This paper charts the development of young people’s self-making in neoliberal capitalism, specifying relationships between their self-making and susceptibility to mental health difficulties as they make their way in neoliberal market society. While neoliberal capitalism provides young people with opportunities to pursue and experiment with diverse identities and ways of being in the world, it also structures their self-making opportunities, by which charting selfhood becomes fertile ground for internalizing mental health problems. Our paper argues that the cultural imperative on young people to attain social status and success in the competitive and achievement-oriented forms of life that inhabit neoliberal capitalism demands that they curate and commodify highly desirable forms of selfhood that can never quite be realized. Endlessly failing to satisfy the conditions of selfhood in neoliberal capitalism, exhausted by the injunction to be more than they have already achieved, young people are socialized into increasingly complex and pressurized neoliberal capitalist cultures which challenge their ability to fulfill both their extrinsic desires for status and identity enhancement and their intrinsic needs for relatedness, belongingness, and self-worth. To conclude our paper, we summarize our main arguments and make some recommendations for promoting a more beneficial relationship between young people and the culture of neoliberal capitalism.
Articles by Stephen M. Butler
I am a child clinical psychologist by training and Professor in the doctoral clinical psychology training program at UPEI in Canada. I am also an Honorary Associate Professor at University College London (UCL), UK following 18 years employment in the doctoral training program in clinical psychology. My research interests are primarily in studying the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents, where I have contributed to both quantitative and qualitative studies. Over the last five years, I have been developing a conceptual and evidence-based framework to help understand the impact of socio-political and socio-cultural factors, a.k.a. capitalism, on child and adolescent well-being. This is my first collaboration with Nathaniel Coward and a welcome progression to writing a more interdisciplinary paper in this area.