The politics of distress

ABSTRACT

We are regularly told that mental health problems are becoming more and more prevalent today, a trend exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. This way of conceiving what might rather be called people's—and particularly young people's—distress has several sources. Medical science has made spectacular progress over the last 50 years, encouraging us to look to it for solutions whenever things go wrong for people. A strongly atomistic line of Anglophone political thinking about the relation between individuals and society carries a bias in favour of trying to fix the former rather than the latter. Yet, there are good grounds for thinking that in many cases psychological distress comes from the way that people relate to each other and to the sociopolitical world that we have allowed to come into being. The last part of the paper gives examples of this from the experience of young people during the recent COVID‐19 pandemic.