Abstract

This paper seeks to show the relationship between psychiatry and capitalism and how psychiatry is being commodified to bring it into the capitalist circuit of accumulation. Capitalism extols the virtues of individualism, work, and consumption and offers a rationalization for unlimited acquisition that blunts ethical challenge, themes that have a parallel in psychiatric thought and practice. In its incessant search for profit, capitalism is always seeking to enlarge its markets by, for example, commodifying various activities of daily life. Psychiatry creates and enlarges its market by expanding its diagnostic system: an increasing number of difficult or troubling experiences are labeled psychiatric, thus creating an ever-larger pool of potential customers, or patients, for psychiatric services. The relationship between capitalism and psychiatry has been obscured, in part, because psychiatry is a profession with different ideals than business. With the arrival of corporate capitalism in the health care arena, however, the boundaries between professionalism and business are eroding in favor of the latter. Psychiatrists and other physicians are now discovering that their professional activities are vulnerable to the same relentless logic of profitability that any activity in a capitalist society is vulnerable to.