Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

Product Information

This is due to psychiatry, mainly, who preaches that if it causes “disfunction”, a deviation of their “normal”, it needs their management. They themselves know that this is NOT working. They are the first to know. There are two themes ever present in the comments at MIA. One is anti-‘victim’-mindset promotion. That is, expressions of support for suffering are cast as having or promoting a victim mindset. So it’s fine to talk about having been victimized but displaying any of the common behaviors or emotions resultant from that victimization is framed as having a victim mindset. It’s a very powerful form of silencing. It’s especially prevalent in discussions of systemic oppressions and marginalization by denials of the very existence of such. The worst extremes of phoney empowerment...can be found in the trite aphorisms of the self-help industry, where popular psychologists ascribe to us almost magical abilities to alter circumstances despite the harsh realities containing us. In a world where disadvantage, unemployment and work-related distress are so socially embedded, downplaying the very real obstacles to opportunity is regularly experienced as yet another form of punishment, yet another form of blaming and shaming the individual."

Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

The explanatory model therefore deploys symbolism to bolster its credence and power in the world, hence the huge resistance the model has to de-medicalising its ideas, concepts and practices (and its almost structural hostility towards non-medical symbolic alternatives). So even though the symbols don’t capture the realities of our emotional worlds (you could even say that they distort these realities) they still serve the function of endowing the model with the authority it needs to dominate and thrive. 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. We are effectively encouraged to use material comforts to treat our distress. Buying something new, something better, will make you feel good. Eating, drinking, smoking, holidays or new clothes become crutches, but profitable for capitalism. At the same time, governments and authorities lecture people about taking personal responsibility for our health and consumer choices. This is a social catch-22, since we have not had governments with any interest in alleviating our distress. We are simply being seen as a source of profits when in distress. A social cure is needed We are then prescribed psychiatric drugs which the corporations who manufactured them claim to have proved will be effective. If we ask our GPs to help us withdraw from these drugs they will look to evidence provided by those same organisations that show that this can be done easily. When many patients experience extreme withdrawal effects, the doctor will suggest that is proof the drugs are still needed. They may even up the dose.

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. More people are taking psychotropic drugs than ever before. It has never been more urgent to have these cruicial conversations.’ AD4E This is because this level of social breakdown will create major divisions within the military itself (creating different well armed factions) and within various police forces etc., and of course various parts of the country. And since there are already so many guns in this country, people will just end up confiscating them from WHEREVER they are stored. 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

Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health

For all those who want a better world, we must certainly be involved in “changing minds” in revolutionary ways and in a revolutionary direction. Helping ourselves and other people become more rational and empathetic about every aspect of institutional forms of human oppression, and seeking newer revolutionary alternative economic and political forms of social organization etc. beyond capitalism. 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. 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.Mental health concerns have risen since 2004 by 48% with an estimated one in eight children suffering from some form of mental health condition or difficulty. 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. Davies’ uses his own research and references many scientific reports into the area, all of which suggest urgent revolutionary attention is needed before we spiral further into despair.

Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health

Someone Else, When I read your post, I think of those ad infinitum pictures—pictures within pictures within pictures within pictures, etc. I think, that could be one probable visual description of psychatry, etc.: never-ending cruelty, abuse, and stupidity. Thank you. 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. 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. There is no evidence that these consultancies improve employee mental health. Even so, they are very popular with employers, mostly as they help control the narrative on workplace distress. By interpreting suffering as a commentary on self rather than system, they banish difficult work experiences from the domain of public discussion, placing them into the private, depoliticised domains, which effectively help shield bad environments from liability. We have seen similar dynamics occurring in job-centers, where outsourced mental health consultancies are used to ‘re-educate’ the unemployed to view unemployment as a psychological problem. Personal rather the structural change becomes the remedy, and if personal change doesn’t work, well, then it’s your fault.James Davies is one of the most important voices on mental health in the world. This is a beautiful and deeply sane book. Everyone who’s suffering – and wants to know how to make it stop – should read it right away. ― Johann Hari, author of Lost Connections 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.

Dr James Davies publishes new book “Sedated: How Modern

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). The central thesis of this book is that mental health is too "medicalized" and low-grade anxiety and depression are conceptualized as chemical imbalances within an individual's brain, rather than understandable, rational reactions to living in a very stressful world. Why would this be so? In Davies' view, the medical establishment does this because it exists in neoliberal capitalism—which is all about individual responsibility, productivity, and buying products to solve all of your problems.

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. 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. 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. No doubt, they wanted to murder a person that was distressed by 9/11/2001, and stands against the never ending wars that, that distressing event has created. Oh, because distress caused by a distressing event, is distress caused by a “chemical imbalance” in one person’s brain? WTF! They don’t seem to know much of anything about the banking and monetary systems, which most definitely need reform. Their primary actual societal function is covering up child abuse and rape, for the mainstream paternalistic religions, which most definitely need reform. Not to mention, they cover up easily recognized medical mistakes, for a big Pharma misinformed – and all too often, incompetent, and honestly downright murderous – medical industry. Oh, and they want to steal everything from us artists who speak the truth, through our history recording artwork, and based upon our many years of research into all these corrupt industries.