A critique of digital mental health via assessing the psychodigitalization of the Covid crisis (original) (raw)
Reading the report 'The Digital Future of Mental Health-care and its Workforce' by the National Health Service (NHS) from the United Kingdom makes for a strange experience. Most centrally, it is utterly perplexing that no single argument is mounted in the report to wave aside accusations that it depicts a totalitarian world governed by a digipsy-complex. As it seems to presage the COVID crisis in its assertion that digital mental health care will and should be the future, this paper takes the pandemic as its point of departure. However, it does not set out not from the apparent digitalisation of psy-care under COVID-conditions , but rather, from the psychologisation of the COVID crisis itself; that is, individualising and pathologising the discontents and socio-subjective sufferings under COVID. The aim is to tackle from here the intertwining of the psychological and the digital, of psychologisation and digi-talisation. This article engages in a close 'symptomatic reading' of the report and makes two points. The first concerns how digitalisation as such is closely connected to the neurobiologisation of subjectivity. The second point is about how digitalisation is also closely connected to the commodification of all things subjective and social. After discussing and interrelating these two issues, the article This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Sign up for access to the world's latest research.
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.