Economic Globalisation and Mental Health: Individual Suffering in Social Context
July 31st, 2015 Economic globalization is much in the news these days, most recently as Congress debated President Obama’s proposal for a “free trade” agreement with the nations of the Pacific Rim. My impression is that few mental health professionals keep up with the details of economic globalization and its impact on culture and mental health. In this article I will briefly present two ways in which economic globalization has a huge and largely unrecognized impact on the lives and work of psychologists and other psychotherapists in the United States and the rest of the world. Economic globalization means global free market capitalism. Decades ago, Erich Fromm noted that personality structures reflect the socio-economic system within which people are socialized. At this moment, the supremacy of global capitalism means that individualistic, competitive values increasingly prevail in cultures, not only in the U.S., but also around the world. Pope Francis recently noted how climate ch...