I have been on antidepressants continually for the last 5 years, and I do find that they help me - whether that’s a placebo effect or not, I don’t know, but I’m fairly sure that they help. That said, it does worry me how easy it is to get these drugs. When I first started taking them I had a 10 minute appointment with a doctor that didn’t know me, and I left with a prescription for fluoxetine. The appointment wasn’t long enough to go into the upheaval and trauma I’d recently experienced in my life, and I was automatically given drugs to ‘alleviate my symptoms’. 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. He argues that our: ‘entire approach to mental health is preoccupied with sedating us, depoliticising our discontent and keeping us productive and subservient to the economic status quo’ (p.3). 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 dif Davies has used this book to describe the UK’s ‘marketised vision of mental health that has stripped our suffering of its deeper meaning and purpose’ (p.2). His arguments are evidenced by discussions of various research papers, by countless interviews he conducted and by his own attendance at events such as the Occupy movement in New York.

Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Caused our Mental Health

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. 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.It would be nice to think that books like this can help change something. As someone qualified to chartered psychologist level who spent the majority of his career in capital markets I have perhaps found it easier than most to see that we were heading into a dead-end with the current labelling of anything and everything as ‘poor mental health’ (especially by the media). This, despite the fact that the true causal factors for the explosion of individual distress are perhaps more structural than internal. Ie more the ‘fault’ of society than the person (despite what the person is being told). I could also see how our politicians were causing more and more inequality and stress (witness Clinton’s politically motivated campaign to offer home-loans to people who could not afford them). And, let’s not forget that the vast, vast majority of people being treated currently as if mentally ill are in fact ‘just’ unhappy - very, very (sometimes suicidally) unhappy - but unhappy nonetheless, not psychotic. 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. Pernah nggak, kepikiran kalau di balik kesehatan mental penyebabnya tidak lain & tidak bukan adalah kapitalisma? 👀

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And this is how we've been taught to view our emotions,' continued Richard, 'as something we can manifacture through targeted acts of consumption. When we suffer, we are not encouraged to delve down and face reality; we don't learn about what is broken in our lives and in our society. We are not taught to read, to study, to think, to struggle, to act..' instead we do what our economy wants, he insisted: we reach for the endless consumer products that falsely promise a better life for a price- the entertainment, pills, the clothes, the stuff. 'We don't manage our distress through action but through consumption.' 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. 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.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”. 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.