Book Review: "Sedated" by James Davies

Full Title: Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis by James Davies

I am still on my nonfiction binge and honestly, I am a little bit worried I might be 'doom reading' myself into sadness but I'm not sure whether I want to stop just yet. This book is called Sedated and is about the over-medicalisation and over-medicating of our entire culture despite the fact in the past 20 years, there has been way more of a focus on mental health. I am glad that we seem to be waking up to something I said about five years' ago. The question is: if there is so much emphasis on mental health help and wellbeing then why is it that our mental health across the western world has progressively been plummeting? Well, its our entire culture that is causing it. It goes from the over-medicating of our everyday ill feelings all the way to our disengagement with our work and even further.

One of the author's starting points is telling the reader about his investigation into the sales figures of the DSM-V in 2013. He found that the sales of this book not only went up but it was an Amazon Bestseller for around six months. He wondered why and found out that the pharmaceutical companies were buying them in bulk and passing them on to people who would diagnose the mental health conditions and be able to medicate appropriately. Therefore, the pharmaceutical companies were basically telling people how to medicate with the medications that they were making.

One of the points I enjoyed most about this introduction is that the author takes us through the reasons why the DSM-V was even expanded to include as many editions as it has with most recent expansions being vital to our new age modernism of navigating mental health landscapes. First of all, he finds errors with the way conditions enter the DSM as they are voted on by a committee of few psychologists and then he infers that there is little scientific basis for how these mental health issues are written up. But instead, the criteria is based upon various behaviours and emotions which, in recent years, have become a lot more vague in the presence of mass diagnosis. Everyday issues that one might deal with are now considered mental health difficulties and it is all thanks to this expansion.

I do not think we really needed to be sold the idea that the over-medicalisation of mental health conditions can lead to a form of fatalism amongst the sufferers but the author again explains the reasoning with a sort of dark humour circular logic. This is where someone would go to get their mental health checked upon by a professional and then be told that they have a mental health condition. What happens next is that the person will be advised upon how to alter their lifestyle accordingly, possibly cutting off certain things that they do or want to do that are more strenuous and a form of 'bad practice'. This then creates the fatalistic attitude by lowering the expectations of the person for their own lives and thus, makes their mental health considerably worse over time.

Medicalising this distress, according to the author, actually does more harm than good and therefore, can stop the person from actually recovering and keep them on psychiatric medications for longer than they would truly require (another problem that I will come on to in a few paragraphs). With the overarching concerns about mental health coming to the forefront, it has to be realised that far too many people are on mental health medications that they may not actually need and, that a lot of them (even for quite horrid conditions) are actually making things more difficult rather than better.

One of the things I found I was agreeing with (that I probably would have been more cynical of if the argument was not so good and didn't include mountains of evidence) was the fact that this is directly linked to the economic prosperity of the country the person is living in. Ever since the Thatcherian Era, Britain's mental health has been in a quick and steep decline and this is due to the shutting down of manufacturing services which means thousands upon millions of workers have been forced into the exploitative service industry. For those of you that know what the service industry entails (everyone from teachers to waiters, from brokers and bankers all the way to human resources), it focuses more on your personality than it does on what you can actually do, forcing you to disengage from your own self to be able to actually work.

This disengagement from your 'true self' to the work is exacerbated by long working hours and even longer commutes due to inner-city housing prices increasing over the years. More time spent going to and from work, more time spent at work only bodes for the mental health of the individual working coming down. Plus the fact that this person is now engaged with a personality which is not their true selves for long hours a day, being forced to act a happier, more 'service' self that is not theirs - this means that things like depression, bipolar disorders and that old fatalistic attitude from a lack of control over their own lives is bubbling right under the surface. A problem that only counts for a small portion of the horrors of mental health in a world that feels like their fixing it.

Sedating these people will stop them asking key questions. The author explains this very well as he does not simply focus on what is happening to the individual, but he also focuses on how this growth on a large scale could have dire consequences for our own personal freedoms as we sell our lives away to companies, corporations and governments that do not care for us in the slightest. The depression is manufactured, but so is the sedation. Medicating these people with numbing drugs such as: Xanax, Prozac and Vallium makes it easier to control them. Suffering is therefore turned into an economy, as the author rightly states, and the cure is also part of the same economy.

Therefore, with the credit card culture turning into consumerist culture and getting people to spend money they don't have and accumulate debt because of it. Then, the debt makes them psychologically less capable, the doctors medicate it and thus, they have aptly sedated them back into the long hours and exploitative mask-wearing of the service work culture. This is not the doctor's fault, it is the entire system's fault. This is just how it is designed. Extrapolate that over millions of people and what do you have? Medicated and numb wage slaves.

I would like to add a comment here on the time when I was on mental health medications. I was on Zoloft at one point and honestly, it doesn't make you actually feel better. It makes you feel nothing. The numbness plus the consequences of side effects definitely keeps you taking the medication because you don't want to deal with any possible worse products of stopping - withdrawal could be bad. But the main point I'm making is that I only took it for maybe 8-10 months before I seriously could not stand it any longer. It's been a couple of years now since I stopped taking it and I think that the author of this book really does understand how harmful mental health medication is. I am lucky I got out before it became even worse (as is mentioned in this book as to how).

The author's research into the pandemic does not go unnoticed. Looking at just April 2020, he realised that there was over £7.4 billion of consumer debt paid off by the British public mainly because we were not really spending any of our money on consumerist stuff as shops were essentially closed. People saved more money and therefore, were able to pay of the debts. Even though unemployment rose by 1.5 million, the debt essentially fell due to closures. This shows us that it isn't people's spending habits that are the problem. It is the rampant and aggressive consumerist culture that surrounds them.

One part of the book I found insanely interesting is when the author starts looking at the results of a study upon patients with mental health conditions who both took medication and did not. It was found that the longer people took the mental health medications, the worse their health became. Connected to a fatalistic attitude (yes, our old friend is back) and a 'numbing' quality the medications provide, the intervals between the numbness is still suffering and thus, the medications actually don't solve anything. It isn't stopping there though - the investigation goes on to state that people who stopped taking their mental health medications earlier on in the treatment out performed people who had long exposure to the medications in every single way. This even went for people with very serious conditions who stopped taking their medications as well as those suffering with less severe conditions.

But it still does not stop there. It is also seen that long term exposure to mental health medications cause the pre-frontal cortex of the brain to go into a state of atrophy that is no way linked to the condition or severity of condition the person is suffering from. Your brain literally begins to waste away because of exposure over a long term. This means that the surge in mental health medicating has turned the British public into zombies, making them more willing to accept their fates submissively rather than fight to make their lives better.

One of the things the reader learns about in this book is how Margaret Thatcher's tightening of the noose upon receiving benefits basically screwed this country seven ways from Sunday. It has been proven that making it difficult to receive benefits or stay on them does not encourage the unemployed to seek out work, instead it just causes undue stress and actually, the opposite happens. Due to the stress, people feel like they cannot seek out work and therefore, are more likely to medicate and blame themselves. It does not encourage a healthy work mindset and yet, Thatcher did it anyway because let's face it - what else did you expect of that evil woman?

From the workforce programs of David Cameron which marked his failure as a Prime Minister all the way to the demonisation of the unemployed as people with character faults, all the reasoning was being steered methodically away from the economic crashes that happened in between to lead to such high rates of unemployment. Making people suffer seems to be a government job at this point.

One last thing that I enjoyed about this book (sorry for taking up so much of your time!) is the way in which it explains how our suffering has been commodified by basically every corporation and also by the government. We are not told why our suffering might be, we are not taught how to face the realities of suffering or to sit with our sadness, but instead we are sold quick-fixes and we are sold lifestyles that might distract us for long enough to make us choose something new to buy. We are never told to wind down a little bit or stop going so fast. We are told that it is our problem and there are things we can buy to make it work. We are blamed if we don't. It is absolutely disgusting.

But honestly, what else did you expect from Conservative Britain?

This brilliantly written book explores in-depth the different ways we are being mentally exploited by neoliberalism and new-age capitalism, how our pain and suffering have been turned into commodities and how we are, on purpose, being kept poor, sad and stupid by the people who are using us to pump money out of. Everything runs on money and the British public are the victims of this massive fraud that this review has only scratched the surface of. Just read the book for yourself and find out how deep it goes.