Sam Fisher stared at the billboard, the words bleeding into the smog-choked sky: New Horizons Wellness — Personalized Therapy for a Happier You! Inside, the lobby hummed with the low-frequency dread of thirty waiting patients. A screen on the wall recycled slogans: Happiness Is a Chemical Equation! Your Trauma, Our Expertise!
“Session 27,” the receptionist droned, not looking up. Her nametag read Janet — Certified Care Coordinator. Sam wondered if it was a real name.
Dr. Vellis’ office smelled of lavender diffusers and stale resignation. She greeted Sam with the same calibrated smile, her eyes glazed by the 47th client of the week. “How’s the mindfulness journaling?” she asked, voice sanded smooth by repetition.
“I’ve been… tracking my triggers,” Sam said, toeing the script. “But the panic attacks — they’re worse. The eviction notice, the debt — ”
“Ah, let’s refocus!” Dr. Vellis chirped, tapping her tablet. “Your negative perception of external stressors may be a cognitive distortion. Have you tried the grounding exercises?”
Sam’s jaw tightened. Grounding exercises? As if the mold festering in his one-bedroom apartment, the gig-work, and the gnawing certainty that none of this would ever change, could be vaporized by breathing into a paper bag.
Your Wellness, Our Bottom Line.
The clinic’s parent company, NeuroSolutions Inc., had a tagline even its therapists parroted. Sam had googled it once: CEO salary, $14.2 million.
Dr. Vellis’ predecessor, a twitchy intern named Liam, had lasted three weeks before vanishing. “Burnout,” Janet muttered. “Happens.” His replacement, a chatbot interface named ELLIE, malfunctioned mid-session and recommended electroshock therapy for insomnia.
Sam had come to see — the system was genius in its cruelty.
Step 1: Pathologize despair. Rediagnose hunger, rage, poverty, exhaustion as mental pathology.
Step 2: Commodify care. Sell the cure in 50-minute increments, $200 a pop, insurance deductible not met.
Step 3: Eradicate context. Ignore the evictions, the economy, the politics. It’s not the world that’s sick — it’s you.
Sam learned this later, of course. After the Zoloft prescription and the third maxed-out credit card. After Dr. Vellis yawned mid-sob-story and said, “Let’s table the ‘societal talk’ — how’s your self-care?”
The turning point for Sam came in Sector C, the free clinic wedged between a pawnshop and a dialysis center. Sam’s last resort.
The therapist there, an 80-year-old woman with ink-stained hands, didn’t smile. Her nametag read Mara — Formerly Licensed.
“They could sue me for this,” she said, sliding a pamphlet across the table. The Collective Trauma Initiative.
Sam took it, feeling the weight of secrecy in his hands, as though the pamphlet were forged from iron. He turned the page, and glossed over stats on wage stagnation. He turned the page again.
A MANIFESTO: MENTAL HEALTH IS CLASS WAR.
A worker who cannot sleep for fear of rent is not ill — he is awake…
“They’ve convinced us we’re broken atoms,” Mara hissed. “But the sickness isn’t in you — it’s in the pills they sell to silence your screams.”
That night, Sam stood beneath the NeuroSolutions tower, its glass face reflecting the city’s fever-dream. Protesters clustered below, their signs were crude and urgent:
CAPITALISM IS TRAUMA. OUR DEPRESSION IS RATIONAL.
WHO PROFITS FROM OUR PAIN?
YOUR BOSS LOVES MINDFULNESS — IT KEEPS YOU OBEDIENT.
DIAGNOSED, DRUGGED, DISPOSED.
The revolution, when it came, would not be therapized.
It would smell of illegal protests, bonfires and stolen SSRI shipments. It would speak in tongues of DSM-V codes repurposed as battle cries: 296.32 — Major Depressive Disorder, Recurrent, Class Consciousness Specifier!
And in the ashes of the clinics, they’d etch a new axiom:
To be sane in an insane world is not a victory — it’s a surrender.