James Davies

Sedated argues that the rise in prescriptions for mental distress is not a medical story but an economic one: that a system needing people back at work quickly has an interest in locating the problem inside the individual, and that antidepressant use trebled in England across two decades without a matching improvement in outcomes. James Davies is a reader in social anthropology and mental health at Roehampton, trained as a psychotherapist, and co-founded the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry, which lobbies on prescribing and withdrawal. Atlantic Books published it in 2021. Psychiatrists have objected that the book underrates how many people are helped by the drugs it questions, and that reading a public health failure as a political design overstates the case. His earlier Cracked made a narrower version of the same argument about the profession itself.