Sedated

How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

James Davies

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781786499875
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786499868
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

A provocative and shocking look at how western society is misunderstanding and mistreating mental illness. Perfect for fans of Empire of Pain and Dope Sick.

In Britain alone, more than 20% of the adult population take a psychiatric drug in any one year. This is an increase of over 500% 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 mischaracterised 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, Sedated 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.

PART ONE

THE NEW OPIUM

1

AN ECONOMIC PRELUDE

In October 2017, a parliamentary assistant walked me down the central hallway of the Houses of Parliament. As we turned into a narrow corridor, she suddenly halted, before ushering me into a small enclave. ‘Wait here, please,’ she said briskly, pointing to some green leather benches lining the wall. She then slipped through a large wood-panelled door, before appearing again a few moments later. ‘This way,’ she said with a smile. ‘He’s ready to see you now. You only have thirty minutes – he’d give you more but it’s been a long day.’

As I entered the bustling Peers’ Common Room in the House of Lords, I immediately began scouring the room for my interviewee. I soon spotted him nestled in a quiet corner, framed by a stately Gothic window that looked out onto the Thames. As I approached, he slowly rose, one hand extended, with the other clutching the armrest for support. ‘Welcome, James,’ he said kindly. ‘Please sit down and join me for coffee.’ As I settled in the plush seat opposite him, it seemed suddenly surreal to be interviewing one of the most influential politicians of the modern age, the man who masterminded the historic economic reforms of Thatcher’s Britain and the new style of capitalism under which we now all live.

I was meeting Lord Nigel Lawson, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, in order to explore an event that had fascinated me for many years. It concerned an encounter that had taken place over thirty-five years earlier, in a room at Number 10 Downing Street, between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the eminent journalist Ronald Butt. In that meeting, Butt wanted to know whether Thatcher was pleased with her government’s performance since being elected two years earlier. Over the course of an hour, little was said that would surprise any informed listener, until something unexpected happened – perhaps something that shouldn’t have happened.

Butt asked Thatcher what her priorities were for her remaining term as prime minister. She responded by declaring that politics over the past thirty years had become far too socialist; that people had come to rely too much on the state rather than on themselves and each other. ‘That approach is wrong,’ she stated flatly. ‘We have to change the approach.’

She then explained how she would do it: ‘It isn’t that I set out on economic policies,’ she said earnestly, ‘it’s that I set out to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach, you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method, the object is to change the heart and soul.’¹

This confession had long captivated me, because it unmistakably exposed a core principle of Thatcher’s political philosophy: that economic reform was not an end in itself, but a means to what she believed to be a far greater social good – to transform the hearts and minds of an entire population; to shape people into better versions of themselves.

‘Thatcher’s aim to bring about human change through economic reform raises a critical question,’ I said to Lord Lawson. ‘What changes in the national psyche did her new economics aspire to achieve? In what direction do you think she wanted our collective hearts and souls to strive?’

“Well, James,’ answered Lawson slowly, ‘I think that by talking about the heart and soul, Margaret Thatcher felt very strongly that there were certain important virtues – self-reliance, independence and self-responsibility – that economic reform could nurture and develop.’

He then elaborated by referring to the founding text of modern capitalism: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. ‘You see, there is a widespread view out there that for Adam Smith, the wealth of nations consisted of actual gold. But actual gold had absolutely nothing to do with it. The true wealth of any nation exists in people working to better their own and their children’s lives. For Smith, the true gold was not found in vaults, but rather in who people were and what they did.’

For Lawson and Thatcher, the 1970s economy they’d inherited from their predecessors simply did not encourage these golden virtues: hard work, competitiveness and personal initiative. Rather it fostered baser metals: dependency, complacency and entitlement to state support. ‘For us, big government was a critical problem in the 1970s,’ Lord Lawson continued, ‘something even demeaning to human nature itself. Being a creature of the state created dependency. We believed, and still believe, that a high degree of self-reliance is what makes a good society. So in that sense, yes, Margaret was right: our objective to reform the economy went far beyond economics.’

As I sat listening to Lord Lawson, a childhood memory flashed through my mind of eating with my family by candlelight. No lights in the house were working that evening, and it all felt a little ominous. I remember my sister asking my mother why it was so dark. Her response suggested that something serious was happening in ways that we just wouldn’t understand. ‘It’s dark because we have to save energy – most people in the country have no lights tonight.’

The scene I describe occurred in the mid 1970s, a period of acute economic volatility and widespread industrial unrest. A key problem was spiralling inflation, which was triggered by the oil crisis earlier that decade. This led the Labour government of the day to reject union demands for higher wages. As the government dug in, the unions fought back, and widespread strikes and blackouts were the result for many households across the country.

For Thatcher, the strikes were yet another symptom of a deeper national malaise rooted in the economic policies of the 1970s. In her view, the growing power of the unions was encouraging feelings of selfish entitlement in the working population, while the expansion of the welfare state was rewarding dependency on the state and economic lethargy. Additionally, the tight regulation of business was discouraging innovation, while the nationalisation of key sectors was stifling the competitive spirit. In the end, too many individuals had come to view the state as a kind of benevolent father, something Thatcher believed was corroding individual initiative, independence and responsibility. If Britain were to thrive, these state-created flaws in the national character needed to be excised. Economic reform would be the surgical procedure, and moral and economic health the national reward.

While the perceived corrosion of the national character was a central target of Thatcher’s reforms, by rejecting the 1970s social order, she was also rejecting an entire economic worldview that had dominated in the UK and most other developed Western nations since the end of World War II. ‘For us,’ as Lord Lawson confirmed to me, ‘there was a very strong sense [in our 1980s administration] that social democracy had been tried and failed. The question for us was now what to put in its place.’

What Thatcher’s government saw as tried and failed in the 1970s was the very same economic worldview that had, during the 1950s and 1960s, created widespread economic prosperity and growth. Whatever names have been given to this previous paradigm (‘social democracy’, ‘regulated capitalism’, ‘the post-war consensus’, ‘Keynesian capitalism’), they all point to a style of capitalism in which the state played a more central role in the economy than it does today (discounting the emergency measures during COVID, of course). In essence, this period of post-war ‘regulated capitalism’ embraced the idea that the state could create a prosperous and equal society by playing a central role in regulating the economy, developing national institutions and infrastructure, investing heavily in public services, and restraining market forces.

During the 1950s and 1960s wherever this model was embraced – from Western Europe to east Asia and the United States – positive economic and social development followed.² This was the period of expanding social security and health coverage, and of historically low levels of unemployment across many developed nations. Steady economic growth soon became the norm too, reaching an annual average of 4–5 per cent in those areas where the paradigm dominated. For these reasons, this period is now regularly referred to as the Golden Age of Capitalism – a period when personal debt was low, inequality went down, wages went up, social liberalism and civil rights expanded, social mobility grew, unemployment almost disappeared, industrial, scientific and technological innovation unfolded at a steady and productive pace, and sustained international peace (between Western nations at least) was broadly secured.³

By rejecting the 1970s, then, Thatcher was also rejecting an entire economic and social model that had brought high and sustained levels of economic prosperity throughout the 1950s, 1960s and part of the 1970s. From now on, that old paradigm – regulated capitalism – would be superseded by a new economic order: a new capitalism, a neo-liberalism, increasing the role of market forces in society and encouraging the kinds of personal qualities – competitiveness, self-reliance, entrepreneurialism and productivity – esteemed by Thatcher’s political elite.

Thatcher set about unleashing the market to do its work. From now on the state would reduce its role in the economy, while corporations would be given far greater freedoms to expand, state-run industries would be privatised and many labour, welfare and social protections would be cut. Standing before the US Congress in 1985, Thatcher praised the effect such reforms had already exerted in America under Ronald Reagan, and described how Britain was, by copying the US, rapidly catching up:

Now the sun is rising in the West [Congress applauds]. For many years our vitality in Britain was blunted by excessive reliance on the state. Our industries were nationalised, controlled and subsidised in a way that yours never were. We are having to recover the spirit of enterprise which you never lost. Many of the policies you are following are the policies we are following. You have brought inflation down, so have we. You have declared war on regulations and controls, so have we … But above all, we are carrying out the largest programme of denationalisation in our history [large applause]. Just a few years ago in Britain, privatisation was thought to be a pipe dream. Now it is a reality, and a popular one … Members of Congress, that is what capitalism is. A system which brings wealth to the many, and not just to the few [standing ovation].⁴

To understand how these sweeping economic changes would soon transform not just the deeper structures of society, but the internal structures of our psychological, personal and moral lives, we must first take a detour to a time and place far removed from late-twentieth-century Britain; to a time when capitalism was undergoing its first major industrial expansion; to a place where some of our most radical economic ideas were first being forged.

In August 1844, two intellectuals in their mid twenties met at the Café de la Régence on the Place du Palais in Paris. The conversation that ensued was so engrossing for both of them that it would continue each day for a further ten days. What captivated both men was a radical conclusion that each had reached independently of the other: that the industrial revolution then sweeping across Europe was crippling the many while enriching the few. This was due to the relationship between the owners of industry and those working in their factories, a relationship that had become one of essential exploitation. The two men had grown convinced that if balance were to be restored, employees must learn that their economic interest lay in fighting for a new set of working relations – one forbidding their exploitation and more evenly distributing profits while at the same time honouring employees’ basic dignity and rights.

The first man in that Parisian café had come to this conclusion by observing the desperate plight of factory workers in the mills of Manchester. His moral shock at the conditions under which they worked had been exacerbated by his meeting and falling in love with one of these very workers – a twenty-year-old woman called Mary Burns, who would later become his wife. A potent brew of moral outrage and heady passion led him to begin writing political pamphlets criticising the industrialism of the age; these soon fell into the hands of the man who sat opposite him in the café: a man whose journey to the same conclusion had followed a course only slightly less romantic. It involved his mixing with other young radical thinkers in Parisian salons and reading widely in philosophy and political economy. As the conversations unfurled over the next ten days, the two men finally committed to collaborating on a new writing project together. Six months later, that commitment materialised in a book entitled The Holy Family. Its authors were, of course, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.

Both men believed that the exploitation of factory workers could only succeed if the workers themselves accepted their own oppression to be both natural and inevitable. What concerned them was the extent to which this acceptance had become deeply engrained in the workers they observed, keeping them in a state of servitude (which compounded their oppression) and a state of isolation from each other (which inhibited their working together for constructive change). Oppressive working conditions had dehumanised people to the extent that they had become detached or alienated from their essential human rights and needs, leaving them in a state of moral and political limbo. And in this demoralised and politically apathetic state, all that remained for them were soothing illusions and anaesthetics – sedatives to compensate them for the painful oppression they endured. Before Marx and Engels met in that café, Marx had already set about identifying one such powerful sedative: organised religion.

Marx felt that religion, unknown to itself, was helping to support the exploitation of factory workers by sedating them to the very suffering that, if fully experienced, would lead them to unite to fight for reform. His view was based on the idea that suffering had always been a powerful driver of social reform: once people experienced the full force of their own despair, they would be compelled to identify and overthrow its causes. Religion, he believed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Part One: The New Opium
• Part Two: How We Got Here
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Notes and References
• Index