Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

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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. Di luar masalah pekerjaan, ada juga gaya hidup yg sengaja dibentuk oleh kapitalisme agar kalau kita stress larinya belanja aja. Alias, melakukan "retail therapy." Kita sendiri pasti ngerasain gempuran iklan di mana-mana. Mendorong kita buat jajan secara impulsif. 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. The “mental health”“system thus fails because it colludes with social structures that themselves generate harmful ways of being in the world.” Sometimes mental health services focus too much on what is wrong with someone as opposed to what happened to someone. So for example if you have an increased workload and you're not sleeping and therefore this is bringing you down and you feel a lot of stress and pressure it is often the remit of professionals to say that that person is suffering from depression rather than from an increased workload that could be managed and sorted rather than trying to manage the label of depression. Many well-being courses that are supplied by companies such as the NHS have no evidence to show that they work in regards to reducing stress and depression. If you have an increased workload for example, you find your job boring and you might have some personal problems it is totally natural to feel some signs of depression or sadness in your life but perhaps managing what it is it's bothering you might be more important than just going on the well-being course where are you practising mindfulness techniques. As already pointed out, no research shows that these kinds of courses actually support and help people and make any changes to their well-being and mental health status.

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

Frente a esto, los gobiernos han apostado por una política de desregulación de la industria farmacéutica y un desmantelamiento de los servicios públicos, lo que ha provocado que la única respuesta asequible y asumible por tiempo y costo sea la medicalización, disparándose el consumo de antidepresivos y ansiolíticos a pesar de que se ha demostrado científicamente su ineficacia a medio-largo plazo. Secondly, notions of help and/or recovery are equally stigmatized. But Dr Davies has very precisely stated here the reason why I promote eCPR. The book focusses on mental health, and as 25% of us are likely to be diagnosed with a mental-health condition each year then it is relevant to us all. It also uncovers the most malicious and underhand practices of government imaginable that easily trump the scandals of ‘partygate’ .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.

Sedated – Atlantic Books Sedated – Atlantic Books

The preferred emotional state for late capitalism is a state of perpetual “functional dissatisfaction”; functional to the extent that you will continue to work, and dissatisfied to the extent that you will continue to spend.” 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. 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. Secondly, it has privatised suffering: redefining individual ‘mental health’ in terms consistent with the goals of the economy. Here ‘health’ is characterised as comprising those feelings, values and behaviours (e.g. personal ambition, industriousness and positivity) that serve economic growth, increased productivity and cultural conformity, irrespective of whether they are actually good for the individual and the community.

To understand what has gone wrong I want to first take a seemingly unconventional route, by invoking an idea that the political economist, Karl Marx, once used to explain the impact that organised religion exerted upon a health crisis of his own day – one caused by wide economic exploitation. JD: Neoliberalism is not just an economic paradigm but, like all such paradigms, it also entails a theory of human nature — a concept of what is healthy and unhealthy, what is moral and functional; what motivates us and what constitutes the good life. In this sense, neoliberalism is a ‘totalising system’ to use a sociological phrase — it does not solely advance a suite of economic directives, but also a set of guiding principles for living (principles that, by the way, mostly serve those very economic directives). Margaret Thatcher intuitively understood this vital link between economics and human psychology. She understood how economic policy (in her case, neoliberal economic policy) had the power to radically transform how people feel, act and behave. As she said two years into her term as UK Prime Minister, her aim was to use economic policy to change the mentality and character of the nation: ‘Economics are the method’, she confessed to the journalist Ronald Butt, ‘the objective is to change the heart and soul’. 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: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health

Sam, I loved this comment. Especially the part at the end about how our disabilities don’t define us. This is why I prefer the term “differently abled”. I even read someone else use this term today for the first time. It is how I feel about myself. I am not a disabled person. I am a person with disabilities. But I have many wonderful abilities that get lost or remain unseen and unappreciated when I am framed solely in the light of being disabled. I think this gets at the heart of what disability advocates are fighting for – to be seen as whole people with many gifts and much to offer despite whatever physical or mental limitations we may have. In the UK 44 million people are taking anti-psychotic medicines and more people are starting antipsychotic medicines than stopping and this is leading to a wide range of concerns including frontal lobe shrinkage and greater increases in variety and depression. Robert Whittaker studies also showed that even in conditions like schizophrenia that people on medicines were more likely to have worse outcomes than those stopping early or on medicines and even with those who are not on any form of treatment. Misalnya saja pada bagian pertama yg diberi tajuk "The New Opium." Menerangkan kalau sejak zaman Margaret Thatcher jadi PM lalu berteman dengan Ronal Reagan (presiden AS ke-40) & cukup dekat dengan Milton Friedman (ekonom), nyatanya memang UK dibuat condong pada paham "free-market." Davies bilang kalau industri farmasi nggak main-main kalau ambil profit. Dengan Thatcher memberi izin lebih leluasa buat mereka, ya tentu ada harga obat-obatan yg gila-gilaan.The intimate relationship between mental health and social conditions has largely been obscured, with societal causes interpreted within a bio-medical framework and shrouded with scientific terminology. Diagnoses frequently begin and end with the individual, identifying bioessentialist causes at the expense of examining social factors. However, the social, political, and economic organization of society must be recognized as a significant contributor to people’s mental health, with certain social structures being more advantageous to the emergence of mental well-being than others. As the basis on which society’s superstructural formation is erected, capitalism is a major determinant of poor mental health. As the Marxist professor of social work and social policy Iain Ferguson has argued, "it is the economic and political system under which we live—capitalism—which is responsible for the enormously high levels of mental health problems which we see in the world today." The alleviation of mental distress is only possible “in a society without exploitation and oppression." I assure you it is not all doom and gloom, rather it is sobering and incredibly enlightening! It has certainly helped shaped my own thoughts and feelings. Davies’ book is a powerful and incredibly sobering examination of just how much damage modern capitalism and ‘big pharma’ companies have done to our global mental health. You say you’re from an ‘Irish’ culture. I won’t inquire whether you’re from that benighted kip or whether you’re Irish American. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that maudlin book by Sebastian Barry ‘The Second Scripture’ about an Irish woman who was incarcerated for life in a mental hospital having become pregnant outside marriage. That story is a fairy story by comparison to yours. We should all be more than a little nervous about the current state of polarization in this country, which clearly seems headed in the direction of civil war type conditions and potential violent conflict.