Of course...

I have worked with a homeless population in an official capacity for almost five years and I was a volunteer for two years before I was officially hired. Part of my responsibility has been dispensing medications and I have literally seen a conversion from the treatment of depression to the treatment of social anxiety disorder (both of which are often treated with the same medications). This is interesting because it highlights the capital investments—that drugs are constantly morphing to cover new territories in order to increase their sales because medicine is also about capitalism. I think that the concept of “semantic contagion” that goes along with existence of interest in a subject is key here, especially because so many of the symptoms of things like depression and social anxiety disorder are shared.

Furthermore, I think that this touches on Lewontin’s notion that under concepts of genetic determinism, the solution to a disordered mind is to fix the mind. I say this because it is fascinating to me that someone would take people who are clearly very stressed out because of tangible, material conditions (like homelessness) and determine that this stress is a disorder (when this kind of stress would probably impact many people in the same way) and then dispense medications to treat the disorder. It is assumed that the cause lies in the brain and can be fixed—not that the cause lies in the situational conditions that people live with. I contend that almost anyone would be experiencing what is medically defined as "social anxiety" if they were mostly preoccupied with how they were going to house themselves and/or their family over the course of the upcoming week.