Key points

Western individualist values have shaped how mental health is understood.

Neoliberalism has had a significant impact on our understanding of mental health and the mental health system.

There are benefits to more collectivist understandings of mental health, such as co-actualization.

Contemporary Western culture strongly prefers locating the problems that bring people to psychotherapy within the individual. When we conceptualize mental health as an individual problem without adequately considering the social and cultural components, it becomes easy to reduce mental health to a product that can be marketed and sold. This simplified version of mental health becomes a commodity of neoliberalism, a philosophy that emphasizes capitalism, free markets, individual rights, and pr

See Full Page