Mental Illness: Capitalist Oppression of a Vulnerable Youth
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a well-known mental disorder affecting people today. Originally dubbed “shell shock” during the First World War, and commonly associated with combat-related trauma, the terms of PTSD diagnosis have expanded greatly over the past century.
Concepts of Marketing in Capitalist Culture
Mass media burns corporate brands into people’s brains like hot iron symbols on livestock. Commercial broadcasts beat the drum of consumerism into the public’s ears over and over again until basic life necessities bear deep and intimate connections with abstract forms and contrasting colors. In 2025, the United States alone spent $422 billion on paid advertisements. The international figure is $1.14 trillion. This figure does not take into account the support staff who aid in circulating corporate products, only the broadcasting itself. Sponsored search engine results confront the masses using keywords they type into their computers, with the recorded search history used to tailor advertisements to every individual often spanning years. Products and services are drilled into their heads until whenever the need to buy something arises, the question is not the qualities of their needed commodity, but which brand they should trust.
People in the United States and similar countries are used to instant gratification. Even if the product isn’t necessarily needed, or even very useful for its intended purpose, capitalism has taught the masses that they not only should spend their money on something immediately gratifying when the mood strikes them, but that they are entitled to it. The threat of overproduction looms over every productive enterprise in the capitalist world, a threat they combat by teaching the masses through social engineering that there is a product to meet every desire, and every desire should be satisfied immediately with a purchased product. These needs range from food, to clothing, to transportation, to feelings of specialness and validity.
An advertisement’s first objective is to be noticed. Whenever an advertisement goes unnoticed, marketing budget is wasted. Visuals are designed to strike the eye or warm the heart, sounds are made to be memorized, and proportions are as grandiose as government regulations – a method of compromise between constituent members of the ruling class, rather than a counterbalancing act of the voting masses – will allow. Because digital marketing is cheap, and people spend much of their time online, a great deal of the corporate marketing budget is spent on digital advertising. Out of the $1.14 trillion dollars spent worldwide on paid ads in 2025, $790 billion was spent on digital marketing. This heavy saturation of highly visible, urgency-building advertisements designed deliberately to drive public action in favor of commodity circulation has taken its toll on the common people’s mental health, especially the young.
Urgency-Caused Anxiety
Meta, Google, and Microsoft all have their own dedicated advertisement distribution services and platforms. They target paid advertisements based on people’s browsing and search histories. Websites collect this information with small pieces of information called cookies, which are stored in your web browser files and send information about your browsing habits to their systems so data analytics can inform advertisers about general trends that occur in response to their marketing. Consent for these cookies to be used for marketing analytics is placid and often implicit.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that those who suffer the most from mental health disorders both real and imagined are young people with ample amounts of screen time. With their minds split constantly between competing services promoted to them on a constant basis, designed for urgency and visibility, and tailored to their specific needs, desires, and psychological makeups, all of them face the inevitable logical conclusion: constant anxiety over what they want, what they need, and what would actually be helpful to them. Although this marketing ecosystem, in and of itself, isn’t the root cause of generalized mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression, it does drive individuals who already have tendencies toward these things into clinical mental illness that tortures them throughout their lives.
Capitalist society markets several treatments for these illnesses. A staggering array of pharmaceuticals, paid therapy sessions using a number of treatment methods that branch out from the core psychology models according to market response more so than effectiveness, and communities of similarly diagnosed individuals that, while they do meet a real need people have for validation and a sense of belonging with like individuals, also promote peer pressure and social alienation from the wider public. All these things provide temporary relief of variable effectiveness.
Depression and Capitalism
There is a certain breed of individual given to pessimism and self-doubt. These people fix their minds on despair, dismiss encouragement as duplicity, and seek relief through self-destructive means. To these people, the marketing ecosystem which serves the capitalist agenda, and the resulting public displays of eclectic tomfoolery, have a strong resemblance to an open zoo. Having little desire to seek out self-discovery or express an individuality they consider inadequate, they see active participation in the social landscape as a pointless venture. Having been told repeatedly by constant advertisements that promise easy contentment and instant solutions to everyday problems, they consider their dissatisfaction with the status quo to be a personal failure.
It is not insane to be unhappy with the way things are in the world. Two thirds of Americans ages 18-35 do not live with a romantic partner of any description. 25% of Americans ages 18-25 suffer from a substance abuse disorder or have suffered from one in the past year. The United States government is more transparent with how blatantly corrupt and flippant it is toward the public wellbeing with each passing year, with seemingly no sign of significant public backlash. Though I won’t go so far as to say major depressive disorder is a normal response to the society capitalism has created for us to suffer and witness, it is perfectly understandable that people sulk in mires of hopelessness and dread when faced with the reality that it’s backed by a world superpower.
Depressed people are very easily exhausted by false hope and empty promises. As a rule, the wealthy elite make their profits by producing cheaply and selling dearly. It is difficult to find a more cost-effective tool for inflating the perceived worth of a product or service than branded broadcasting of exaggerated claims regarding its efficacy repeated until nausea to the masses. To a person who is pessimistic by nature, a flashy advertisement for a popular product registers to the mind like a heated stovetop registers to the fingertip.
Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD)
It is easy to get distracted in a world where hundreds of billions of dollars and decades of study in the fields of psychology, sociology, and marketing bombard you with competing messages whose common goal is to get you to part with your money. To someone whose neurological makeup isn’t conductive to sustained focus, capitalist society can feel like a giant pinball machine. They might have difficulty resisting the urge to abandon tasks they know they should fix their attention on so they can meet their basic needs and long-term desires, but under the sheer mass of the corporate marketing that’s seared instant gratification into their subconscious mind, their willpower is crushed like an insect under a jackboot.
Behind all the pomp and glitter that’s become standard in American society and elsewhere, the world is mundane, the rules are constant, and difficult questions don’t have easy answers. To someone suffering from ADHD, pomp and glitter is all it takes to destroy discipline and crush focus. Bright lights, snappy sounds, and strong sensations make frivolous endeavors feel like urgent missions. The nagging urge from the superlative mental faculty to focus on useful things become sublated by the sublative neurological impulse. When the important task gets neglected, needs don’t get met, satisfaction is not achieved, and the constant urge to fulfill short-term desire continues unabated.
It’s important to remember that the marketing ecosystem doesn’t cause these mental illnesses by itself. It exaggerates and exploits natural tendencies that already exist in people’s minds for biological and environmental reasons particular to them. This causes the variety and spectrum of mental disorder. Because these disorders exist on spectrums, and because the capitalist system has direct incentive to keep these people alienated from the general public and constantly buying commodities from the mental health industry, the idea of invented mental illness cannot be discounted. While the actual eccentricities that get converted into clinical mental illness through the marketing machinery are real, there is also a tendency for the response to these eccentricities to also be exaggerated, resulting in misdiagnosis and erroneous execution of mental health treatment procedures. Many people are told that they are mentally ill when their alignment with normality is only slightly askew, and due to the sheer nature of the problem, the pervasiveness of this issue is difficult to quantify.
Capitalism Leveled on Self-Esteem
Americans, in particular, live in a mental prison where history and human development are driven not by the material conditions which result in the decisions people make over the course of time, but by the decisions, themselves. This allows them to be convinced that their free will is an actual, real metaphysical power in the universe, which is indomitable, eternal, and checked only by the other free wills around them. When their free will fails them – when the material conditions framing their decisions disallow the intended result – it is very easy to convince them that the failure can be fixed with a counteracting decision, very often the simple decision to purchase a commodity, or that the issue is a flaw in the indominable free will that is innate and God-given, therefore correct cause for permanent grief and shame.
Seeing as the topic of this discussion is mental illness, allow me to use the example of body dysmorphic disorders as an example. Physical flaws that directly affect the health and aesthetic quality of people’s bodies are real. Some men are bald, some women have sagging breasts, and people of both sexes are obese. These are genuine problems that hurt the quality of life, and have solutions of limited effectiveness and accessibility that confront the public as commodities. Other physical flaws are invented, and only through sheer social relation do they become material issues. This can include numerous divergences from ideal body images promoted by the corporate media because they are immediately stimulating, using marketing techniques that seize attention, communicate urgency, and become saturated into the social consciousness through sheer repetition. Because a large number of commodities exist which are marketed as easy fixes for problems that are either difficult or impossible to solve, failure to repair these issues is often seen as personal failure, with its root cause stemming from flaws surrounding the indominable will of the free individual, and with further expressions of the indominable will aimed at remedying these innate problems as the ultimate solution.
As socialists, we reject the idea of free will as a real, metaphysical force separate from the material world outright as a tool of capitalist oppression and a delusion of truly epic proportions. We hold that these religious, bourgeois notions are forms of false consciousness which are harmful to world humanity, and for the common good of humankind, must be stamped out whenever possible, wherever they are found. In order to liberate our youth from the heavy yoke of mental illness exaggerated and caricaturized for marketing and commodity circulation purposes, the almighty, personal creator of all existence must be burned to smoke and ash in revolutionary fire, all his institutions must be smashed, and these institutions’ assets repurposed to suit the common good. The problem of mental illness, as it is presented to us by capitalist society, is described as something that is ultimately unfixable and has only temporary solutions that require constant experimentation by individuals to yield their benefits, but this is only true within the framework of their systematic oppression of the working masses. Only with the complete and utter destruction of their system of oppression can the problem as presented can be ultimately cured.
