The neurofication of everyday life being driven by academics & professionals. 👇

Dr James Davies (PhD) 💭 In this paper, we discuss exactly that (with evidence). Diagnoses were unnecessary for effective service provision, but were used as *exclusion* (not inclusion) criteria. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

We often discuss how psych-diagnosis 'opens the door to care'. But let's talk about how it regularly shuts it, via 'diagnostic overshadowing’: when physical complaints get wrongly attributed to 'mental illness', with examinations & treatments being consequently delayed or denied.

“By reclassifying painful normality as psychiatric abnormality, we’ve created the illusion of a psychiatric epidemic,” argues James Davies.

Linda Bauld, Dr James Davies (PhD) 💭 and Professor Susan Michie debate the future and limits of healthcare. iai.tv/video/life-dea…

‘Fixing ‘ the ‘symptom’ so often ignores that the ‘symptom’ is a gateway into a deeper reality or problem that needs to be explored and unraveled. Look beyond the symptom to the story behind it.

'Mental health is dedication to reality at all costs.”
- M Scott Peck.

People are now talking about different brains in their one brain wanting to do contradictory things. Presumably there’s a third brain somewhere observing all this... 🥴

Listening is not a 'skill' you 'learn', it's an expression of being deeply interested in the other; of being committed to understanding what's being communicated on multiple levels - overtly & tacitly. If you have to perform listening, you're probably not listening at all.

Once your distress has been medicalised, medicated & depoliticised, the government will now prescribe its final remedy: cutting your financial support so that you're now forced to return to the precarious, low paid & demoralising work that made you miserable in the first place.

Should be an interesting read.

Anyone already read it?

Once your distress has been medicalised, medicated & depoliticised, the government will now prescribe its final remedy: cutting your financial support so that you're now forced to return to the precarious, low paid & demoralising work that made you miserable in the first place.

The solution to our mental health crisis isn't cutting disability payments, worsening the lives of the most vulnerable, but tacking social determinants & funding effective psycho-social interventions. We can't cut, medicate & diagnose our way out of this.
theguardian.com/politics/2024/…

The widespread demoralisation of young people caused by an economy that works against them is a great opportunity for pharma.

More funding for mental health? Be careful. Our medicalised system has had over 40 years to prove itself. By most measures it has failed: mental health worsening, prescriptions vaulting, outcomes flatlining, morale tumbling. We need more funding, but not for more of the same.

The neurofication of everyday life, aside from fuelling a global psych-drug market, is driving young people to reframe various forms of real distress & difficulty as indicating fixed disabilities, that neither they nor anyone else can change. This is debilitating a generation.

This is 100% the most riveting and timely book I've ever read. We need to change systems not ask more of people.