Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

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I was blown over by “commodified suffering” comment. I have been calling this as the commodified feelings. In the mental health system, the most commodified feeling or state of mind is empathy. Try to show empathy, and it is taken right off your mouth, and you are forced into regression, and only then, you will be released until you again show the same empathy that was not allowed from you earlier. Do not worry of others (killing any collectivism on the way), just worry about your feelings as first person (creating isolation of the mind). Of course the therapist must show empathy, must function as my own empathy since I am not allowed because I am a child…symbolically speaking but yet as if. writing this down is making me go mental already. No reason to make helping others so categorized…it is soft, it is malleable, it is flexible, it is human connection of the mind, the body and the others all at once, all apart organically, and all mixed when needed in so many different capacities. No hard rules!

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https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/life-sciences/news/dr-james-davies-publishes-new-book-sedated-how-modern-capitalism-created-our-mental-health-crisis/ Sam, I loved this comment. Especially the part at the end about how our disabilities don’t define us. This is why I prefer the term “differently abled”. I even read someone else use this term today for the first time. It is how I feel about myself. I am not a disabled person. I am a person with disabilities. But I have many wonderful abilities that get lost or remain unseen and unappreciated when I am framed solely in the light of being disabled. I think this gets at the heart of what disability advocates are fighting for – to be seen as whole people with many gifts and much to offer despite whatever physical or mental limitations we may have.Firstly, our sector has depoliticised suffering: conceptualising suffering in ways that protect the current economy from criticism – i.e. reframing suffering as rooted in individual rather than social causes, thus favouring self over social and economic reform. About ‘A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs: The Truth About How They Work And How To Come Off Them.’ 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 La tesis principal de Davies es que el neoliberalismo impulsado por Tatcher en la década de los 80 caló cambiando la cultura y la mentalidad de la población, inculcando ciertos valores que le son funcionales al sistema capitalista, tales como el materialismo o el individualismo, despolitizando y patologizando los problemas de salud mental. Así, el autor apuesta por un origen sociogénico a la actual ola de salud mental, y reivindica la necesidad de poner el foco en las causas estructurales (el sistema) y no sólo coyunturales (la pandemia, la guerra). 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.

Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Caused our Mental Health

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. 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 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’ .Finally, it has decollectivised suffering: dispersing our socially caused suffering into different self-residing dysfunctions, thereby diminishing the shared and collective experiences that have so often in the past been a vital spur for social change. JB: What I found eye opening in ‘Sedated’, was just how entrenched and pervasive this ideology is in our society. The ways you illustrate how the neoliberal ethos — competition for resources, productivity over wellbeing and ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking — is at play in schools and hospitals, for example, makes this quite clear. It is not just the habitual stress and anxiety that results from this, but a whole experience of others and the world in terms of “us vs them, haves vs have nots.” Our value under this rubric is earned — by what have and do — rather being to do with intrinsic human qualities. This ethos has become so embedded in our society that for many it can simply seem to be a given. How do you think it became so powerful?