Capitalist medicine and the psychotechnical embrace: lessons from American psychiatry.

A psychotechnical embrace characterizes the contemporary mental health landscape in the United States such that capitalist incentives are shaping how people reimagine the meanings and practices of treatment. An algorithmization of mental health treatment is now equating changes in symptoms with quality metrics without exploring how patients define improvements in quality of life, relationships and daily functioning. This paper takes three examples-the privatization of mental health services, a movement toward measurement-based care, and artificial-intelligence-powered psychotherapy applications-to trace how capitalist values of time efficiency, higher patient volumes and lower costs are transforming mental health. To stem this algorithmization of mental health, psychiatrists must engage in advocacy to ensure clinical attention to the psychological, social and cultural dimensions of mental health.