Neoliberalism and Mental Health Care in Ontario: A Critique of Internet-Based Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I offer a critical analysis of Ontario’s mental health strategy, “Roadmap to Wellness,” and the government’s investment in internet-based cognitive behavioural therapy (iCBT) programs as a frontline strategy to address the province’s mental health crisis. Though I acknowledge that publicly funded mental health care is a step in the right direction, I argue that the choice to provide cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) as the only form of publicly funded therapy indicates a problematic commitment to the maintenance of neoliberal governance. To argue this point, I use discourse analysis to explore the language present in Ontario’s two current iCBT programs – AbilitiCBT and Mindbeacon – and demonstrate the ways in which they reinforce a neoliberal discourse of mental health by emphasizing the values of 1) individual responsibility, 2) productivity, and 3) recovery. More broadly, I argue that neoliberal forms of governance ultimately produce the mental health crises that they seek to address through neglecting the social determinants of health and defunding of social services and assert that critiques of mental health care must address the socioeconomic conditions within which they are implemented, given the intimate relationship between neoliberalism, managerialism, and public policy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".