Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

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This book blew my mind. It articulated and answered so many of the questions that have been swirling around in the brain about mental health for years. 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. As a student, you will have be supported not just by those that teach you, but also by the wide range of staff who will be with you throughout your studies.

Sedated by James Davies | Waterstones Sedated by James Davies | Waterstones

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. 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.' El autor detalla este cambio en el imaginario haciendo hincapié en cuatro aspectos: la individualización del problema, el sufrimiento dejó de ser un evento social para convertirse en una lucha individual; la redefinición de lo que es el bienestar y la felicidad; la patologización de las emociones que son negativas en términos económicos (como la falta de concentración); y la mercantilización de las respuestas al problema del sufrimiento en términos de oferta de consumo". 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). 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 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’. 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. 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’ .

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

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.

Sedated

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.

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

Sometimes mental health services focus too much on what is wrong with someone as opposed to what happened to someone. So for example if you have an increased workload and you're not sleeping and therefore this is bringing you down and you feel a lot of stress and pressure it is often the remit of professionals to say that that person is suffering from depression rather than from an increased workload that could be managed and sorted rather than trying to manage the label of depression. Many well-being courses that are supplied by companies such as the NHS have no evidence to show that they work in regards to reducing stress and depression. If you have an increased workload for example, you find your job boring and you might have some personal problems it is totally natural to feel some signs of depression or sadness in your life but perhaps managing what it is it's bothering you might be more important than just going on the well-being course where are you practising mindfulness techniques. As already pointed out, no research shows that these kinds of courses actually support and help people and make any changes to their well-being and mental health status.

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 preferred emotional state for late capitalism is a state of perpetual “functional dissatisfaction”; functional to the extent that you will continue to work, and dissatisfied to the extent that you will continue to spend.”