CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Hirsch, Johanna |
|---|---|
| Title | Neoliberalism and Mental Health in Hungary: Gendered Treatment of Anxiety in Higher Education |
| Summary | The present thesis investigates the effects of neoliberal governmentality on how anxiety is perceived and treated among Hungarian university students. The research is a case study of the peer counselling group of one of Hungary’s largest university, ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University). Based on ten in-depth individual interviews with peer advisors – who are students themselves training to be psychotherapists – the thesis examines how neoliberal reasoning, mediated through post-feminist though and mainstream psychology, appears in the counsellors’ beliefs about mental health, self-management and care work. The research aimed to provide an example of how individual solutions are offered for larger scale structural problems, for instance by locating the source of anxiety in personal deficiency. The prevalence of anxiety and depression is increasing worldwide as well as in Hungary, and the majority of those affected are women. This thesis argues that this phenomenon is embedded in various structural developments caused by a neoliberal governance. The privatization of mental health services, as part of a larger crises of care work, is resulting in the expansion of self-help. Competitiveness and entrepreneurial logic are promoted for women through gender mainstreaming and what can be referred to as “neoliberal feminism”, while higher education is also a site of these developments, increasing perfectionism and competition, and favoring disciplines based solely on their worth on the market. The peer advisors themselves internalized and mediated these expectations and neoliberal technologies of the self for their clients, however they also had their criticisms of increasingly atomized views on mental health. They recognized structural, economic problems when discussing their peers’ anxiety, nevertheless, they mainly ignored gender as a factor in mental health. I labeled their reasoning a “pessimist” post-feminism, that might be specific to Hungary. While they believed women have already achieved emancipation in their professional lives, they identified the prescriptive nature of gender in the case of men, hindering their possibilities of asking for help. Even thought, they conceptualized their methods as gender blind, I argue that women worked as a default category for the advisors, who were mostly women themselves. In connection to this, a gendered division of labor emerged through their work as they provided free mental health services for engineering students, who were predominantly men. Based on these results future research could further pursue the specifics of the applicability of post-feminism in a post-socialist, Hungarian context. Gender based horizontal segregation in higher education seems to play a significant role in students’ mental health and the nature of their anxieties. Special attention should be paid for institutional factors behind engineering students increased levels of anxiety. At the same time the mental health of care workers – such as future psychotherapists – is especially important, as they are preparing for the financial and mental burdens of their work, possibly already during their university years. |
| Supervisor | Fodor, Éva |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/hirsch_johanna.pdf |
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