Private pain cannot be separated from public policy

“Mental Health professionals should not help to reinforce the myth that “pain can be magickcd away” by prescription pads, especially when that pain goes hand in hand with unfavourable social circumstances like unemployment. Tranquillisers will not only dampen down the pain but also the anger “which . . . is the most appropriate and healthy response to being deprived of the right to work through no fault of your own”. This “dampened down anger” can “go sour” and lead to increases in depression, suicide and anxiety states.

If the medical profession . . . allow themselves to continue to be used as controllers of pain which should appropriately and healthily be expressed in anger, if they dampen down the energy which a healthy person puts into changing an unsatisfactory environment, they are betraying their professional integrity, they are whoring for a collapsing late capitalist society.

We do not need any more research into the effect on mental health of poverty, injustice and lack of social opportunity; we now need the will to do something about those effects and conditions, we need “the courage to stand up and be counted, not to fit humans to the shape of the world, but to shape the world for humans.

Dr. Kay Carmichael