Letter: Capitalism is mental (2025)

Letter to the Editors from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism is mental

Dear Editors,

Thank you for publishing ‘Capitalism is Mental’ (Socialist Standard, August), it’s one of the few pieces I’ve read in a socialist publication that genuinely tries to link mental health, neurodivergence, and class struggle. I agree with much of it, but I’d like to go further.

I’m an autistic, working class man in my fifties. I wasn’t diagnosed as a child we didn’t get diagnosed where I was from. You just got told you were difficult, thick, lazy, or weird. I spent most of my life thinking I was broken. Now I know the truth: I was wired differently, but the world was never built for people like me.

Autism, ADHD, PTSD, anxiety we talk about these things like they’re individual conditions. but they’re shaped by the world we live in. If you take a sensitive, pattern seeking kid and throw him into a world of noise, fear, chaos, poverty, and pressure, what do you think happens? You get trauma. You get shutdowns. You get rage. You get silence.

I don’t think people fully understand how classed this all is. Most working class people don’t have therapists. We have panic attacks on night shifts. We cry in the car outside our work. We get sectioned or sedated or sacked. Our ‘mental health support’ is a bottle of lager and a walk with the dog, if we’re lucky.

I’ve heard much of the left talk about ‘neurodiversity’ like it’s a fashion. They go on about identity and inclusivity, but they rarely ask who’s being left out. I’ll tell you who: lads like me. Men who mask it for 30 years. Women who get called dramatic. Kids who are fobbed off with ‘poor parenting’. We don’t get soft landings we get hard floors.

So yes, capitalism is mental. But it’s also murderous. It strips meaning from life, blames us for not coping, then sells us back the cure in pills, pop psychology, or mindfulness apps. All the while, it’s our nervous systems not theirs breaking under the pressure.

I’m glad your article spoke about neurodivergence as resistance. I’ve come to see it that way too. We’re not broken. We’re canaries in the mine.

Pablo Wilcox