By Comrade Sante, Black Hammer Times Staff
The month of May is colonially deemed as Mental Health Awareness Month, so let’s take a revolutionary spin to this topic.
The UN and WHO say that the impact of coronavirus on global mental health is “extremely concerning.” Of course, this means African and colonized people get the brunt of this.
Not only do African and Colonized people face disproportionate deaths within their communities from coronavirus, the mental stress that Colonized people have to cope with are exacerbated by our socioeconomic conditions.
The UN briefing stated an emergency mental health service should be widely available and included within universal health coverage.
Bourgeois mental health response during coronavirus
Coronavirus, a natural-borne disease, pays no attention to color. But the colonial healthcare system of amerikkka does.
Typical of bourgeois health-crisis responses, they offer virtually no material solutions. As revolutionaries, the dialectic around mental health must go beyond the colonial psychiatric model, AKA yoga mats, and “mindful meditation techniques,” to one which includes colonial and class analysis.
Just as our current healthcare system is based on western medicine, so is the criteria for diagnosing mental health.
The philosophy of western scientific medicine (WSM) views human bodies as literal machines (technocentrism).
WSM also theorizes that pumping drugs into the system or performing surgeries will help get the “machines” working again.
These failures and contradictions of settler colonialism and WSM is found in the suicide crisis among colonizer men. This epidemic makes it clear that the illusion of wealth and white power as medical advice leads to more colonized people going untreated and dying.
It is clear that Amerikkkan pharmaceutical companies are incentivized by profit by keeping Colonized people mentally unwell.
Think of the last time you were prescribed a drug that didn’t cure your disease, or only marginally alleviated your suffering.
There is no blue pill or red pill to “cure” your clinical depression. Western doctors become pharma hustlers who are more financially invested in our mental suffering and keeping us hooked on opioids than our well-being.
Bourgeois organizations, like the CDC, have monopolized the conversation around mental health. They promote self-help books, corporate medication, and lists of meaningless coping strategies as tools to deal with the rightfully-felt mental trauma we constantly experience.
They know these things won’t truly free us from mental anguish, but that it’ll line up their pockets.
No, mindful meditation apps won’t cure your anxiety while you’re under a heaping pile of bills. These are clear tactics of obfuscation by the bourgeois.
Coronavirus has become the metaphorical ‘crown,’ the cherry on top, on the pile of rubble that is colonial-capitalism.
We refuse the tiny bandages for our deep wounds; we want the cast. We want the crutches to build our strength back so we can walk towards the revolution.
We will revolutionize healthcare.
We cannot individually “get better” only to return to our degrading lives under capitalism. We must instead collectively struggle together to overthrow our oppressors.
We will defeat white power capitalism!
Black Power!
