First off, the depoliticisation of suffering has helped exonerate bad policies, environments and powerful institutions from crucial scrutiny. A most telling example has been the rapid proliferation of mental health workplace consultancies over the last 10 years. These semi-private/public companies train selected employees to identify and ‘help’ work colleagues who may be distressed and underproductive at work. What this means in practice is referring underperforming colleagues to services, that reframe worker dissatisfaction and disengagement (themselves rooted organisational and social arrangements) as mental health conditions requiring individualised interventions. Within the book, Dr Davies argues the widespread medicalisation of mental distress has fundamentally mischaracterised the problem. Many who are diagnosed and prescribed psychiatric medication are not suffering from biologically identifiable problems. Instead, they are experiencing the understandable and, of course, painful human consequences of life’s difficulties – family breakdowns, problems at work, unhappiness in relationships, low self-esteem. Compartiendo gran parte de sus tesis, creo que a veces peca de hablar desde un plano demasiado teórico y poco material. Es cierto que inevitablemente la superestructura determina nuestros valores, cómo nos sentimos y nuestras expectativas, pero frente a la gran crisis de salud mental que estamos viviendo es necesario poner en marcha medidas que ayuden a prevenir, intervenir y paliar la situación. Trascender el modelo biomédico y apostar por recursos psicosociales desde los servicios públicos (sanidad, educación, servicios sociales...). Es importante hacer análisis macro, pero también poner en marcha medidas tangentes y urgentes.

The new opium of the people | James Davies » IAI TV The new opium of the people | James Davies » IAI TV

Because I've never read any psychological or psychiatric literature that actually bothers to situate mental health care within the culture context in which its practice, this book was a thrill to read. Other books I've read on this subject treat mental health as separate and distinct from the socioeconomic context in which it appears. Sedated, on the other hand blends together a compelling critique of the mental health industry, politicians, drug companies, and neoliberalism. Dr Davies said, “by sedating people to the causes and solutions for their socially rooted distress – both literally and ideologically – our mental health sector has stilled the impulse for social reform, which has distracted people from the real origins of their despair and has favoured results that are primarily economic while presiding over the worst outcomes in our health care system”. The idea that we have infinite power over our lives and fates, while initially seductive and uplifting for some, often leads to acute disappointment when things go wrong. Persuading people they have more power than they do and ignoring the real barriers to attainment primes them for self-blame when reality fails to deliver.

Sedated

This market has thrived on good marketing concealing bad science, on close and often corrupting financial ties between industry and psychiatry, on a deregulated pharmaceutical sector that has lowered regulatory standards, and on the chronic underfunding of psycho-social alternatives. While 7.4 million adults were prescribed antidepressants last year in England’s NHS, for instance, only 1.3 million received psychological therapy. This imbalance does not reflect what most people want, but the staggering impact of commodification. Our suffering is now being blamed on us, not the circumstances of our lives. We are in this way objectified as simply a tool to help the accumulation of profits for the pharmaceutical companies. It is no accident that the profits of pharmaceutical corporations have mushroomed since the 1980s. Therapy for capital’s benefit To understand this dynamic, let’s look at the ways in which our mental health sector has broadly adapted to the needs of our economy, but at the expense of generating the good clinical outcomes we all want and deserve. There have been four main trends. Tras una investigación concienciduda sobre el estado de la salud mental en Reino Unido, Davies desmenuza con datos y evidencias de dónde viene la actual crisis de salud mental y cómo se está abordando desde los diferentes gobiernos.

Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

More people are taking psychotropic drugs than ever before. It has never been more urgent to have these cruicial conversations.’ AD4E Using studies, interviews with experts and detailed analysis, the book explores how mental health outcomes have flatlined since the 1980s as our mental health sector has primarily developed over that period to serve economic outcomes, but at the expense of providing the health services people both need and want. Davies powerfully argues that the rise of mental illness and the rising prescriptions of psychiatric drugs (he particularly focuses on anti-depressants) is due to a model of mental illness where the individual is blamed and pathologised for their rational responses to socially caused distress - aka capitalism and neo-liberalism. What a lot of treatments do is blame the individual, rather than understand the life circumstances that have led to their distress. The book particularly affected me because I dropped out of CBT treatment and felt like a failure and like I hadn't worked hard enough to fix the way I thought, and there is a whole section dedicated to CBT and why it is ineffective and harmful in blaming victims.Consumerism exploits our dreams, our hopes and our human vulnerabilities. And its pursuit (and promises) has orientated living to such an extent that consumption has become an endpoint for much of our activity, making it difficult to envisage a life lived outside the materialistic grind.' Many people believe that they wish to be more entitled and seek a more materialistic world of possession and privileges to help those with mental health problems to meet this need. But in countries where wealth is better distributed, people feel more secure and equal, less of these problems exist. In Britain alone, more than 20% of the adult population take a psychiatric drug in any one year. This is an increase of over 500% since 1980 and the numbers continue to grow. Yet, despite this prescription epidemic, levels of mental illness of all types have actually increased in number and severity.

How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis - LinkedIn How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis - LinkedIn

Mental health concerns have risen since 2004 by 48% with an estimated one in eight children suffering from some form of mental health condition or difficulty. After talking about work, the book then goes on to discuss how the rise of these approaches are being used in educational establishments. The author begins with the rise of special educational needs. The number of people with special educational needs has doubled in 10 years since 2010. Now that number now accounts for almost 20% of all schoolchildren in education. This could be their speech, language, cognition, learning, or behavioural issues. However, the biggest increase in this number is those with a mental health problem be at anxiety, depression, ADHD and behavioural problems. It would be nice to think that books like this can help change something. As someone qualified to chartered psychologist level who spent the majority of his career in capital markets I have perhaps found it easier than most to see that we were heading into a dead-end with the current labelling of anything and everything as ‘poor mental health’ (especially by the media). This, despite the fact that the true causal factors for the explosion of individual distress are perhaps more structural than internal. Ie more the ‘fault’ of society than the person (despite what the person is being told). I could also see how our politicians were causing more and more inequality and stress (witness Clinton’s politically motivated campaign to offer home-loans to people who could not afford them). And, let’s not forget that the vast, vast majority of people being treated currently as if mentally ill are in fact ‘just’ unhappy - very, very (sometimes suicidally) unhappy - but unhappy nonetheless, not psychotic. The central thesis of this book is that mental health is too "medicalized" and low-grade anxiety and depression are conceptualized as chemical imbalances within an individual's brain, rather than understandable, rational reactions to living in a very stressful world. Why would this be so? In Davies' view, the medical establishment does this because it exists in neoliberal capitalism—which is all about individual responsibility, productivity, and buying products to solve all of your problems. More than 20 per cent of adults take a psychiatric drug each year in Britain alone–over a 500 per cent increase since 1980. Despite this ‘prescription epidemic’, the prevalence of mental illnesses, from the least to most severe, has simultaneously risen. Many of us will be familiar with the statistics often quoted by organisations such as Mind, like ‘1 in 4 people are diagnosed with a mental illness of some kind in England each year’ and ‘the overall number of people reporting mental health problems have been going up.’ [1] When pointed out, this does appear to be a contradiction, for which there are two possible explanations. The first is that we are indeed in the midst of what some have labelled a mental health ‘crisis’. The second is that the problem (and thus the solutions to the problem) have actually been misinterpreted.

James Davies sendiri ternyata seorang psikiater berbasis di UK. Sedated adalah buku yang ia susun untuk mengkritisi bagaimana pemerintah UK malah memperparah kondisi mental manusia di sana. https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/life-sciences/news/dr-james-davies-publishes-new-book-sedated-how-modern-capitalism-created-our-mental-health-crisis/

Sedated – Atlantic Books Sedated – Atlantic Books

Since the 1980s, our country has changed dramatically and now 80% of us work in the service sector. We work longer hours, change jobs more frequently and are more likely to live in large cities. In 2018 55% of Brits felt under excessive pressure, exhausted or miserable at work. We are forced to strive to meet targets at work which are placing workers under even more pressure. Even our school children are placed under pressure to pass exams, bolstering their school’s position in the league tables. Is it any wonder that one in six school children now have a diagnosable psychiatric condition? Within the book, Dr Davies argues the widespread medicalisation of mental distress has fundamentally mischaracterised the problem. Many who are diagnosed and prescribed psychiatric medication are not suffering from biologically identifiable problems. Instead, they are experiencing the understandable and, of course, painful human consequences of life’s difficulties – family breakdowns, problems at work, unhappiness in relationships, low self-esteem and etc. For these individuals, there has become an imbalance in the provision, with so many offered medical interventions versus talking therapies and social psychological provision, which may better facilitate meaningful change and recovery. Since the 1980s medications for mental health have increased by 400% with large numbers of people now on medication. But when you look at how a drug is approved there are an awful lot of flaws in the process of allowing a drug to be marketed and passed for use. For example there may be one positive clinical trial that can be accepted and submitted whilst admitting three negative trials that showed a drug not working can be excluded. It's also worth noting that on certain drug trials it might not necessarily be the best treatment but a form of treatment can be used on someone who might have a response or reaction to a far superior form of medicine. However, when these medicines are prescribed it is not for that reason but more probably to do with the fact that it has been marketed well even though the evidence is not robust and that it is also cheaper than a superior medicine which would be more effective in regards to treatment of mental health problems and conditions. Dr Davies said, “by sedating people to the causes and solutions for their socially rooted distress – both literally and ideologically – our mental health sector has stilled the impulse for social reform, which has distracted people from the real origins of their despair, and has favoured results that are primarily economic while presiding over the worst outcomes in our health care system”.I was really excited to get into this one because the subject matter really intrigued me, but I was left feeling a little bit disappointed overall. Dr James Davies publishes new book “Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis” By sedating people to the causes and solutions for their socially rooted distress our mental health sector has stilled the impulse for social reform Joanna Moncrieff is Professor of Critical and Social Psychiatry at University College London, and a consultant psychiatrist at the North East London Foundation Trust. She is one of the founders and the co-chair of the Critical Psychiatry Network. Her research consists principally of a critique of mainstream views about psychiatric drugs. She also writes about the history of drug treatment and about the history, politics and philosophy of psychiatry more generally. She is currently leading UK government-funded research on reducing and discontinuing antipsychotic drug treatment and collaborating on a study to support antidepressant discontinuation. She is the author of numerous papers and several books, including The Bitterest Pills: the troubling story of antipsychotic drugs and The Myth of the Chemical Cure. Davies’ uses his own research and references many scientific reports into the area, all of which suggest urgent revolutionary attention is needed before we spiral further into despair.