Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

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By sedating people to the causes and solutions for their socially rooted distress our mental health sector has stilled the impulse for social reform Pernah nggak, kepikiran kalau di balik kesehatan mental penyebabnya tidak lain & tidak bukan adalah kapitalisma? 👀

Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Caused our Mental Health

Davies appears only willing to hint at the need for larger systemic change leaving his readers to somehow believe that fundamental change is still possible within a class based capitalist system, even though he admits it will be more difficult in a post Covid 19 world. The doctor and shrink looking at each other both know they are often telling lies that greatly hurt people. 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? we exile sufferers to ‘experts’ in consulting rooms sitting far outside the community walls”…”there is no community, no shared cosmology, no ritual coming-together around the person’s pain” https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/life-sciences/news/dr-james-davies-publishes-new-book-sedated-how-modern-capitalism-created-our-mental-health-crisis/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 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. 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. Just as religion served industrial capitalism in the mid-1800s, our mental health sector now performs a similar function. Through the medicalisation, privatisation, depoliticisation, dehumanisation and commodification of distress, it has aligned ideologically with aims of the neoliberal economy, with its emphasis on individualism, political quietism, marketisation, deregulation and corporatisation success. 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, has distracted people from the real origins of their despair, has favoured results that are primarily economic, while presiding over the worst outcomes in our health care system. It is due to this our mental health sector has now surely become the new opium of the people.

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This is the first book I've read that examines mental health in a sociopolitical context, and it was a breath of fresh air. Last year, I had a video appointment with my new primary care doctor because I was dealing with burnout and depression from severe job stress. Five minutes into the call, the doctor told me she would write me a prescription for antidepressants. I'd never met this doctor before, she didn't know anything about my life or the circumstances that led me to feel depressed and burned out—yet she was happy to give me a prescription for psychiatric drugs within minutes.For anyone hoping to make major, and/or revolutionary, change in the world. this is not only a must read, but also a must be discussed, digested and developed, and then circulated analysis. 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.

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

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."As medicalisation and commodification have occurred apace, they have also hastened the widespread depoliticisation of distress. Although we all live in a sea of social determinants that inextricably shape our experience, our mental health sector has only played theoretical lip service to the fundamentally social nature of distress. Instead, hypothesised dysfunctions that purportedly reside between our ears have become the principle target of its interventions. And this privatisation of woe has generated a culture highly advantageous to current corporate, economic and governmental arrangements. 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. I hope you’re right, because I have zero doubt major reform, if not the complete abolition of psychiatry, and all DSM “bible” believing “mental health” industries, is needed. I mean, how many times does Western civilization allow an industry to commit massive holocausts, without eventually saying enough is enough. Our modern psychiatric industries’ current “holocaust” is killing “8 million” EVERY year. Katel, I am sorry that you have felt that way. I, too, have had similar feelings. It’s not you, of course. But, as “crazy” as the world is, I don’t think it’s entirely the world, as our perceptions of the world. However, psychiatry, etc. does not allow us our unique perceptions of the world, rather positive, negative or mixed. Psychiatry, etc. through its drugging, therapizing and all its etc. seeks to impose their view of the world upon us and its usually a world of blame, negativity, oppression, and worse. Psychiatry, etc. has the goal to take away our inherent God-given ability to decide what we think about the world. This is not like the parent/child relationship, a necessary step in growth towards adulthood and maturity; no—this is out right theft of our minds and our brains. It’s not your fault, Katel. You have had the worst thing stolen from you; who you are. You can restore who you are to you; but, first, you must walk away from psychiatry and renounce it in all its evil forms. Thank you.

Politics of Distress: A discussion with Dr. James Davies The Politics of Distress: A discussion with Dr. James Davies

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. The crux of the issue is due to a conglomeration of issues: unregulated pharmaceutical companies, doctor’s reliance on issuing anti-depressants despite no scientific evidence that they even work (in fact there is more evidence to suggest they do more damage than good in the long term), broad psychological misdiagnosis issues from doctors, a focus more on the individual being the ‘problem’ and not our modern societies and the work environments we now all work in. 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.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. So what are the main features of this collusion between neoliberalism and mental health? How has the sector been able to flourish despite its consistently poor results? Well, here are a few mechanisms I discuss in ‘Sedated’: By sweeping the social causes of distress into the private corners of self, our mental health sector has helped stifle collective and community action. Collective suffering, after all, when fully owned and properly channelled, has always been a vital spur for social change. This was true for the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and will be true for any successful movement to come. But by dispersing our socially caused and shared distress into different, self-residing dysfunctions, medicalisation refracts and diminishes collective experience. In this way, diagnostic tribes replace political tribes, as we identify with a given ‘mentally ill’ social grouping rather than with a particular social cause (or the interests demands of the diagnostic grouping become the one and only social cause). Once suffering has been politically defused in this way, individualised and profitable treatments then follow, emphasising on self over social reform.