Institut Ramon LLull

4.227 is the number of suicides recorded in Spain last year. A figure which continues to climb and a reality which tends to be silenced. It has been argued that, while we should avoid alarmism, it is evident that horror and stigma work in the system’s interests. By considering suicide as a question of mental health, we end up negating any implicit social critique. Our author reminds us that psychiatry’s origins lie in the courts, not in medicine, and that depression and anxiety have a political edge to them. These apparent mental illnesses are part and parcel of structural failures, transcending clinics and pointing towards a malaise in the different lifestyles proposed by capitalism.

This essay proposes an affective turn, drawing on our emotions to communicate critique: depression and melancholy as forms of resistance understood as emancipatory forms of negativity; versus desire understood as an insatiable source of positivity which enslaves individuals in a form of self-imposed exploitation, bound to algorithms, pharmaceuticals, the free market, and chatbots. The alternative is not any nostalgia felt for the past, nor a return to some utopian idea of modern progress, but rather a melancholic militancy engaging with the present.