Alienation and Mental Health: How Capitalism Manufactures Suffering and Suppresses Its Cure
Alienation is not a personal mental health failing but a structural condition under capitalism. Today’s article explores how systemic forces shape mental health, drawing on Marxist, Maoist, and Pan-Africanist thought to chart a path toward collective liberation.
Introduction
Alienation is a defining feature of life under capitalism, not just in the economic sense that Marx described, but in the deeply personal and psychological sense as well. Marx understood alienation as a condition in which individuals are separated from their labour, from each other, from the products of their work, and ultimately from themselves. Whilst his analysis focused primarily on the material realities of industrial capitalism, the consequences of this disconnection extend far beyond the factory floor. In capitalist societies, alienation is not simply a byproduct of economic exploitation—it seeps into every aspect of life, shaping relationships, self-perception, and even the way mental health is understood. The distress that so many experience is not an internal failing or a personal malfunction; it is the logical response to a world that systematically disconnects people from meaning, purpose, and community.
Rather than recognising this systemic root of suffering, capitalist societies pathologise individual distress. Mental health struggles are framed as chemical imbalances, personal shortcomings, or failures to ‘cope’ rather than as reasonable responses to the conditions of modern life. The solution offered is rarely systemic change but rather individualised treatments—medication, therapy, productivity hacks—anything that allows a person to remain functional within an inherently dysfunctional system. By reducing mental health to a problem to be fixed on an individual level, capitalism obscures the fact that much of what it calls ‘illness’ is actually a rational reaction to exploitation, isolation, and precarity. This framing ensures that the system itself remains unchallenged whilst placing the burden of adjustment entirely on those suffering under it.
My own experience has shown me how alienation manifests not only in work or economic struggle but in the fundamental disconnect between self and society. As an autistic person and a gestalt processor, I have long felt the pressure to fit into structures that were never designed for me. As a trans person, I have seen how the material world refuses to accommodate my reality, demanding that I conform to narrow expectations of gender expression or risk erasure. The inability to fully externalise my inner truth within the constraints of a capitalist world has, at times, been maddening. Yet the response from the system was never to acknowledge that this was a structural issue; instead, I was told to adjust, to medicate, to learn to cope with a world that refuses to change. It was only through understanding myself—through recognising that my struggles were not a result of personal inadequacy but of systemic forces beyond my control—that I was able to begin the process of recovery.
Today’s article will explore alienation as a root cause of so many mental health struggles under capitalism, using my own experiences as an entry point before turning to the theoretical frameworks that make sense of this reality. Drawing on Marxist, Maoist, and Pan-Africanist thinkers, I will examine how alienation, colonialism, and systemic oppression shape our collective distress. From Fanon’s exploration of the psychological wounds of racism and colonial rule to Mao’s analysis of contradiction and struggle, these perspectives provide a lens through which to understand the mental health crisis as more than just an epidemic of individual suffering, but as a structural condition imposed by the system itself. Finally, I will connect these ideas to the current political moment, particularly the increasingly hostile climate for trans people and the working class as a whole. If alienation is one of the primary causes of distress in capitalist societies, then the solution cannot simply be individual resilience—it must be a fundamental transformation of the conditions that produce this suffering in the first place.
Personal Struggle: My Experience with Alienation and Recovery
I did not have the words for my alienation when I was younger. I knew I was different. I knew that difference made me a target. I knew that no matter how hard I tried to understand the rules that governed the social world around me, I could never quite make them fit into a coherent whole. But I had no language for what made me different. I did not yet know that I was autistic. I did not yet know that I was trans. I did not yet know that my inability to move through the world as others did was not a personal failing but the result of an unaccommodating world built to exclude those who did not conform. And so, without language, I suffered.
The systems designed to “help” people like me only deepened the fracture. As a teenager and young adult, I found myself in psychiatric settings, locked in behavioural health hospitals where I was treated as an enigma. My inability to verbalise my distress in the ways expected of me made me, in their eyes, unpredictable—a risk. The safest course of action, for them, was to keep me confined. My own mind was a mystery to them, and that made me dangerous. At no point did any of them consider that I was not a threat to myself or others but simply someone who lacked the words to articulate the dissonance between my inner world and the external one. Instead of helping me bridge that gap, they sought to contain me.
Therapy, too, failed to account for the larger forces at play. Every therapist I saw over the decades of this journey through capitalist mental health wanted to talk about my childhood, my family, my relationships—anything but the systems in which I was embedded. They treated me as a closed circuit, a self-contained entity whose problems could be traced back to my tragic personal history rather than structural conditions. They did not ask how capitalism had shaped my distress, how the rigid expectations of a cisnormative, neurotypical world had worn me down, how the sheer exhaustion of trying to survive in a system that was never meant for people like me had led to my breaking point. Freud had little to say about capitalism. Neither did my therapists.
And so, I was medicated. That was the “solution.” I lost a decade to psychiatric drugs that numbed me, slowed me down, dulled my edges until I could no longer process the world in the way that had always come naturally to me. For a gestalt processor, the speed and fluidity of thought are essential. When that was taken from me, when my mind was forced into a sluggish, stuttering rhythm that was not my own, panic set in. The medications that were meant to “help” me only compounded my distress, disrupting my ability to process reality and leaving me trapped in a fog of disorientation. When I finally made the decision to come off them, the withdrawal was brutal. Every sensation, every thought, every emotion came rushing back with the force of years of suppression. But beneath the rawness of it all, something else stirred—clarity.
Recovery, for me, did not come through the frameworks capitalism provided. It did not come from therapy that refused to acknowledge structural oppression. It did not come from medication that sought to silence the symptoms of alienation rather than address its root cause. It came through understanding myself. Through learning that my distress was not a sign of personal weakness but a natural response to an unnatural world. It came through rejecting the idea that my mind was broken and embracing the reality that it was simply different.
It came, too, through transition—not in the sense of “passing” or conforming to external expectations of gender, but in the sense of aligning my inner world with my external one in whatever ways were possible. My body, at 6’7” and powerfully built, will never be read as typically female in any culture on this planet. If my goal had been to “pass,” I would have set myself up for a lifetime of disappointment. Instead, I chose a different goal: to find comfort, to find joy, to embrace whatever changes came and celebrate them for what they were. And that has been enough. More than enough. HRT has not only transformed my body; it has transformed my inner space, bringing a sense of peace and alignment that I had long thought impossible.
The greatest revelation of my recovery was this: the pain I had experienced for so long was not mine alone to bear. It was not a defect within me. It was the logical consequence of an alienating world that refuses to make space for those who do not fit its narrow mould. And once I understood that, once I saw that my suffering was not personal failure but systemic harm, I could begin to imagine something different. A different way of living, a different way of understanding myself, a different way of moving through the world—not in resignation, but in defiance.
Theoretical Frameworks: Alienation and the Canon
Alienation is not simply a theoretical concept—it is a lived experience, one that many of us feel deeply but may not have the language to articulate. The feeling that something is off, that we are disconnected from ourselves, from others, from meaning, from a sense of wholeness, is not a personal failure. It is not simply brain chemistry gone wrong. It is not always a problem that can—or should—be solved with medication alone. Sometimes medication is necessary, even life-saving, but before reaching for it as the first and only solution, we must ask: What if the problem is not inside of us, but in the world we are forced to live in? What if the despair, the exhaustion, the crushing anxiety, and the sense of disconnection are actually rational responses to an irrational system? What if our minds and bodies are reacting exactly as they should to an environment that is designed to alienate and exploit?
Marx & Alienation: The Unwell Populace as an Economic Necessity
Karl Marx was among the first to systematically explain alienation—not as an individual or psychological failing, but as an unavoidable consequence of capitalism. Under capitalism, alienation occurs in several key ways. First, we are alienated from our labour—we do not control what we produce, how we produce it, or even how that labour benefits us. Instead, we sell our time, our skills, and our energy to an employer who profits from our work whilst we receive only a fraction of its value. This strips work of its meaning, reducing it to a mere survival mechanism rather than something that connects us to a larger purpose.
Second, we are alienated from ourselves—our own creative capacities and inner desires are stifled in service to economic survival. The things we might want to build, to create, to explore, are secondary to what we must do to pay rent, afford food, and stay afloat. This forced division between what we are capable of and what we are allowed to do creates profound distress. It is no wonder that so many people feel unfulfilled, aimless, or trapped—the system is structured to deny us autonomy over our own potential.
Third, we are alienated from others. Capitalism breeds competition, not cooperation. It demands that we see each other as rivals for scarce resources, jobs, promotions, and opportunities. It isolates us, turns us against each other, and erodes the very community structures that might otherwise provide support and meaning. Under capitalism, relationships become transactional, friendships struggle against the pressures of survival, and the working class is deliberately divided so that collective power cannot be realised.
Finally, we are alienated from our species-being—our fundamental nature as social, creative, and interconnected beings. We did not evolve to live in isolation, to work endless hours for basic survival, to navigate life as fragmented individuals disconnected from purpose and community. And yet, this is exactly the world capitalism has built. The mental distress so many of us feel is not a malfunction—it is our bodies and minds telling us that something is deeply wrong.
For capitalism to function, it requires an unwell, precarious populace. A workforce too exhausted to organise, too disconnected to build solidarity, and too desperate to demand better is easier to control. This is why systemic distress is treated as an individual problem. It is why we are encouraged to take medication to remain productive, rather than given time, resources, and community to actually heal. This is not to say medication is never necessary—sometimes it is. But before altering brain chemistry, we must first ask: is the problem within us, or within the world we are forced to survive in?
Fanon & the Psychological Toll of Oppression
Frantz Fanon, writing from his perspective as a psychiatrist and anti-colonial revolutionary, understood alienation as more than economic disconnection—it was a deeply racialised, psychological weapon of oppression. In Black Skin, White Masks, he describes how colonised people are forced to internalise the values of the oppressor, leading to a deep mental fracture. The colonised subject learns that their own culture, language, and identity are seen as inferior, whilst the culture of the coloniser is treated as the ideal. This leads to profound psychological distress, as individuals attempt to navigate an impossible contradiction: to be themselves is to be marginalised, but to conform is to lose themselves entirely.
The colonial model of control is mirrored in capitalism’s approach to mental health. Just as colonialism forces people to question their own worth, capitalism convinces us that our distress is our own fault. If we are anxious, depressed, or burned out, the message is that we are not resilient enough, not working hard enough, not thinking positively enough. The system refuses to acknowledge that perhaps the reason so many people feel unwell is because the world is structured in a way that makes well-being nearly impossible.
Fanon’s work reminds us that mental health struggles are not simply medical conditions—they are often the result of systemic violence, oppression, and forced disconnection from identity and community. The question then becomes: how do we break from the systems that make us sick, rather than simply finding ways to survive within them?
Mao & Dialectical Resolution of Contradictions
Mao Zedong’s work on contradiction provides another lens through which to understand mental distress. Mao argued that contradictions exist everywhere in the world—between rich and poor, oppressed and oppressor, self and society. These contradictions are not static; they intensify over time and must eventually be resolved. If they are not addressed, they create instability, tension, and, in many cases, deep suffering.
For those of us who experience alienation—whether through class, race, gender, or neurodivergence—the contradiction between our inner truth and the external world is a primary source of distress. We know who we are. We know what we need. And yet, the world refuses to accommodate us. It demands that we conform, suppress, and distort ourselves to fit within its boundaries. This contradiction is unsustainable, and unless it is actively resolved—through material change, not just personal coping—it will continue to cause harm.
This is why individual solutions—therapy that ignores capitalism, medication that numbs distress without questioning its origins—are not enough. The contradictions must be addressed at their root. This does not mean rejecting all forms of treatment, but it does mean refusing to accept that the problem begins and ends with the individual. Change must be collective, structural, and revolutionary.
Cabral & Cultural Alienation as Psychological Harm
Amílcar Cabral, the anti-colonial leader and theorist, understood that cultural alienation—the severing of people from their own history, identity, and traditions—was a form of violence. Colonialism sought not just to exploit land and labour, but to erase cultural memory, replacing it with the ideology of the oppressor. This disconnection from heritage and community created a deep psychological wound, one that could not simply be healed through economic or political liberation alone.
In capitalist societies, a similar alienation occurs. People are stripped of connection to land, community, and tradition, forced instead into a world of commodification and individualism. The erosion of cultural identity, of shared rituals, of intergenerational knowledge, leaves many feeling rootless. Depression, anxiety, and addiction are often the symptoms of this forced disconnection. Cabral argued that reclaiming cultural identity—understanding oneself within the context of history, resistance, and solidarity—was essential to psychological and political liberation.
bell hooks & Love as Revolutionary Resistance
bell hooks reminds us that capitalism thrives on isolation, and that radical love—care, community, and solidarity—is a necessary counterweight. In a system that teaches us to see each other as competitors rather than kin, love becomes an act of defiance. It is not just romantic love, but love as an ethic—a commitment to collective well-being, to mutual aid, to refusing the alienation that capitalism enforces.
Mental health cannot be separated from the conditions in which we live. Before we accept that our distress is something wrong with us, we must first ask whether it is a reasonable response to the conditions we are forced to endure. If capitalism is making us sick, then the answer is not simply to medicate and adjust, but to imagine, demand, and build a world that does not require our suffering.
Tying It to the Present Moment: Capitalism’s Assault on the Mind
Capitalism thrives on crisis. It is not a system designed to create stability, security, or well-being—it is a system that profits from instability, precarity, and distress. The mental health crisis, the epidemic of anxiety and depression, the rising tide of alienation and despair—none of these are accidental, nor are they merely unfortunate side effects of modern life. They are, in fact, necessary for capitalism’s survival. A content, secure, and mentally well population would be a catastrophe for those who hold power. If people were not struggling, if they were not drowning in debt, if they were not exhausted by work or paralysed by fear, they might start asking dangerous questions. They might begin to demand something different.
Instead, capitalism maintains its grip by suppressing alternatives, ensuring that socialist and anti-capitalist thought is treated as radical, unrealistic, or even criminal. The Overton Window is so tightly controlled that even basic ideas—healthcare as a human right, wages that keep pace with inflation, housing as a public good—are framed as impossible fantasies. The moment someone suggests that perhaps the system itself is the problem, they are branded a threat. The suppression of socialist thought is not just historical, a relic of McCarthyism, but an ongoing and active process. Whether through social media algorithms, academic gatekeeping, or outright legislation, the capitalist class works tirelessly to ensure that people do not even consider an alternative.
Meanwhile, distress is medicalised rather than understood as systemic. If you are anxious, depressed, or burned out, the answer is not to ask why but to seek treatment—individually, quietly, without questioning the system that made you this way. The psychiatric model, for all its benefits in some cases, too often reduces mental health struggles to biological misfires, ignoring the crushing weight of economic precarity, systemic oppression, and social isolation. The destruction of collective spaces—unions, community centres, affordable housing, libraries, even parks—has been deliberate, forcing people into increasingly isolated individualism (e.g., why did the US government NEED to crush the Black Panther Party?). Under capitalism, you are expected to face your suffering alone, to internalise it as a personal failing rather than recognising it as a shared and structural experience.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the current attack on trans existence. The state is not simply marginalising trans people—it is actively seeking to erase us. This goes beyond rhetoric; it is legislation, medical bans, forced detransition, surveillance, and social engineering aimed at making trans life unlivable. The contradiction between self and society—one that so many trans people feel—has now been enshrined in law as an impossibility. The right to transition, to be seen as oneself, to access care, to exist in public space, is being systematically dismantled. This is alienation at its most extreme: to be forced to live in a body and in a society that not only refuses to recognise you but actively works to erase you. And all this? In the so-called land of the free—where the pursuit of happiness is a constitutional promise, so long as your happiness conforms to the narrow boundaries of what the state deems acceptable.
The pressure to “pass” has always been a capitalist mechanism. It is not about authenticity but about acceptability—about making oneself palatable to a system that does not want us to exist. The further one is from cisnormative expectations, the more scrutiny, the more violence, the more exclusion one faces. But passing is an illusion, a demand without end. The world has already decided that trans people are unacceptable, and no amount of assimilation will change that. This is why joy—unapologetic, defiant, and rooted in personal truth—is an act of resistance. It is why rejecting the demand to conform and instead embracing the self, in all its complexity, is revolutionary.
This moment feels unstable because it is. The myth of the American Dream is collapsing. The promises of upward mobility and of hard work leading to success—these are being exposed as the lies they always were. The younger generations are waking up to the realisation that the world they were told to prepare for does not exist. The cost of living soars, wages stagnate, homeownership becomes an impossible dream, and the reality of climate catastrophe looms. The working class is being squeezed harder than ever, and the capitalist class is doing everything in its power to keep the pressure on. The more exhausted people are, the more likely they are to accept any solution offered—no matter how reactionary.
And so, we see the rise of reactionary politics, of fascism disguised as populism, of manufactured culture wars designed to divide and distract. The ruling class knows that it is in crisis, that the contradictions are sharpening, and they are desperate to turn that rage against the most vulnerable rather than themselves. The war on trans people, the scapegoating of migrants, the attacks on education, the policing of protest—these are not random acts of cruelty. They are strategies of control. They are attempts to ensure that the anger, the despair, the desperation felt by so many is directed downward, never upward.
I write this as someone who exists at the heart of the Empire, in California, under the watchful eye of a system that has declared people like me public enemy number one. I am not racially connected to the theorists I have drawn upon, but I stand in solidarity with them, in the lineage of struggle they articulated so powerfully. The privilege of my skin and eye colour does not shield me from the consequences of being autistic, of being a gestalt processor, of being trans, of holding Marxist, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial views. These things put me in direct conflict with the Regime. The state does not want people like me thinking, writing, or speaking—because to do so is to expose the lie. It is to name the alienation, to pull back the veil, to show that the suffering so many experience is not inevitable but constructed.
And so, the task before us is clear. We must not only name the system that seeks to break us, but actively resist it. We must find ways to reconnect—to ourselves, to each other, to a shared vision of the future that capitalism insists is impossible. Because it is not impossible. It is necessary. The alternative is what we are living now: crisis without end, alienation without resolution, and a world that demands our submission in exchange for survival. That is not a life worth living. And that is why we must fight—not just for ourselves, but for everyone who comes after.
Final thoughts …
If alienation is the root of so much suffering under capitalism, then the answer is not to simply treat its symptoms, but to strike at its cause. The system would have us believe that our struggles—our anxiety, our depression, our sense of disconnect—are personal failings, chemical imbalances, or individual burdens to be carried in isolation. But the reality is far simpler, and far more damning: our suffering is manufactured. The conditions we live under are designed to alienate us, to separate us from ourselves, from each other, and from any sense of collective power. And if that is the case, then the only meaningful path forward is to reject the frameworks that capitalism has given us for understanding our pain and to build something else entirely.
Reclaiming Mental Health from Capitalist Frameworks
Lenin, in What Is to Be Done?, argued that before we can take meaningful action, we must first analyse the world as it truly is—not as we might wish it to be. This principle resonates deeply with my autistic way of being. I do not deal in comforting illusions; I cannot make myself believe in a world that does not exist simply because it would be easier to do so. My mind demands patterns, coherence, and an honest assessment of reality as it stands. This is not cynicism—it is necessity. To navigate a world that is structured against people like me, I must see it clearly, without distortion, without the false reassurances that capitalism feeds us to keep us compliant. Only from that place of clarity can action be taken, and only by acknowledging the depth of the crisis we face can we begin to imagine a way forward.
The first step in reclaiming mental health is recognising that much of what is framed as personal distress is actually systemic harm. This is not to say that individual treatment—therapy, medication, or other forms of care—are never necessary. They absolutely can be. But they must be understood within their proper context: as tools, not as ultimate solutions. A society in which the only path to survival is numbing, adjusting, and medicating away the entirely reasonable distress of living under capitalism is a sick society, one that sees its people not as humans to be nurtured but as raw material to be exploited.
Healing, then, must be understood as both an individual and a collective act. It is not enough to find ways to personally cope with alienation. We must work to abolish the conditions that create it. This is where Fanon’s analysis of colonial oppression becomes crucial. Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, argued that colonised people could not simply ‘heal’ from the psychological violence inflicted upon them while remaining within the structures that dehumanised them. The only true path to liberation was through revolution—not just political or economic revolution, but a psychological and cultural one as well. The same is true under capitalism: there can be no real healing without dismantling the system that necessitates our suffering.
Building Alternative Spaces for Well-Being
If we accept that capitalism is structured to break us, then it follows that the first step toward liberation is to build spaces where that logic does not apply. Mutual aid, community care, and radical solidarity are not simply acts of kindness—they are acts of defiance. The system wants us isolated, disconnected, and trapped in a cycle of endless self-improvement that will never actually free us. The alternative is to refuse its terms entirely, to create structures that prioritise human need over profit, that value care over productivity, that see people as more than their ability to produce surplus value.
Lenin, in What Is to Be Done?, argued that organisation is key to resistance. Spontaneous struggle, no matter how righteous, is not enough—it must be directed, intentional, and sustained. The same is true of any effort to reclaim well-being under capitalism. The answer is not simply to disconnect, to retreat into solitude, or to find personal ways to ‘beat the system’ on an individual level. The answer is to organise—to create new structures of care that exist outside of capitalist logic. Worker cooperatives, community housing projects, radical mental health collectives, disability justice networks—these are not just alternatives, they are survival mechanisms.
Rejecting the myth of individual success means embracing collective liberation. No one escapes capitalism alone, and no one heals alone. The system thrives on our desperation, our loneliness, our willingness to compete with each other for scraps. Refusing to play that game is not just personally freeing; it is politically necessary.
Radical Hope as an Act of Defiance
Fanon wrote that “each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.” Our generation’s mission is clear: to fight, in whatever ways we can, against a world that is being deliberately constructed to crush us. But to fight, we must first believe that resistance is possible. Capitalism wants us to believe that there is no alternative, that its horrors are inevitable, that nothing can be done. But this, too, is a lie.
Even as capitalism tightens its grip, resistance continues. People continue to organise, to care for one another, to build alternative structures, to imagine different futures. And in that, there is hope—not the passive, empty hope that things will somehow get better on their own, but the active, revolutionary hope that comes from knowing that we can fight back. That we must fight back. And that we are not alone in doing so.
Joy, too, is an act of defiance. To find joy, to experience connection, to create beauty in the face of a world that insists on our destruction—this is resistance. The ruling class wants us to be miserable, exhausted, and hopeless because miserable, exhausted, and hopeless people do not organise. They do not fight back. They do not imagine new possibilities. And so, to refuse despair, to insist on hope, to find meaning and connection despite everything—this is revolutionary.
There is no easy path forward. The work of dismantling capitalism will not happen overnight, and the struggle will be long and difficult. But what is the alternative? To resign ourselves to alienation? To accept the destruction of our minds and bodies as the price of survival? That is not a life worth living.
The task before us is daunting, but it is not impossible. We are not the first to struggle against an inhuman system, and we will not be the last. What matters is that we fight. That we refuse to accept the terms capitalism has set for us. That we reclaim our minds, our health, our communities, and our futures—not as individuals, but together.
Because if alienation is capitalism’s weapon, then solidarity is ours.