In this MCC Brussels Deep Dive, John O’Brien speaks to Dr Ashley Frawley, Visiting Research Fellow at MCC Brussels and author of the new report Manufacturing Fragility: How Brussels’s Therapeutic State Makes Citizens Weaker.
The EU has committed more than a billion euros to mental health programmes across schools, workplaces and wider society. But Frawley argues that many of these initiatives are built on weak evidence and may be doing the opposite of what they promise. Rather than making people more resilient, she says, they encourage citizens to scan themselves for symptoms, reinterpret ordinary distress as illness, and become more dependent on professional and institutional intervention.
The discussion examines the rise of “mental health awareness”, the blurring of the line between serious mental illness and normal human unhappiness, and the way schools are being turned from places of knowledge transmission into sites of emotional management.
Frawley also argues that Brussels’s mental health agenda is not simply about health. It is a wider form of governance, one that gives the state new authority over education, work, speech and the inner lives of citizens.
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