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“Persuading people they have more power than they do and ignoring the very real social barriers to attainment primes them for self-blame when reality fails to deliver. The worst extremes of phoney empowerment, argues Frayne, can be found in the trite aphorisms of the self-help industry, where popular psychologists ascribe to us almost magical abilities to alter circumstances despite the harsh realities constraining us. In a world where problems like disadvantage, unemployment and work-related distress are so socially embedded, downplaying the very real obstacles to opportunity is regularly experienced as yet another form of punishment, yet another form of blaming and shaming the individual.”

WorkEmpowermentWorkersHealthcarePsychoanalysisPsychotherapySocial Care
Book:Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis
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“Psycho-compulsion is therefore not just about instilling people with a so-called correct employability mindset. It is a mechanism for penalising deviation from what it defines as the right set of attitudes and behaviours. ‘What psycho-compulsion therefore attempts to do is silence alternative discourses to the neoliberal myth that you are to blame for your unemployment,’ said Friedli. ‘At the same time, it undermines and erodes alternative frameworks around which people can come together in solidarity to act against the social causes of worklessness.’ In short, psycho-compulsion not only pathologises and punishes a claimant’s dissent, it depoliticises the causes of joblessness (which discourages collective action), and it does so by resuscitating Margaret Thatcher’s earlier myth that unemployment can be reduced to character deficiencies.”

WorkMental HealthWorkersEmploymentDissentNeoliberalismMargaret ThatcherDepoliticisationPsycho Compulsion
Book:Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis
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“What we need is a profound rethinking of the nature of suffering itself, and what it is trying to highlight and ask us to change. We need to repoliticise emotional discontent in the minds of teachers, parents and policy-makers, rather than continue reducing it to dysfunctions that allegedly reside within the self. We need to acknowledge that suffering also reflects family/socio/political dynamics we would do well to better acknowledge and address.”

SufferingMental HealthTherapyHealthcarePsychotherapyNeoliberalismDepoliticisation
Book:Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis
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“Tim Kasser: ‘The heyday of humanistic psychology was in the 1960s and 1970s, when Keynes dominated. But since the rise of neo-liberalism from the 1980s, we’ve seen an influx of cognitive behavioural approaches and psychiatric drugs – technologies that put the cause of the problem right between your ears. The therapies our governments now want all focus on internal not external reform. They don’t see suffering as a call to change external circumstances for the good of our development.”

SufferingPsychologyCapitalismTherapyPsychiatryNeoliberalismKeynesCbt
Book:Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis
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“As the renowned clinical psychologist Dr Anne Cooke put it to me in conversation: ‘The mental illness narrative encourages us to see mental health problems as nothing to do with life and circumstances, so no wonder we don’t look at structural or social causes; and of course this perspective is a great fit with the current neoliberal approach – where individuals have to reform themselves to fit with existing social structures.’ The trouble with programmes that are blind to the perils of such adaptations is that they essentially neuter political reflection on why distress proliferates in our schools, certainly when compared to schools in most other developed nations.”

PsychologyMental HealthSocial IssuesPsychotherapyNeoliberalismHealthcare ReformDepoliticisationAnne Cooke
Book:Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis
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