Key words: Magical voluntarism

Around a decade ago, Mark Fisher invoked the psychologist David Smail’s term ‘magical voluntarism’ to describe the trajectory of mental health discourse.

This concept draws on the individualistic notion that we are all masters of our destiny – meaning we can and should become masters of our mental health too. As David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ took shape and social provisions were pruned, this focus on the individual became an essential component of neoliberal ideology.

Neoliberalism’s predominance has since been propped up by a media that’s in tow with this messaging. TV personalities, influencers, and even celebrity money-saving experts have co-opted the work of the ruling class in propagating magical voluntarism. They remind us that we live in a meritocracy – we all have the same 24 hours in a day – where social mobility is only bound by us not trying hard enough to change our fortunes.

Seen through the lens of a cost of living crisis, this means foregrounding things like budgeting advice, cooking lessons, and obligations to sacrifice leisure. A deep sense of shame can then be interpolated onto those who aren’t able to utilise such brittle means to haul themselves out of the poverty that is swallowing them.

Simultaneously, anti-stigma campaigns have gained traction in the language of mental health, with well-meaning but often facile mantras like ‘it’s time to talk’. Naturally, this has proven to be low-hanging fruit for employers and politicians – it allows them to disavow responsibility, placing the onus back onto the individual to initiate, and ultimately control, their own recovery.

The role of therapy in society has also fallen prey to this kind of aspirational language. We should consider therapy to be a useful outlet for processing emotional trauma or finding solutions to existential problems, but this too is being subsumed into our growing obsession with self-improvement rhetoric. Therapy is now seen as an individual selling point – evidence that we’re working on ourselves – and reduces valuable mental health resources to commodities to be compared.

Even on the left, we have seen an emphasis on ‘self-care’, which promises to address – very real – problems of burnout, exploitation, and underfunding in activist circles, but again focuses on individuals rather than systems or structures.

These approaches also conveniently adhere to neoliberal ideology – the more you put in, the more you get out – meaning the duty of care is again pushed back onto us; we must take responsibility for how well we are. But when people are facing precarious employment, eviction notices or struggles to feed their children, the role of talking therapies and self-help skills is seriously diminished. Techniques like CBT and Mindfulness are increasingly presented as non-medical panaceas, and while I’ve seen how useful they can be in managing stress and anxiety, they are often misemployed and their benefits overstated.

Ultimately, magical voluntarism steers us into the trap of minimising the impact of material disaffection. By ignoring social causation and the kinds of adversity that can be endemic to working-class lives, we are inadvertently contributing to mental health’s depoliticisation.

This article first appeared in Issue #237 The war racket. Subscribe today to support independent socialist media and get your copy hot off the press!