While general medicine has certainly advanced over the last few decades, clinical psychology has travelled a deeply distressing trajectory. As Marx thought of religion, the role of the mental health sector is now to sedate, to distract from distress and to prevent political action, all in the interests of our neo-liberal economy. Following the publication of his book, Sedated, How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis, James Davies explains. 

Since the 1980s, clinical outcomes in general medicine have been on a positive trajectory upward, due to impressive advancements in biomedical research, technology and treatment. While progress has been rapid throughout general medicine, one area of health care has nevertheless bucked the trend – the area of psychiatry and mental health. 

Not only have clinical outcomes broadly flat-lined in this area, but according to some measures they have declined. In recent decades, mental health disability rates have almost trebled; the prevalence of mental health problems has risen fourfold, while for people diagnosed with serious mental health issues the gap between their life expectancy and everyone else’s has widened (from 10 years to 20). These and other dire statistics exist despite our having invested over quarter a trillion pounds in UK over quarter a trillion pounds in UK mental health research and services since the 1980s, and despite nearly a quarter of our adult population receiving some kind of mental health intervention each year.