Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

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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.

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

I bring all this up NOT to suggest that we shouldn’t fight for reforms in the current reality, but only that we should do so firmly with the perspective that this work is part of an overall strategy for revolutionary changes leading to a complete socialist transformation of society. Here I am talking about a new form of socialism (learning from past historical mistakes), that has never before been attempted in human history. I was blown over by “commodified suffering” comment. I have been calling this as the commodified feelings. In the mental health system, the most commodified feeling or state of mind is empathy. Try to show empathy, and it is taken right off your mouth, and you are forced into regression, and only then, you will be released until you again show the same empathy that was not allowed from you earlier. Do not worry of others (killing any collectivism on the way), just worry about your feelings as first person (creating isolation of the mind). Of course the therapist must show empathy, must function as my own empathy since I am not allowed because I am a child…symbolically speaking but yet as if. writing this down is making me go mental already. No reason to make helping others so categorized…it is soft, it is malleable, it is flexible, it is human connection of the mind, the body and the others all at once, all apart organically, and all mixed when needed in so many different capacities. No hard rules! I agree with those who have heaped a great deal of praise for this author and his penetrating analysis of neoliberalism as a guiding ideology for the current state of modern capitalism. 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. 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.Fourthly, it has commodified suffer i ng: transfiguring suffering into a vibrant market opportunity; making it highly lucrative to big business as it manufactures its so-called solutions from which increased tax revenues, profits and higher share value can be extracted. The book concludes that change is possible, so long as we identify and reform the real social drivers of our mental health crisis. This book begins by looking at how modern medicine has been such a benefit in so many areas such as treating leukaemia - once a disease that caused almost fatality and death in most children is now something that can be treated and managed and few children now die from this form of cancer. In fact in all areas of medicine, there has been great gains and successes in treating the health and well-being of others has been remarkable. However, there is one definite exception, the treatment of mental health. 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

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

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.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’. https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/life-sciences/news/dr-james-davies-publishes-new-book-sedated-how-modern-capitalism-created-our-mental-health-crisis/