Foucault Foresaw Our Identity Crisis

A common experience these days is being told that people don’t talk about things that people are constantly talking about. “Let’s Face It” — declared a recent headline on the website of McLean Hospital, the famous psychiatric facility in Boston where David Foster Wallace, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell were patients — “No One Wants to Talk About Mental Health”. This is an odd claim. If Sylvia Plath, for example, were revived after her six decades in the grave and made to listen to the streams of babble that course through our popular culture, one thing she would surely find remarkable is all the talk about mental health. She’d be amazed and maybe depressed at how avidly people diagnose (and how eagerly they invent) their own mental troubles, at how much jargon from psychotherapy circulates in everyday conversation, and with how much numbing regularity educators and other functionaries intone the phrase “mental health”.