Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

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This is an incredible book and one of the most important there is to read. t has also depressed me because I've been very much into manifestation and making your own reality. Until I became unemployed and was rejected by every job, cue in my feelings of failure because if I wanted it badly enough then I would have gotten it. Allegedly. 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 Our mental health sector has had little protection against what more powerful politico/economic interests have demanded.

Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health

For these individuals, there has become an imbalance in provision, with so many offered medical interventions versus talking therapies and social psychological provision, which may better facilitate meaningful change and recovery. Muchas personas toman antidepresivos por la simple razón de que hay poquísimas alternativas disponibles. Nuestros servicios públicos carecen de alternativas psicosociales, como la terapia, por lo que los fármacos se convierten en la intervención más rápida y barata (aunque menos eficaz) en salud mental". Urgent and persuasive, Sedated systematically examines why this individualistic view of ‘mental illness’ has been promoted by successive governments and big business – and why it is so misplaced and dangerous.We also live in an age where everything is about the economy and building money for shareholders and this in turns means that we treat happiness through buying consumer goods rather than actually looking to see what is in the best interest of people and society. One of the things that the author discusses is what are the things we should be considering and what kind of society do we want. I know I would like a kinder, warmer society with more empathy and curiosity and braveness rather than one that is drawn to human needs and greed. We can't just buy our way out of everything and maybe for happiness and contentment, we have to work on it through understanding and developing better morals as well as kindness and attitude. 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”.

Dr James Davies publishes new book “Sedated: How Modern

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. James is also a psychotherapist, who started working for the NHS in 2004. He is the co-founder of the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry (CEP), which is secretariat to the All Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence. 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. 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 distress of all types have increased. Using a wealth of studies, interviews with experts, and detailed analysis, Dr James Davies argues that this is because we have fundamentally mischaracterised the problem. Rather than viewing most mental distress as an understandable reaction to wider societal problems, we have embraced a medical model which situates the problem solely within the sufferer and their brain. Dr 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.

Sedated

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. The evidence behind this claim comes from research undertaken by Professor Martin Harrow and published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Harrow’s research showed that many psychiatric drugs when taken long term harm the people they purported to help (p.44). Davies interviewed another researcher, Robert Whittaker, who having seen Harrow’s work engaged in a study to look at the effects of psychiatric drug use on many major mental illnesses. Whittaker showed that in aggregate people who continue to take psychiatric drugs do much worse in the long term than those who stop them (pp.49-50). People with much more wealth and a higher status tend to be much less kinder in their attitude to others than people who have a low status position. The idea behind this is that people who are selfish or better paid tend to be more selfish in their approaches and behaviours to others. These ideas gave rise to a theory of materialism in that people who were more wealthy or a higher status tended to cheat more and find ways obtain things that people of low status weren't so bothered about. But people of high status and more wealth, also gave rise to a certain level of unhappiness. One example of this is that people with low status could be given the idea that they were a high status person and they then showed changes in their behaviour to seek more in the way of material goods and wealth. The main argument is that people who are wealthy tend to be more selfish but maybe that's part of why they have become wealthy. Many of these people who are obsessed by materialistic wealth goods often get something but as soon as the item has been bought they lose interest and seek something else. I generally believe that the love of money and the desire to have more and more of it is actually another kind of addiction in a similar way that someone might be addicted to heroin or gambling. Dr James Davies, Reader in our Departments of Psychology and Life Sciences, has published a book investigating the vast increase in mental health interventions since the 1980s, despite there being no clear improvement in clinical outcomes over the last four decades.