From technology-driven innovations in healthcare to narratives of mental illness, these works reflect on the current state of health and wellbeing, and imagine bold new futures.
The pandemic has accelerated some trends, such as the… hospital conceived as a digitally connected community rather than a circumscribed physical space… This is the hospital without walls – the hospital that is everywhere, embedded in our lives. And since some medicine will always require patients and medical personnel to meet, it will inevitably shape the places where that happens, too.
Laura Spinney, The Guardian
Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatisation of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?