drjamesdaviesbskys.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

🧵I recently watched the BBC documentary "Change Your Mind, Change Your Life" (it films therapists in action), & found many aspects of it frankly disturbing. Within minutes of meeting clients, therapists were making sweeping claims about their client's underlying psychology...1/7

submitted 16 hours ago • 2 comments

Therapists who do not listen & learn collaboratively & dialogically, but who instead impose thier prefabricated ideas, advice & meanings, do not heal people - they manipulate them. They do not help liberate, empower or enlighten: they oppress.

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

The American Psychiatric Association’s (2025) annual conference, or should we say Pharma Expo 2025? One glance at the conference map & you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a sales convention, not a 'medical' gathering 👇

submitted 7 days ago • 2 comments

🧵A defence mechanism I regularly encounter in the therapeutic space (but which is entirely under-theorised) is what I would term 'internalisation bias', wherein somone persistently attributes all difficulties, failures & negative experiences to a perceived internal flaw, defect...

submitted 9 days ago • 2 comments

Call me cynical, but isn't Mental Health Awareness Week a hollow festival of shallow & performative activism, that companies leverage to stage 'progressiveness' & everyone else expolits to sell their individualistic ideas & wares; where social determinants remain buried & nothing gets better.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Our new study of patients enrolled in primary care therapy services confirms that antidepressant withdrawal is common & debilitating, with those using antidepressants for longer than 2 years more likely to experience withdrawal & severe/protracted effects. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Uncovering the true aim of therapy is a vital part of the therapeutic process. It must emerge collaboratively, not be imposed externally before the work begins (e.g. when services prioritise outcomes like 'return to work'). When this happens, you're being co-opted, not helped.

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

As we're biologically predisposed to seek attachment figures during periods of extreme vulnerability, we're very suspectible to the lure of any figure who authoritatively nurtures such an attachment; even if this figure's influence may be ultimately at our own expense. Be careful.

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

In many cultures, the birth of a child is also seen as the birth of a mother - both are supported & nurtured by the community. In ours, we often negelct the birth of the mother entirely, and then medicalise the fallout when inevitable suffering sets in.... www.independent.co.uk/life-style/h...

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Around 1.8 million adults were prescribed psychological therapy in England last year, compared to nearly 9 million prescribed antidepressants. The imbalance isn't in our brains it's in our provision.

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

The less a person knows about how social institutions work; about how the social world shapes the internal contours of self (i.e. the more impoverished their sociological imagination), the more vulnerable they are to reductive & individualistic logics & harms of the psych-professions.

submitted 22 days ago • 2 comments

A downside of the consistanly 'validating' therapist: they invariably collude & rarely challenge reinforcing biases, blind-spots, harmful beliefs/behaviours. By putting feeling-states above facts, they foster dependency, a victim mentality & reality avoidance. All inhibit change

submitted 23 days ago • 1 comment

The idea that critical psychiatry is anti-disability is just cynical nonsense. No one denies that suffering & disability require care & support. What's rejected is the idea that your needs must be first medicalised, pathologised, depoliticised & privatised before supported.

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

'Diagnostic sliencing' I define as the most potent form of censorship - its pathologises our dissent, sows doubt in our radical instincts & wounds (in the eyes of others) our power and credibility.

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

"When patients...being ‘treated’ by psychiatric services are then informed that the drugs they took [for years] in the hope of recovery, were exactly what robbed them of the chance to lead their best life, their pain & loss becomes unbearable". www.madintheuk.com/2023/03/pate...

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

🧵Why is mental health disability rising? Here are key reasons rarely discussed in mainstream media: 1/ For decades we've neglected tackling the social determinants of societal distress, relying instead on medicalisation as a superficial ‘fix’ for downstream harms. This has......

submitted 64 days ago • 3 comments

When the right complains about 'over-diagnosis' they really mean people aren't suffering at all & so don't warrent support. For the left that's disengenious, as people's suffering is real, but rather points to psycho-social problems that over-medicalisation mistreats & ignores.

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

I want to talk to you about one of the biggest myths in psychiatry, & that is the idea that all we need are new drug breakthroughs and then all of our problems will be solved. — a play on the words of Quyen Nguyen.

submitted 31 days ago • 2 comments

No society in history has ever professionalised the management of emotional distress as thoroughly & excessively as our own. We have stigmatised self-trust, scoffed at lay wisdom, & stripped local & grassroots knowledge & support of its value & legitimacy. And for what in return?

submitted 34 days ago • 0 comments

While research found most interviewees gained validation from close relationships with chatbots... these were hollowed out versions of friendship: providing entertainment when bored..."There’s was no sense of growth or development or challenging yourself.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

submitted 40 days ago • 0 comments

The idea ADHD is a neurologically fixed & unchanging disability is scientifically unsupported. It's also sowing demoralisation in the younger generation, who, believing this, fear personal change is not possible. Useful NYT article exploring these themes👇 www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/m...

submitted 41 days ago • 0 comments

Peer-led, Hearing Voices Groups offer a rare space for meaning-making & mutual understanding outside the biomedical model. Despite strong evidence for their efficacy, they remain underfunded and largely excluded from mainstream mental health services. www.madinamerica.com/2025/04/what...

submitted 46 days ago • 0 comments

Great to present at the critical psychiatry conference yesterday at UCL in London. In the q&a I addressed the co-option of critical ideas by government to justify inhumane cuts to disability. Some of my thoughts below 👇

submitted 51 days ago • 1 comment

To argue we are over-medicalising distress isn't to deny the vital need for support; rather it's to suggest that such suffering demands a different kind of provision- one rooted not in the prescriptions of medicine, but in public health, relational & community-based forms of care

submitted 53 days ago • 1 comment

The share of the NHS budget spent on mental health is set to fall next year, despite acknowledgement there is a mental health crisis and that services are in dire state. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

submitted 56 days ago • 0 comments

A sickening 4.5m children now live in poverty in UK, while new data shows that welfare cuts will hit children and disabled people hardest 👇 www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

submitted 57 days ago • 0 comments

Many companies now use 'neurodiversity' as a kind of sanctimonious slogan for PR purposes. Largely inconsequential 'accommodations' & superficial diversity initiatives are preferred over real structural change (e.g. less precarity, income inequality, insecturity & errosion of rights).

submitted 60 days ago • 0 comments

Negative cultural messages sent to children during the covid era: Other people are unsafe Society is unsafe Digital life (not real life) will always be there for you Your freedom is expendable Physical contact is dangerous Relationships can be taken away Think of the effects.

submitted 61 days ago • 0 comments

'How chatbots could spark the next big mental health crisis.' New research from MIT & OpenAI shows that heavy chatbot usage is correlated with loneliness and reduced socialization.... Interesting findings given the recent push for chatbot therapy... www.platformer.news/openai-chatg...

submitted 61 days ago • 1 comment

If we wish to bring down disability, rather than implmenting cuts, we must tackle one of its primary drivers: a broken mental health system which overrelies on drugs & digital 'treatments' (rather than psycho-social policy alternatives) that have poor outcomes & recovery rates.

submitted 62 days ago • 1 comment