Ethical Matters: Mental Health, Capitalism & the Sedation of a Nation with Dr James Davies

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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.

Dr James Davies is Associate Professor of Mental Health and Anthropology at the University of Roehampton. He is the author of the bestselling book Cracked: Why psychiatry is doing more harm than good and The New Opium: Capitalism, Mental Health and the Sedation of a Nation (Atlantis books 2021).

[This talk was recorded in the Brockway Room at Conway Hall with an in-person and online audience]

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