Mental health is notoriously difficult to categorize or define. After more than two centuries of dedicated study, we are scarcely any closer to achieving satisfactory explanations — scientific or otherwise — for the various forms of mental distress and disturbance that people can experience.

Compounding the difficulty of getting to grips with psychological suffering is the fact that social and personal adversity — such as poverty, inequality, economic precarity, and experiences of violence or abuse — significantly influence our mental health. And yet the experience of similar travails impact individuals and their mental health differently. Why do some survivors of war develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and not others?

Driven by a humanistic desire to alleviate suffering, and a justified deep-seated suspicion of its ideological justifications, leftists have understandably sought to find explanations of mental illness in the quotidian miseries of capitalist societies. Economic precarity and low incomes alone can’t explain depression — not everyone who lives on a low income is depressed, and not everyone with depression has a low income. Other forms of mental disturbance, like mania or psychosis, are even more difficult to solely attribute to issues of economic justice. Still, barring some modest scientific advances around social and genetic risk factors (in the case of schizophrenia) we are far from understanding their cause.