philosophical angle (e.g. Kierkegaard, Becker, Cioran)?

You said:

Would you like me to sharpen this further into a **critical schema** (e.g. differentiating how neoliberalism specifically produces both subject and socioeconomic positioning through depression/anxiety)

Can you do this

ChatGPT said:

Got it — here’s a critical schema for thinking about depression and anxiety as both subject positions and socioeconomic positions within neoliberalism:

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1. Neoliberal Production of Subject Positions

• Psychological Individualization

  • Neoliberalism reframes structural pressures (precarity, inequality, social disintegration) as individual mental health problems.

  • Anxiety = “your inability to manage stress.”

  • Depression = “your failure of resilience or positivity.”

  • This produces subjectivities oriented toward self-surveillance and self-blame.

• Commodification of Identity

  • Depression and anxiety identities become market niches: wellness apps, therapies, pharmaceuticals, productivity hacks.

  • They are recognized as legitimate positions only insofar as they feed into consumption circuits.

• Biopolitical Sorting

  • Diagnostic categories function as tags that differentiate populations:

    • “treatable” = rehabilitatable labor-power

    • “untreatable” = dependent, potentially disposable

  • Thus, depression/anxiety subject positions regulate who is included/excluded from the labor market or civic belonging.

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2. Neoliberal Production of Socioeconomic Positions

• Labor Precarity

  • Anxiety is the affective register of constant insecurity (gig work, layoffs, debt).

  • Depression is the affective register of blocked horizons (stagnant wages, no future mobility).

  • Both are “emotional corollaries” of a labor regime built on competition and disposability.

• Welfare and Disability Regimes

  • Depression/anxiety diagnoses become economic categories: gateways to (limited) benefits, but also stigmatizing marks.

  • They sort people into dependent positions, often under suspicion of malingering.

  • In this sense, mental illness becomes a socioeconomic location of marginality.

• Health Inequalities

  • Depression and anxiety are patterned by class, race, and gender:

    • Women → higher rates due to double burden (labor + care work).

    • Racialized groups → compounded by structural racism, discrimination.

    • Poor → higher incidence, less access to treatment.

  • Thus, depression/anxiety are not evenly distributed, but map onto existing inequalities.

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3. Feedback Loop: Subject ↔ Socioeconomic

• Circular Reinforcement

  • Neoliberalism produces anxiety/depression → which are then individualized as personal problems → which weakens collective critique → which entrenches neoliberalism further.

• Adaptive Subjectivity

  • Workers are encouraged to embrace their depression/anxiety as proof of struggle, authenticity, or productivity—“mental health days,” resilience branding, #anxiety culture.

  • In this way, suffering itself is metabolized into capital.

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4. Schematic Distinction

• As Subject Positions → Depression/anxiety are discursive categories that shape how one understands oneself and how institutions classify people.

• As Socioeconomic Positions → Depression/anxiety are lived structural locations within labor, welfare, and inequality systems.

• Neoliberalism links the two by individualizing structural conditions while profiting from their management.

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This schema shows how depression and anxiety are not just inner states, but positions within a political economy of subjectivity.

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Do you want me to also trace how this schema could be historicized (e.g. how depression/anxiety functioned differently under industrial capitalism vs. neoliberal capitalism), or keep it focused on the present neoliberal frame?

You said:

Do you want me to also trace how this schema could be **historicized** (e.g. how depression/anxiety functioned differently under industrial capitalism vs. neoliberal capitalism)

Can you do this

ChatGPT said:

Perfect — let’s historicize the schema, so you can see how depression and anxiety shift meaning across capitalist epochs. I’ll sketch it in three stages:

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1. Industrial Capitalism (19th – early 20th century)

• Subject Positions

  • Depression often framed as melancholia or nervous exhaustion (neurasthenia). These were seen as ailments of the bourgeoisie or professionals — a marker of refinement, “too much culture for the nerves.”

  • Anxiety (esp. “hysteria”) coded as a feminine weakness or moral failing. Male workers were framed instead as malingerers if they claimed psychological suffering.

  • Subjectivity tied heavily to moral discourse: mental illness = weakness of will, failure of masculinity/femininity, bad heredity.

• Socioeconomic Positions

  • Mental breakdowns often excluded people from work and family roles.

  • Industrial psychiatry largely functioned to separate “fit” from “unfit” labor.

  • Asylums and poorhouses absorbed those too depressed/anxious to work — mental illness was equated with nonproductivity.

  • Eugenic thinking: depression/anxiety linked to degeneration → justifying exclusion or sterilization.

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2. Fordist / Welfare-State Capitalism (mid-20th century)

• Subject Positions

  • Depression reframed in post-WWII psychiatry as a treatable medical illness (e.g. DSM standardization, antidepressants).

  • Anxiety framed as “modern stress” in an age of bureaucracy and nuclear threat → think of Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (conformity and insecurity).

  • Subjectivity shifted from moral weakness → to medicalized pathology. Still stigmatized, but now treatable.

• Socioeconomic Positions

  • Welfare states integrated mental illness into social insurance (disability pensions, veterans’ benefits).

  • Being diagnosed depressed/anxious could grant access to long-term support → a recognized though marginalized socioeconomic position.

  • Labor unions sometimes negotiated protections for breakdowns → “mental illness” partly acknowledged as a social cost of modern work.

  • But institutions (asylums, psychiatric hospitals) still excluded many, preserving a structural boundary between the “productive” and “dependent.”

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3. Neoliberal Capitalism (1970s – present)

• Subject Positions

  • Depression/anxiety reframed as ubiquitous individual pathologies. Not rare afflictions but mass conditions — “everyone’s anxious, everyone’s depressed.”

  • Rise of “resilience” and “wellness” discourses: the depressed/anxious subject must manage themselves with therapy, mindfulness, SSRIs, apps.

  • Identities become market niches and cultural idioms (#anxiousgirl, depression memes). Subjectivity no longer about exclusion, but about modulated inclusion into consumption circuits.

• Socioeconomic Positions

  • Depression/anxiety mapped onto labor precarity: endless hustle → anxiety; stagnant futures → depression.

  • Welfare regimes restrict support: one must perform depression/anxiety to qualify, under suspicion of fraud.

  • Mental illness increasingly an economic filter:

    • “mild/moderate” = rehabilitatable labor-power (therapy, meds, coaching).

    • “severe/chronic” = written off as unemployable, managed at minimal cost.

  • The structural violence that produces depression/anxiety is disavowed → responsibility is individualized.

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Historical Trajectory

• Industrial era → Depression/anxiety = deviance from productivity, managed by exclusion (asylums, moral discourse).

• Welfare/Fordist era → Depression/anxiety = medicalized, partly recognized, managed by inclusion (insurance, welfare).

• Neoliberal era → Depression/anxiety = mass, individualized, managed by responsibilization (apps, therapy, resilience) + partial exclusion (benefit suspicion).

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So:

• Under industrial capitalism, depression/anxiety meant you fall out of work/society.

• Under welfare capitalism, they meant you are recognized and supported (but stigmatized).

• Under neoliberalism, they mean you must constantly self-manage and monetize your own fragility, or risk falling into total exclusion.