Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

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In countries where we have seen a doubling in psychiatric medicine used to treat mental illness we have also seen a doubling in many side-effects and health problems related to these medicines. Medicines are not necessarily the solution. Yet we are giving them out in greater numbers. If I am born less physically resilient, and can’t work in any physical capacity, I get physiotherapy, to help build me up. I do not get talked to, or drugged, to make it go away. I get support.

Politics of Distress: A Discussion With Dr. James Davies The Politics of Distress: A Discussion With Dr. James Davies

JD: There are two things I believe must happen if the mental health sector is to work. Firstly, reform has to start with ourselves, with identifying where we collude with the very causes of the suffering we purport to alleviate, by disseminating ideas and interventions that exonerate these causes. When I say ‘ourselves’ I refer to both professionals and services users (or to the very many who straddle both categories). And we are making excellent strides – I need not repeat for MITUK or MIA readers a list of the many people and organisations now engaged in pushing against the status quo. And by the way, we are no longer a small and symbolically inconsequential minority – we are a growing and ever more powerful majority, with organisations like the World Health Organisation and the UN gradually aligning with this potent call for change. As medicalisation and commodification have occurred apace, they have also hastened the widespread depoliticisation of distressDr James Davies graduated from the University of Oxford in 2006 with a PhD in social and medical anthropology. He is now a Reader in social anthropology and mental health at the University of Roehampton. All this type of analysis does is ultimately perpetuate the illusion that fundamental change is somehow still possible within a capitalist system. This follows earlier comments about so-called “socialist” elements within society that predated the Medical Model takeover that began the 1980’s. This sort of implies that early incarnations of psychiatry and the “mental health” system were somehow devoid of oppressive forms of power and control over its patients and potential victims. The book that then looks at a type of treatment called APT which will help people in times of stress but when you look at the statistical outcomes they show the same amount of recovery as people who haven't had any treatment even though they seem to fiddle the numbers to say that they are been a success. The greatest number of people who are struggling are actually people who are practitioners of APT therapy. They are constantly in burnout mode.

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

Mental health doesn't exist in a vacuum, separate from everything else that happens in a person's life. Sometimes people are severely depressed without any clear cause, and they need medication to function. But often, as James Davies argues in this book, people are depressed or anxious for good reasons. They don't need drugs to paper over their problems; they need things like decent housing, a living wage, fulfilling work, strong community ties, rewarding relationships, time to rest and pursue hobbies, or the support of a patient, competent therapist. https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/life-sciences/news/dr-james-davies-publishes-new-book-sedated-how-modern-capitalism-created-our-mental-health-crisis/ During the 80s and 90s, then, displaying the outward signs of such self-betterment grew in cultural salience. The things we consumed became the outward markers of our success. More and more of us came to derive our identity and self-esteem from our possessions, believing that we principally defined and created ourselves through the objects we consumed, and that by acquiring more high-status possessions and accolades we somehow increased our value and worth as persons. As the more we possessed the more we believed we were, a dominant cultural aim became ‘to have much’ rather than ‘to be much’ — to put it in Erich Fromm’s terms — to make material acquisition a central fulcrum of living.We are effectively encouraged to use material comforts to treat our distress. Buying something new, something better, will make you feel good. Eating, drinking, smoking, holidays or new clothes become crutches, but profitable for capitalism. At the same time, governments and authorities lecture people about taking personal responsibility for our health and consumer choices. This is a social catch-22, since we have not had governments with any interest in alleviating our distress. We are simply being seen as a source of profits when in distress. A social cure is needed 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. Davies kemudian melanjutkan kalau nggak cuma kebijakan Thatcher terhadap industri farmasi UK yg ambil peran terhadap kesehatan mental, tapi bagaimana tekanan pekerjaan yg nggak manusiawi demi keuntungan pemilik modal semata yg bikin manusia jadi mudah stres. Ketika ada serikat pekerja yg memprotes terhadap banyaknya rekan mereka yg sudah tumbang, eh cuma dikasih psikiater & psikolog saja. Pemerintah maupun pemilik modal nggak mau mendengar bagaimana kompensasi dan beban kerja mereka sebenarnya nggak imbang. By sedating people to the causes and solutions for their socially rooted distress our mental health sector has stilled the impulse for social reform

Sedated by James Davies | Waterstones Sedated by James Davies | Waterstones

Marx argued that religion, by teaching that our suffering in this life would be rewarded in the next, was instructing people, and usually the most disadvantaged people, to accept and endure rather than to fight and reform the harmful social realities oppressing them. As religion numbed the distress that would otherwise motivate political action, he referred to it as ‘the opium of the people’ – a cultural sedative powerful enough to disable the impulse for social reform. Davies’ overall analysis in “Sedated” only reaffirms my belief that psychiatry and all forms of psychiatric oppression are firmly and FOREVER entrenched within the capitalist system. The Medical Model needs capitalism for its existence, AND capitalism now needs the Medical Model for its future existence. This symbiotic and deadly relationship between these two entities has evolved in a relatively short historical period over the past four decades. Grove Press An imprint of Grove Atlantic, an American independent publisher, who publish in the UK through Atlantic Books. No doubt, they wanted to murder a person that was distressed by 9/11/2001, and stands against the never ending wars that, that distressing event has created. Oh, because distress caused by a distressing event, is distress caused by a “chemical imbalance” in one person’s brain? WTF! They don’t seem to know much of anything about the banking and monetary systems, which most definitely need reform. Their primary actual societal function is covering up child abuse and rape, for the mainstream paternalistic religions, which most definitely need reform. Not to mention, they cover up easily recognized medical mistakes, for a big Pharma misinformed – and all too often, incompetent, and honestly downright murderous – medical industry. Oh, and they want to steal everything from us artists who speak the truth, through our history recording artwork, and based upon our many years of research into all these corrupt industries.James Davies (with his book “Sedated”) has taken concepts about all the enormous harm perpetrated by the medicalization of human distress that some of us have been critiquing for many years, and uncovered and revealed multiple deeper layers of both the institutional and mental chains of control this Medical Model has created in today’s world. And your own struggle with potentially “disabling” type problems in life helped create and enhance your development of many “abling” qualities that those more (perhaps less) fortunate in life so far have not yet developed.