Dr. James Davies

How our mental health system has colluded with the interests of late capitalism: a call for mental health reform.

The Sedations of Nations: The underlying reasons why our mental health systems are failing. In this presentation, Dr. James Davies calls for major social and economic reform to tackle the crisis in poor mental health outcomes, revealing the political, corporate and economic motives behind the promotion of the medical model, which depoliticises, individualises, commodifies and pathologises our emotional distress - a model, while handsomely serving neoliberal aims and objectives, has presided over decades of worsening clinical outcomes.

In Britain alone, more than 20 per cent of the adult population take a psychiatric drug in any one year. This is an increase of over 500 percent 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 mischaracterized 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, his book The New Opium 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.

Therapists are now more likely than ever to be working with clients who are taking or withdrawing from prescribed drugs. These presentations by the main editors of the Guidance for Psychological Therapists are based on the companion publication “A short guide to what every psychological therapist should know about working with psychiatric drugs”. They will give you the information you need to work more confidently with clients and gives answers to many questions about working with prescribed psychiatric drugs in therapy. Speakers: Dr James Davies, Professor Rosemary Rizq, Dr Anne Guy. https://prescribeddrug.info/training/

In the first part of this lecture, Dr James Davies will take us behind the scenes of how the psychiatrist's bible, the DSM, was actually written. The second part will address why psychiatry is such big business, and why, on the whole, it may be doing more harm than good.