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READ THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY HERE
This eye-opening report is one of the first studies to provide a systematic critique of the European Union’s billion-euro mental-health agenda. The report demonstrates that, rather than responding to medical necessity or a concern for people’s wellbeing, the mental-health industry, supported by the EU, is fast becoming a political tool for social control.
This provocative thesis is supported by an analysis of the inflated statistics and vague clinical language that the EU uses, not just to pathologise normal human emotions like stress or sadness, but also to redefine and discredit political dissatisfaction.
The report exposes how the EU is fast-embedding wellbeing frameworks into schools, workplaces and digital governance. There will be no escape from the EU’s empire of mental health. In this way, the report raises concerns that the authorities are undermining individual resilience and expanding state surveillance.
At the same time, the report shows how these initiatives launder political values into medical categories to justify censorship and intrusive educational reforms.
Ultimately, what is needed is a redirection of funds toward serious psychiatric illnesses while abandoning universal programs that may actually increase psychological distress across the continent.
About the author
Ashley Frawley is a sociologist and author of two books, Semiotics of Happiness: Rhetorical Beginnings of a Public Problem (2015) and Significant Emotions: Rhetoric and Social Problems in a Vulnerable Age. Her expertise is in the public presentation of social problems and the increased policy focus on individuals, families and emotions as a route to solving them. She is a fervent defender of family autonomy and has campaigned to stop the policy encroachment into parental decision-making, which lowers the bar for often punitive interventions into family life. Originally from Canada and a member of Nipissing First Nation, she is the mother of two small children. Her hope for MCC Brussels is to open up a space for critical questioning of regressive policies that are dressed in the language of progressivism.
