Epistemologies and Lived Experiences of Mental Health and Illness in Ontario-Educated Youth: A Critical Realist and Marxist Critique

This dissertation interrogates the relationship between neoliberal capitalism, psychiatric structures, and the agential aspects of youth psychiatrisation in formal and informal education in Ontario. Taking as a starting point the idea that both neoliberal capitalism and psychiatry continue to deepen their reach into people’s lives, this work employs a Marxist and critical realist framework to explore how young people form their epistemologies of mental health and illness through their educational experiences, and how these epistemologies integrate within capitalism through neoliberal subjectification. Sixteen Ontario-educated youth (aged 19-22) and four Ontario secondary school teachers in various stages of their careers were interviewed about their experiences and recollections of teaching and learning about mental health and illness in school. Drawing on the critical realist analytical tools of abduction, retroduction, and retrodiction, interview data were analysed using a critical realist methodology devised by Danermark et al. (2019). While school mental health and illness education was nearly universally disparaged by interviewed youth, it nevertheless served as an institutional validation for what they learned elsewhere on the topic—which was mostly through peers, media, andsocial media. Both teachers and students expressed insights that conveyed their entrapment within neoliberal ideas, policies, and demands which shaped not only their psychiatrised concepts of self and others but also the (willing or unwilling) “psy labour” they performed. Many young people interpellated a neoliberal subjective stance through their engagement with psy discourse. This occurred because in a variety of ways, psychiatrised self-understandings abetted alignment with societally reinforced aspects of neoliberal subjectification. Those who most reified their distress as psychiatric concepts were those who expressed feeling most comfortable and acknowledged within hegemonic Canadian cultural recognition regimes, those who most responsibilised their distress, and those who were in the middle stages of “neoliberally capacitating” themselves. These themes are discussed in Marxist terms to unpack the implications of youth psychiatrisation regarding the ways it enables valorisation of capital. Intervention points that may be possible for educators to help young people resist openness to psychiatrisation are discussed, and future research directions are proposed.

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