Among the many sites on the battleground of the United States in which racism and classism rage is the all-too-overlooked mental health industrial complex. Over the past four decades, the mental health industrial complex has used the biomedical explanation for mental suffering. This focus on diagnoses that result from problems of the brain and not from social factors has contributed to an exponential increase of consumed medications and total revenue earned from the mental health and addiction services provided in the United States. Moreover, this specific ontology of subjectivity—that humans are solely defined by their material brains—helps serve the interests of the dominant hegemony. It is the assertion of this article that today as persons are conditioned to understand mental illness as a result of a purely individual problem, they become unaware of the ways in which the structural problems of race and class contribute to their mental illness. As a therapist who works with marginalized populations, I have seen firsthand how the biomedical model can be used to reinforce the illnesses that it aims to treat. The following article will illustrate the complex dynamics of the mental health industrial complex by way of analyzing three case studies of Black, male patients who I treated while working at a mental health facility in the Northeastern United States.
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