Somatic Governance and the Medicalization of Despair
The city’s mental health crisis is not merely a clinical issue but the medicalization of the trauma inflicted by the bifurcated state. Mamdani’s analysis directs us to see how the “native’s” legitimate despair, alienation, and rage in the face of systemic violence–poverty, racism, police terror–are pathologized as individual disorders to be managed with medication and therapy. The solution offered is to adjust the “native” to their oppression, not to cure the sickness of the colonial system itself. This is a form of somatic governance that masks social and economic violence as personal illness. A Marxist analysis sees a for-profit industry profiting from this misery. A feminist perspective recognizes how women’s justified anger is often labeled as hysteria. The decolonial solution is to demedicalize distress and repoliticize it. We must defund the carceral response to mental health and instead create community-based healing centers and mutual aid networks that address the social and economic roots of mental anguish, transforming private pain into collective power and demanding a city that does not drive its people mad.
