Critical Psychiatry and the Political Backlash Against Disabilities: A Closer Look at James Davies
Guest Post by Robert Chapman
Robert Chapman, PhD (they/them) is an academic philosopher, writer, and organizer living in Newcastle. Their first book, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism, was published by Pluto Press in 2023.
The war on disabled people is part of a long-established tradition of capitalist disability discrimination, well documented by historians and contemporary commentators alike. But the newest edition in Britain focuses primarily on neurodivergence and mental health problems, with right-wing MPs and journalists lamenting what they see as too many diagnoses of autism, ADHD, and depression. Some, such as ex-Tory minister Matthew Parris, even suggest that some of these are not real disabilities and therefore they should not justify access to government benefits.
Although the backlash against neurodivergent rights has been brewing in the right-wing press for some years, it culminated over the last week or so in Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s attempt to win over reactionary voters by launching a renewed assault against disabled people directly from the government. Sunak has focused on how recent rises in benefits claims have mainly been related to rises in recognition of mental health problems. In particular, he refers to a sicknote “culture” and warns against “over-medicalising the everyday challenges and worries of life.”
As I have indicated previously in my academic work, and as has been noted during many discussions on Twitter/X, this ideology closely mirrors certain narratives of British “critical psychiatry,” one of the many movements that seeks to critique and politicize the theory and practice relating to mental health. I recently pointed out that one of the prominent figures of the movement, James Davies, had literally been organizing with hard-right Conservative MPs and working with the right-wing press, laying the grounds to cultivate this culture war for many years. He has also, more recently, been vocal on social media about his disdain for the neurodivergent rights movement. Thus, for me, this new political assault on neurodivergence and mental health disabilities seemed the logical outcome of such efforts, even if he has sought to distance himself from some of Sunak's views. Strangely, Davies responded by tweeting a screen shot of my comment to his thirty thousand followers, saying that I’m a liar and a conspiracist.
As it turns out, though, everything I said about Davies’s history of conservative activism is easily verifiable, as I’ll detail here. But the point of this article is not about an individual. Rather, Davies is just an exemplar of one strand of critical psychiatry, a strand that has become increasingly dominant in a movement that arguably used to be more pluralistic. Therefore, this presents an opportunity to make some general points about the ideological relationship between at least one leading form of critical psychiatry ideology and British right-wing politics (“critical psychiatry” in this specific sense is distinct from the Mad Pride, psychiatric survivor, and neurodiversity movements, which I am involved in and support). The example of Davies is instructive not only because he is arguably Britain’s most well-known critical psychiatry public intellectual, and hence can be taken as a key representative of the most mainstream variant of the movement, but also because he has recently rebranded himself as some kind of (vague and unspecified) leftist intellectual, despite years of activism aligned with radical conservatism. While this history may surprise readers of his recent book Sedated, and his accompanying foray into Twitter/X, whereby he presents himself as a leftist critic of neoliberalism and neurodivergent identity politics, we shall see that things are not so clear-cut. If anything, this shift arguably exemplifies a broader pattern of elite capture, whereby ruling-class ideology infiltrates subversive political movements before undermining those movements by guiding them towards maintaining the status quo.
Davies’s Radical Conservativism
To understand Davies’s political philosophy, it will help to turn to the broader trajectory of Davies’s work. Interestingly, he has shared that he got into critique of psychiatry after reading a book by the libertarian critical psychiatrist (and, now, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist) Peter Breggin, who he later became friends with. Davies then graduated from Oxford, where he completed a PhD in medical anthropology in 2006, and also trained as a therapist (he currently works at Harley Street where, according to their website, clients pay fees of £210 upwards per 50-minute session). He published his first academic book relevant for our current discussion, The Importance of Suffering, in 2009 with Routledge, and he also published multiple essays on the same topic around that time. This was several years before he became a public intellectual known for his critique of psychiatry, but to understand his work properly it is helpful to start here.
The publisher’s abstract for Davies’s early book describes it as reframing suffering as a “healthy call-to-change” that “shouldn’t be chemically anesthetised or avoided.” The book raises some valid points and interesting theories, and it also acknowledges some of the social detriments of suffering. Yet for our purposes, what is important is that the overall narrative is largely about how, along with the decline of Christianity, Western culture has also declined in terms of our ability to deal with suffering. On this view, the masses have grown increasingly soft and mistakenly believe we need things like psychiatric medications to anesthetize our suffering. Instead, argues Davies, we should embrace our suffering as an opportunity for growth and change. Davies, in short, urges the masses to learn how to suffer properly again.
While the book makes a longer case for this, it is also worth considering a related essay Davies published in 2011, which is freely available online and more clearly details the religious basis and development of Davies’s thinking. Here Davies says that he was primarily concerned by his work in the clinic, noticing how “the psychiatric management of despair is premised upon a very different [negative] vision of suffering from that [positive vision] which Christianity traditionally professes.” His worry, he explains, was that some of his patients’ faith had been “weakened” or even “destroyed” given their conversion to a “psychiatric understanding and management of their suffering.” His underling concern, then, was that a “surge in [psychiatric] prescriptions” itself was “helping to spread the negative vision of suffering,” and therefore undermining faith. His own theory was that his patients’ “growing estrangement from God” had been “a by-product of the antidepressants” themselves, since they “can dull the intensity of our relational life.” He also thus wondered if his earlier interpretation of the role of secularization may have been too rigid. In fact, he came to see psychiatric medications as not just an effect of secularization but also as a cause; this was their true crime.
Going back to these texts, I see two things. First, Davies’s dislike of psychiatry seems based on it aiding this purported cultural and moral decline of the West. Understanding this theme—which continues to run, to varying extents, through all his work—is the key to understanding his political philosophy, and how it grounds his critique of psychiatry. Second, I believe, understanding this theme is also key to understanding why the conservative press came to love his work and conservative politicians wanted to collaborate with him. After all, even if Davies’s early work was not widely noticed at the time, it can be read as an intellectual and academic defense of the conservative ideas that the West is in cultural and moral decline, that younger generations are snowflakes who need to toughen up (although Davies does not use such language and may not condone it), and finally that as a society we need to return to a traditional religious view of suffering.
Davies became more of a public figure with the publication of his 2013 pop-science book Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm than Good. Closely following his early influence Breggin and in turn Breggin’s university mentor, Thomas Szasz, this book argues that psychiatry is basically a pseudo-science and that its diagnoses, such as ADHD, depression, and so on, are not legitimate. Interestingly, the argument of the book is made in a secular style, and Davies does not disclose his underlying religious concerns that he had been clearer about in his earlier work. Yet this book still maintains Davies’s concerns about anesthetizing mental pain and a cultural decline in our ability to deal with suffering, indicating his underlying concerns had not changed.
In any case, this more popular—and populist—book seems to be where his relationship with the right-wing press began to really solidify. Most notably, the book received not just a cover endorsement, but also three separate glowing reviews from one of Britain’s leading right-wing papers, the Daily Mail (see here, here, and here). (For people outside the U.K., the Daily Mail is notorious for having supported Hitler in the 1930s and, in more recent times, leading the way on various ‘culture wars’ against LGBTQI people, immigrants, asylum seekers and so on). Following this, Davies went on to write for the Daily Mail himself, where he penned, for instance, an alarmist tabloid piece on psychopharmacological meds, titled “Why popping a pill for every emotional problem is madness.” (Of course, many medications across different areas of medicine come with a range of negative effects, and it is important to be clear about them—but writing scare pieces in the Daily Mail seems the worst possible way to raise such awareness.)
It is important to note that Davies has been interviewed by, or (to varying extents) positively reviewed by, and has written for, several other papers, some on the right but also some on the left (especially following his most recent book, Sedated, which I’ll come back to). In my view, this is a testament to his clear writing style and engagement in important issues, such as the corruption of big pharma, on which he gets much right, or almost right. This includes how they ‘bury’ studies that don’t support the results they want the world to see; how they aggressively market them to people who might even be harmed by them; and how many doctors and researchers who promote them have undeclared conflicts of interest. All of these issues are genuine and important, and can and should be recognized by people across the political spectrum.
Still, the Daily Mail and other conservative papers, such as the Telegraph and Times, are not known for going out of their way to enthusiastically promote the work of intellectuals on the left. For instance, the Daily Mail certainly did not support critiques of psychiatry and its relationship with neoliberalism by the left social theorist Mark Fisher, despite Fisher’s books being highly original, readable, popular, and of much greater significant cultural influence than Davies’s own work. And of course they wouldn’t support Fisher’s books, since, in contrast to those efforts the Daily Mail does promote, his analysis was wholly at odds with the paper’s ideology.
To avoid misunderstanding, my point here is not that cozying up with anti-immigration, anti-welfare hard-right papers is bad (although I think this is also true). My point is twofold. First, that the right-wing press seems to love Davies’s critique of psychiatry (rather than, say, Fisher’s critique of psychiatry) for a reason. And the most obvious explanation for this is that they ideologically align with it in ways that they don’t with radical leftist critiques of psychiatry. Second, as I’ll expand on, Davies’s relentless campaigning over many years has led the way in stirring up the discursive context for our current culture war, which focuses on undermining recognition of the kinds of disabilities that psychiatry seeks to classify.
After all, Davies’s argument is precisely that these are not “real” disabilities in the same way as disabilities in the rest of medicine are, but rather they are mere labels, made up by psychiatrists to rebrand ordinary suffering as medical problems, so big pharma can sell drugs and so the masses can avoid their suffering. As we have already seen, this is the suffering Davies thinks we need to relearn to embrace as a chance for growth and change. Whilst there might be some elements of truth to this claim in certain cases, it is this kind of framing that conservatives get giddy over: as far as I can tell, they seem to see it as an intellectual justification of their ideology and judgements about disabled and unwell people as being snowflakes who need to toughen up or as malingerers who are a burden on societal resources. Moreover, if things like ADHD aren’t real disabilities, then cuts to services can be justified. Looked at in this way, Davies—while he may disagree with some of their conclusions—ends up playing the role, advertently or inadvertently, of a radical conservative theoretician who helps academically legitimize and justify their disabilist and anti-welfare dispositions.
Davies’s argument is precisely that these are not “real” disabilities in the same way as disabilities in the rest of medicine are, but rather they are mere labels, made up by psychiatrists to rebrand ordinary suffering as medical problems, so big pharma can sell drugs and so the masses can avoid their suffering… it is this kind of framing that conservatives get giddy over: as far as I can tell, they seem to see it as an intellectual justification of their ideology and judgements about disabled and unwell people as being snowflakes who need to toughen up or as malingerers who are a burden on societal resources. Moreover, if things like ADHD aren’t real disabilities, then cuts to services can be justified.
It is also easy to trace Davies’ influence on other reactionary journalists writing for the same publications. Consider Peter Hitchens, a highly influential conservative writer and journalist who also writes for the Daily Mail. We know Hitchens read and enjoyed Cracked because he wrote an enthusiastic blurb recommendation. But more than this, he has also joined the culture wars on the side of Davies. For instance, last year, he wrote a Daily Mail article titled “It has a huge and powerful lobby which turns with fury on its critics so I know this question will get me into loads of trouble but… does ADHD even exist?”. In this article, he sought to cast doubt on its existence and claimed that we have all been “seduced into this belief that a pill will make [us] fit in better with the modern world,” thereby dismissing the experiences of millions who find that pills do often in fact help in this way. While he does not cite Davies, it seems highly plausible that this leading conservative writer’s backlash against recognition of ADHD is inspired by his reading of Davies’s work, which Hitchens’ blurb (which can be seen on Amazon) urged should be “read by every doctor… by everyone in politics and the media, not to mention any concerned citizen.”
Following such campaigns, in recent months—and especially with an election looming—there seems to have been something of a rush in the right-wing British press to fast-track this new culture war, with new articles regularly focused on critiquing the reality of neurodivergent disablement. After all, as the right has learned from their culture war against trans people, one of the best ways to undermine recognition, support, and rights for marginalized people is to cast doubt on the validity of their identities. (Similar arguments and rhetoric have increasingly been embraced not just by conservatives but also by the far right. For instance, the self-described “theocratic fascist” Matt Walsh believes that ADHD is “not a legitimate medical diagnosis but a label,” while also campaigning against access to gender-affirming healthcare.) In the midst of the current backlash, Matthew Parris, former Tory minister turned journalist, wrote a recent article in the Times titled ‘Our disability benefits system invites abuse: Claiming mental ill-health makes too much financial sense but no major party will discuss the problem honestly.’ In this article, he questioned whether things like ADHD really exist, lamented how the autism category is too broad, and challenged Britain’s political parties to take this issue seriously. And all of this was precisely the discursive context in which Sunak came to accept this challenge, launching a full-on war on disabled people last week when he attacked a “culture” of diagnosis and sick-notes, derided the claim that people are actually becoming more unwell, and lamented the over-medicalization of ordinary life.
Davies’s collaboration with Tory MPs
Tellingly, Davies has often worked most closely with the aristocracy, including earls, lords and Tory MPs. For instance, Davies co-founded the Council For Evidence Based Psychiatry (CEP) with Luke Montagu, who will be the next Earl of Sandwich and has been described by the Times as the “heir to Mapperton, the finest manor house in England.” Among other efforts, they promoted the work of Davies’ early influence, Peter Breggin, who was invited to lecture at a CEP-related conference.1
Most recently, Davies has collaborated with Conservative MP Danny Krueger on their new ‘Beyond Pills’ parliamentary group, which focuses on reducing how many people in the U.K. take psychiatric medications. Notably, Krueger is on the furthest right end of the Conservative party and has even been recently described as “the dangerous saviour of British nationalism” and as Britain’s “defender of Christian conservativism.” While Krueger is surely abhorred by the left (and even centrist liberals, given his attitudes towards abortion, which are extremely conservative by British standards), Davies co-authored an article with him earlier this year, along with other critical psychiatry leaders and politicians. But this should not be too surprising, since Danny Krueger is also an open critic of psychiatric medications from the radical religious right, as I’ll come back to, in ways that cohere nicely with the trajectory of Davies’s work detailed here.
In Davies’s defense—that is, for the defender who wants to believe that he is a friend of the left—it could be argued that there is serious overprescribing of psychiatric medication, and sometimes working with opponents is necessary for change. Personally, I agree that medications are by themselves often an inadequate and overly individualistic solution to systemic problems, and they are even harmful for some of us. I also think it is important to be able to work, and even write, with people you disagree with, if doing so has a pragmatic outcome. Thus, given my own leftist political commitments, if what this group was working towards was progressive structural or systemic change, then I would be sympathetic to this kind of interpretation. But what this group is actually working towards is openly explained on their website, and it is nothing like systemic change. Instead, they are pushing to replace access to psychiatric medications with equally individualistic and weakly-evidenced solutions, this time in the form of social prescribing or other forms of (inevitably short-term) psychotherapy. This just replaces one form of individualist medical clinical model intervention with others, many of which are likely to be cheaper for a Tory government always looking for ways to cut costs (it costs nothing to prescribe going for walks, for instance). Whatever Davies’s intentions, this kind of activism seems more consistent with the ideals that are clearer in his earlier work—that medications specifically are bad due to anesthetizing suffering—than anything to do with systemic change in the progressive sense (increased housing, welfare, accommodations, better access to care, etc.—these all being things that would surely decrease suffering). After all, if he wanted systemic change in this sense, surely that is what his lobbying efforts would focus on.
‘Sedated’ and Neoliberalism
So far, I’ve mainly talked about Davies earlier two books, which, in my view, more openly exhibit a conservative outlook. But what of Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis, his 2021 book that adds a critique of neoliberalism to his previous analysis? Some people do genuinely change their politics in various ways, and some conservatives do sometimes manage to shake that off. This should be applauded. However, it is also important to consider that elites with reactionary politics often dress them up as something else. Consider how Keir Starmer pretended to be a socialist to be voted in as leader of the Labour Party before turning its policy sharply right once in the role. Those of us on the left must be wary of such cases of ‘elite capture.’
It is important to be clear that I agree with some of the arguments in Davies’ book, including many of the critiques of neoliberalism. While they are not hugely original, I think they improve on his previous analysis by emphasizing how the logics of the market have increasingly impacted healthcare in this period. However, it is still vital to keep in mind that criticizing neoliberalism does not indicate an acceptance of progressive politics. Many conservatives, or even fascists, also dislike neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is not, after all, a classic British conservative ideology but something radically libertarian. It is as destructive for conservative institutions like the church and the nuclear family as it is for socialist achievements such as social medicine or welfare. Hence, many on the right and far right are as against neoliberalism as many of those of us on the left are.
Consider here the work of Danny Krueger, the hard-right nationalist MP with whom Davies currently collaborates. Krueger is also a critic of neoliberal policy and of psychiatric medications, lamenting how “We have epidemics of mental ill-health, domestic abuse and loneliness. We are bored and anxious. We distract and medicate ourselves with a cocktail of passive entertainment, legal and illegal drugs, alcohol and bad food.” Like many radical conservatives, Krueger does not like neoliberalism precisely because it undermines traditional institutions, most notably the family and traditional Christian virtues. Hence, Krueger wants to go back to a kind of Britain before neoliberalism, where traditional (and heterosexual) family life was more supported, including by the state. Like Davies, he also sees the West as in cultural and moral decline, and he also sees widespread reliance on psychiatric medications as part of this. Notably too, Peter Hitchens, the Daily Mail journalist discussed above, is also a more classical conservative, who has also been critical of recent neoliberal governments. In fact, this kind of old-world conservatism concerned with Western decline seems to be what links all these thinkers.
Notably too, as Sam Gleedan points out, Davies own ideal in Sedated is not socialism but rather the post-war, Fordist era of capitalism. While Davies sees neoliberalism as massively amplifying our modern mental health crisis, he thus remains a staunch defender of capitalism. Indeed, he very quickly dismisses any attempt to build socialism when he briefly considers this towards the end of the book (while on social media he seems to reserve his harshest disdain for neurodivergent socialists). But was Fordism really that good? It certainly wasn’t for neurodivergent people, as I have detailed elsewhere. In fact, this was an era where neuronormative domination and the coercive power of psychologists and therapists grew over neurodivergent people. Neither was it particularly good for disabled people more generally (who had far less robust rights), women (often consigned to unpaid housework), queer people (who were criminalized and pathologized), or people of color (who were more often locked out of work due to arguably more overt racial injustice). Perhaps, it was better for the white, abled, cis-het men, in certain ways, since many were better paid than now, had better working conditions, and also were more privileged in relation to more marginalized groups. So it is easy to see why some people long to go back to this period. But for those of us who do not fit into that demographic, this will not be our golden age.
Elite Capture
I’ve critiqued Davies’s work here and elsewhere, while also agreeing with aspects of his critique of psychiatry (not that any of these are remotely unique to his critique). It is true that big pharma is corrupt, and that we are likely overmedicating in various ways and with harmful side effects. It is also true that individualistic, biomedical models of mental illness are harmfully pathologizing and depoliticizing. We can accept all this even as we recognize the important role diagnosis and medications currently play in the lives of many disabled people. It is because of such issues that I’ve forwarded critiques of the “pathology paradigm” in psychiatry and psychology, psychiatric coercion, and other harms to psychiatric survivors. I also support (progressive or left variants of) psychiatric abolitionism, which for me focuses not on cutting access to medications but rather on cultivating mutual aid, community-based alternatives, anti-carceral supports, and, I hope in the longer term, worker-owned pharmaceutical cooperatives, that could one day make existing institutions obsolete. These approaches have nothing to do with restoring some purported golden age or teaching the masses how to embrace suffering, but instead aim towards frameworks that genuinely prioritize the wants and needs of those of us who are disabled, distressed, or unwell.
Ultimately, while I cannot speak to Davies’s intentions, I can detail his political theorizing, the impact of his work, his publicly documented organizing efforts, and how they align with the right-wing political agenda of disability denial and restrictions on government benefits. These inconvenient facts, all on public record, are not conspiracy theories.
But this is not all about Davies: he is really just an example, chosen given his leading role as a public intellectual. In fact, Davies is far from unique in critical psychiatry in its current manifestation. As I’ve examined previously, this once more pluralistic movement has, as the co-founder of critical psychiatry, Duncan Double has highlighted, taken an overly rigid Szaszian direction. In the U.K., many of its leaders are upper middle-class people who went to elite schools, collude with the right-wing press, seem comfortable working with Tory MPs (who went to the same elite schools), and seem to share a close ideological connection with the kind of politics detailed here. At the same time, other leaders of the British movement, such as Joanna Moncrieff, have also been critiqued for stirring up fears in the hard right media and for raising fears about benefits claims by people with mental health problems (despite her professing to be some kind of Marxist). And this is before we even get to how many leaders (including Davies) have been critiqued by psychiatric survivor groups for issues relating to transphobia.
In short, my more general worry is that critical psychiatry in the U.K. is in danger of facilitating the conservative establishment agenda in Britain (despite still having some advocates I admire who come from a genuinely more progressive, leftist angle). Their many establishment connections are surely partly why they’ve been able to wield such influence, while also presenting themselves as critics of the establishment. The overall lesson here is that we should be wary of thinking that all critics of psychiatry are on the side of those of us who are attempting to build a more inclusive politics from the left (especially with a serious class analysis alongside recognition of other intersections), trying to ensure that care and accommodations are accessible without barriers, and that the healthcare system is oriented towards the empowerment of disabled individuals. Going forward, to generate a genuinely liberatory critique of psychiatry from the left, we should be concerned not just with the harms of psychiatry itself but also with the elite capture of the movements against it.2
See also:
As I’ve often argued elsewhere with regard to the neurodiversity movement, e.g., in my book Empire of Normality.
Thus guest post is immensely helpful in framing important issues in critical psychiatry and disability rights
I think it's so important to realize that basically everything can be captured by nasty elites. These ideas - people go on sick leave for nothing, young snowflakes imagine that they have a mental problem because they've never learnt to deal with the natural hardships of life, etc - are pushed in Sweden too. But there was also this time when our horrible racist right-wing government suggested that maybe young men of colour living in poor and crime-ridden neighbourhoods are restless and a nuisance because of ADHD - couldn't we send psychiatrists out there, do some kind of quick diagnosis of the lot, and then medicate them into a nicer demeanor? Obvs actual medical professionals quickly shut down this ridiculous idea.