After decades of trying to prove [the chemical imbalance theory], researchers have still come up empty-handed.’ c) The training of future psychiatrists must install greater awareness of psychiatry's scientific failings and current excesses as well as how to manage patients outside the medical model. Many of the symptoms of mental conditions that are now pathologized; such as anxiety and depression - can be effectively moderated with a combination of non-pharmaceutical interventions; like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, as well as a holistic approach that includes a healthy balanced diet, regular vigorous exercise, adequate and quality sleep time to maintain a circadian rhythm, and ensuring vitamin D levels are not deficient. James Davies obtained his PhD in medical and social anthropology from the University of Oxford. He is also a qualified psychotherapist (having worked in the NHS), and a senior lecturer in social anthropology and psychology at the University of Roehampton, London. He has delivered lectures at many universities, including Harvard, Brown, CUNY, Oxford and London, and has written articles about psychiatry for the New Scientist, Therapy Today and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. There has been a change in thinking from the 60s and 70s, where psychiatric drugs were seen as altering mood (in the same way as any mind altering drug, including alcohol and street drugs alter moods) A shift occurred to thinking of psychiatric drugs as ‘curative’. This might not seem an important shift – however it goes along with the idea that much uncomfortable, difficult human emotion is now being seen as potentially aberrant and classifiable as a ‘disease’ - as in the DSM – shyness becomes ‘social phobia’.

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James Davies gained his PhD in social and medical anthropology from the University of Oxford in 2006. He is also a qualified psychotherapist, who has worked in organisations such as the NHS. James is a Reader in social anthropology and mental health at the University of Roehampton, London. He has published four academic books for presses like Stanford University Press and Routledge, and has delivered talks at many universities such as Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Brown, CUNY (New York), and The New School (New York). James has also written for The Times, The Guardian, The New Scientist and Salon. He is the co-founder of the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry, now secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence. James Davies’ timely expose of the psychiatry industry makes for fascinating and thought-provoking reading. Using his insider knowledge to illustrate for a general readership how psychiatry has put riches and medical status above patients’ well-being, Davies shows a real flair for the polemic, as well as a real sympathy for the senstivity of the subject.” First of all, let me say that I completely agree that overmedicalisation is a big problem. Okay, now for the real review.The book begins with a discussion of the DSM and its plausibility. Davies speaks with Robert Spitzer (a key figure in earlier versions) and others about the meaning and purpose of this diagnostic text and establishes that the categories within were not arrived at by research, but what seems to be a consensus of practitioners. Later he talks with a prominent critic of the current DSM (5) with Allen Frances, who expresses his view that many normal behaviours are now being pathologised. I've read Frances' book Saving Normal, on this topic, and it appears in both instances that, for all the valid points he makes, Frances is unable to put himself outside the thought of his profession.

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Davies seems to side with the view that some form of suffering is natural for humans and the best way to treat it is through social measures or simply managing it. He suggests a path forward for the profession which has four steps: Author James Davies obtained his PhD in medical and social anthropology from the University of Oxford. He is also a qualified psychotherapist (having worked in the NHS), and a senior lecturer in social anthropology and psychology at the University of Roehampton, London. He has delivered lectures at many universities, including Harvard, Brown, CUNY, Oxford and London, and has written articles about psychiatry for the New Scientist, Therapy Today and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. James Davies, with a PhD in social and medical anthropology from Oxford, begins with a history of psychiatry starting in the 1970s and a crisis of confidence it faced. A series of experiments questioned the validity and reliability of psychiatric diagnosis. Who bites the hand that feeds? There is a huge cover-up, smoke and mirrors going on in the world of funding ‘research’ into psychiatric medicine whether in academic institutions, or with clinicians. And, gentle reader, there is even less transparency over this in the UK than there is in the States, where under the Obama administration, spearheaded by a particularly truth-and-justice campaigning Senator, Senator Grassley, some efforts to bring the Pharma hyena under the spotlight are beginning to bear fruit. But not here, where there is murk a plenty. Perhaps though, the fact that fully 56% of the panel member luminaries involved in writing the DSM-IV bible had 1 or more financial associations with the pharmaceutical industry, should begin to rip the wool from over our eyes. And, for those writing/creating the diagnostic categories, which would or course be primarily treated by pharmaceuticals, - 88% of DSM-IV panel members had drug company financial ties.from Big Pharma. And things don’t have appeared to have changed for Perhaps this altered state of mind can be helpful to alleviate painful emotions and give us a chance to make changes to our lives so the drugs are not needed. Yet, this is not the case if we are told that those drugs are a cure and we must stay on them for life. And not if we are left finding the withdrawals from those drugs unbearable.Under the leadership of Dr Spitzer, a team of fifteen psychiatrists were assembled to begin the writing of the DSM III to fix this crisis (p.13). However, Davies reports that even after the DSM III had been published, when a group of psychiatrists were asked if diagnostic reliability had increased, ‘a full 86 per cent said that reliability was still poor’. Davies goes on to say: ‘Another study published in 2006 showed that reliability has not improved in 30 years’ (p.18). There is no point piling up more quotations. By now you get the picture: the public defections continue to mount because, after nearly 50 years of investigation into the chemical imbalance theory, there is not one piece of convincing evidence that the theory is actually correct..." Chapter 1 ends questioning the validity of psychiatric diagnoses even if we fix the reliability problem. Even if we could get every psychiatrist to agree on the diagnoses, does that mean it’s a real disease entity, or that we’ve just made a reliable but arbitrary construct? He argues that we need biomarkers to prove it’s a “discrete, identifiable biological disease.” While I agree, I think that psychiatric definitions do a good job of separating normal but different from disease, by often requiring that the disease is disruptive to the patients social relationships or occupational function. What makes psychiatric illnesses, diseases is that they are problematic for people’s lives, and people, whether the patient themselves or their friends and family, want something done about it. I’m unsure if we will be able to find or need to find biomarkers for every disease. While some diagnoses may ultimately be arbitrary, if they are clinically helpful and can show statistical and long-term improvements in patients quality of life, then they are valuable.

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In Britain, approaching a quarter of the adult population take a psychiatric drug in a year, an increase of over 500% since 1980. Despite this rise in prescriptions, the prevalence of mental health problems and disability have also increased.Within the book, Dr Davies argues the widespread medicalisation of mental distress has fundamentally mischaracterised the problem. Many who are diagnosed and prescribed psychiatric medication are not suffering from biologically identifiable problems. Instead, they are experiencing the understandable and, of course, painful human consequences of life’s difficulties – family breakdowns, problems at work, unhappiness in relationships, low self-esteem. The DSM has gone through a number of editions and each time numbers of "new" mental illnesses have been added to the book (82 new illnesses from DSM3 to DSM4). So what are all these "new" mental illnesses. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power. Atlantic have bought UK & Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) in Dr James Davies’s The New Opium:Capitalism, Mental Health and the Sedation of a Nation. The book argues governments now are more preoccupied with sedating us, depoliticising our discontent and keeping us productive and subservient to the economic status quo, than with understanding and solving the real roots of our emotional despair.

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I am not saying (nor is Davies) that all these senior clinicians and medical academicians are corrupt, merely that neutrality becomes hard to achieve when your income is dependent on a particular company who are hoping your findings will support the excellence of their product, and even to demonstrate a need for their productStriking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds. I can’t urge the reading of this book strongly enough. Anyone who cares about what it means to be a fully human being, and especially anyone involved in any way in the caring professions needs to be aware of what Davies lays clear about the mental health industry. For industry it surely is. The book concludes that change is possible, so long as we identify and reform the real social drivers of our mental health crisis. Reading this book was eye-opening and pretty scary. If taken literally I can imagine that no one would be able to trust any health professional at all. He uses sensationalism in places that I felt was unnecessary to get the point across. His main point is that the health profession is turning the stresses and strains of everyday life into treatable illnesses for monetary gain. His focus is on mental health which cannot be measured biologically in the same way that physical/visible illness can. He has a valid point with 48 million anti-depressant prescriptions in England in just one year! In Chapter 9, he discusses the utterly immoral process whereby pharmaceutical companies pay psychiatrists and universities to sell their product, and how it is near impossible for any patient to find out if their psychiatrist is being paid to promote the drug they are being prescribed. He discusses what he terms as ‘psychiatric imperialism’ in Chapter 12. In this chapter, he discusses how the West has exported their pathologizing of distress to countries more likely to see it as a result of social or psychological problems. A way forward from this crisis in psychiatry