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.

Crucial conversations: with Joanna Moncrieff and James Davies Crucial conversations: with Joanna Moncrieff and James Davies

As medicalisation and commodification have occurred apace, they have also hastened the widespread depoliticisation of distress This is an incredible book and one of the most important there is to read. t has also depressed me because I've been very much into manifestation and making your own reality. Until I became unemployed and was rejected by every job, cue in my feelings of failure because if I wanted it badly enough then I would have gotten it. Allegedly. Our mental health sector has had little protection against what more powerful politico/economic interests have demanded. 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. 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.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. I was really excited to get into this one because the subject matter really intrigued me, but I was left feeling a little bit disappointed overall. Interested to take on higher education in psychology? Aventis School of Management offers a broad range of Part-time Graduate Studies catering to working professionals to upgrade your knowledge and skills or a mid-career switch. 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. Within the book, Dr Davies argues the widespread medicalisation of mental distress has fundamentally mischaracterised the problem. Many who are diagnosed and prescribed psychiatric medication are not suffering from biologically identifiable problems. Instead, they are experiencing the understandable and, of course, painful human consequences of life’s difficulties – family breakdowns, problems at work, unhappiness in relationships, low self-esteem.

Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our [PDF] [EPUB] Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our

However, another point in this book is that suffering can actually cause many good things to occur. Think of the civil rights movement which was built on the suffering people were experiencing. Also, many people's suffering such as a death of a partner or child that has an illness can help us to truly start to reevaluate what is truly important in our life. 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.' 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. The book looks at how people who have aspirations and dreams and what they might buy can influence their personality, for example an interesting experiment was carried out in people who drove high status, expensive cars and low status cars and the people who drove shiny, expensive, high costing cars were more likely to not stop for a pedestrian that was trying to cross the road and show less consideration for others. In my own personal experience I feel that this is often true and that people in low status cars are less likely to cut up in front of people or stop when you are trying to cross a road as opposed to people who might have a nice shiny Mercedes-Benz, BMW or Audi.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 new opium of the people | James Davies » IAI TV The new opium of the people | James Davies » IAI TV

People with much more wealth and a higher status tend to be much less kinder in their attitude to others than people who have a low status position. The idea behind this is that people who are selfish or better paid tend to be more selfish in their approaches and behaviours to others. These ideas gave rise to a theory of materialism in that people who were more wealthy or a higher status tended to cheat more and find ways obtain things that people of low status weren't so bothered about. But people of high status and more wealth, also gave rise to a certain level of unhappiness. One example of this is that people with low status could be given the idea that they were a high status person and they then showed changes in their behaviour to seek more in the way of material goods and wealth. The main argument is that people who are wealthy tend to be more selfish but maybe that's part of why they have become wealthy. Many of these people who are obsessed by materialistic wealth goods often get something but as soon as the item has been bought they lose interest and seek something else. I generally believe that the love of money and the desire to have more and more of it is actually another kind of addiction in a similar way that someone might be addicted to heroin or gambling. After talking about work, the book then goes on to discuss how the rise of these approaches are being used in educational establishments. The author begins with the rise of special educational needs. The number of people with special educational needs has doubled in 10 years since 2010. Now that number now accounts for almost 20% of all schoolchildren in education. This could be their speech, language, cognition, learning, or behavioural issues. However, the biggest increase in this number is those with a mental health problem be at anxiety, depression, ADHD and behavioural problems. 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.A wonderful, moving and truly life-changing book. Sedated is an urgent intervention for post-pandemic society, written with expertise and clarity. Warning: it will cause irritation to powerful interests who fear us all becoming better informed about the root causes of so much human suffering. ― Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, former Director of Liberty The entire appointment was 15 minutes long, and it really rattled me. It implied that there was nothing wrong with my situation, but rather there was something wrong with me. If you're stressed and exhausted by a high stress job during a global pandemic, the doctor seemed to suggest, you should fix yourself with drugs, rather than working to fix the external circumstances. I didn't take the prescription, but that appointment stayed with me. While Marx’s argument targeted religion during industrial capitalism, its analytical thrust over the 20th century would influence social scientists across the political spectrum. They would use his ideas to explain how social institutions (e.g. religion, education, health care) all adapted to the aims of the wider economy, mostly to ensure their own survival and success. In what follows, I want to explore how this enduring idea can help explain the failure of our mental health sector to improve its outcomes since the 1980s. 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’ .

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

For most of our history we have needed to act in a cooperative manner to be a part of a society that evolved over a long period of time to an egalitarian way of thinking. But now things have changed. There is a significant link of this book has already pointed out that sometimes inequality is driving increased levels of 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." About ‘A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs: The Truth About How They Work And How To Come Off Them.’ The author looks also at how in modern day Britain, where schools are are ranked by league tables and even parents are putting high levels of pressure on their own children to succeed and pass exams, is it any wonder that children are feeling high levels of anxiety and sadness. In countries such as Canada, where things are much more relaxed, there are far fewer children with so-called mental health problems. It doesn't help that many of these needs are created not just by governments alone, but also by many parents. Within the book, Dr Davies argues the widespread medicalisation of mental distress has fundamentally mischaracterised the problem. Many who are diagnosed and prescribed psychiatric medication are not suffering from biologically identifiable problems. Instead, they are experiencing the understandable and, of course, painful human consequences of life’s difficulties – family breakdowns, problems at work, unhappiness in relationships, low self-esteem and etc. For these individuals, there has become an imbalance in the provision, with so many offered medical interventions versus talking therapies and social psychological provision, which may better facilitate meaningful change and recovery.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.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.Urgent and persuasive, Sedated systematically examines why this individualistic view of mental illness has been promoted by successive governments and big business – and why it is so misplaced and dangerous. Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis by James Davies – eBook Details 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. 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? Muchas personas toman antidepresivos por la simple razón de que hay poquísimas alternativas disponibles. Nuestros servicios públicos carecen de alternativas psicosociales, como la terapia, por lo que los fármacos se convierten en la intervención más rápida y barata (aunque menos eficaz) en salud mental". 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