Contemporary Neoliberal Mental Health Discourse: Economization of Mental Health and Construction of Personal Pathology

This paper focuses on the discursive analysis of the neoliberal coinage of mental health, observing neoliberalism as a modern rational form of governmentality. Inspired by Michel Foucault's theory of discourse and governmentality (but also by others - Nikolas Rose, Sara Ahmed), in this paper I analyse what meanings and knowledge about mental health are articulated in public policies in Croatia by neoliberal market demands and the logic of self-management. The main thesis of the paper addresses the primary purpose of neoliberalism in the process of economization - the creation of a social reality in which all aspects of human life are reduced to economic problems, including human health itself. Through the analysis of public health projects and campaigns, the paper shows the connection between mental health policy and the constructed entrepreneurial self of citizens. Reading the critical categories of productivity, risk, resources, ability, and personal responsibility, in the paper I problematize how health has become a bioeconomy. Health thus becomes the mediation of the market and the neoliberal system in which the individual is seen as a consumer, who will either be a burden or contribute to the economy.