Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

Product Information

It concerned an encounter that had taken place over thirty-five years earlier, in a room at Number 10 Downing Street, between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the eminent journalist Ronald Butt. 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. Thatcher’s aim to bring about human change through economic reform raises a critical question,’ I said to Lord Lawson. 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: How Modern Capitalism Caused our Mental Health

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. Because this may be the key to unlocking a better future for us all, and this book, Sedated by James Davies, could be a pivotal factor in making this happen. In this way, diagnostic tribes replace political tribes, as we identify with a given ‘mentally ill’ social grouping rather than with a particular social cause (or the interests demands of the diagnostic grouping become the one and only social cause). 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.

Because I've never read any psychological or psychiatric literature that actually bothers to situate mental health care within the culture context in which its practice, this book was a thrill to read. Yet, despite this prescription epidemic, levels of mental illness of all types have actually increased in number and severity. Mental health doesn't exist in a vacuum, separate from everything else that happens in a person's life. Within the book, Dr Davies argues the widespread medicalisation of mental distress has fundamentally mischaracterised the problem. So what I argue in ‘Sedated’, to come to your question, James, is that our mental health sector, broadly speaking, does nothing to problematise the social conditions of distress.

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

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. This means that if you join us as a student, you will benefit from being taught by leading thinkers from your first year of study. Personal rather the structural change becomes the remedy, and if personal change doesn’t work, well, then it’s your fault. We can choose to take Davies’s book as a prompt to act against the way in which our suffering is seen as a commodity and a source of profit. In this game-changing polemic, James Davies leaves us in no doubt: to tackle the mental health crisis we need major social and economic reform.About ‘A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs: The Truth About How They Work And How To Come Off Them. It ensures that the model remains relevant in the face of the social determinants of distress, protecting or even expanding the model’s jurisdiction over us, but it also allows the model to claim sophisticated ‘bio-psycho-social’ credentials, despite relegating social causes to mere ‘triggers’ and widely privileging biological/drug interventions in the management of what has been triggered – namely – the ‘mental illness’. The cry is for ‘ more psych-services ’ and ‘mental health consultancies ’, not for serious reflection on, and reform of, the harmful policies weighing on student life. But most of all we need to turn on its head the argument that government must ‘balance the books’ as an excuse for rampant capitalism. 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.