[How About This Book] A Debt-Promoting Society... People Losing the Light of Their Hearts

Korea Enters Era of 1 Million Depression Patients... Antidepressant Use Rising
Professor Davis: "Neoliberal Economic System Is the Root Cause"
Emphasis on Efficiency and Forced Debt Harm Modern Mental Health

Last year, the number of depression patients in South Korea exceeded one million for the first time. The National Health Insurance Service recorded 1,000,744 people diagnosed with depression last year, a 32.9% increase from 752,976 in 2018.

James Davies, a professor of medical anthropology and psychology at the University of Roehampton in the UK, diagnoses in his book We Sell Mental Illness that the increase in mental illnesses and antidepressant use over the past few decades is a global phenomenon commonly observed not only in the UK but also in the United States, Australia, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and other countries.

Professor Davies traces the root cause to the neoliberal economic system. He statistically confirms that antidepressant use has increased worldwide since the introduction of neoliberalism. Hence, the original title of the book is Sedated. It also carries the subtitle, How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis.

Since neoliberalism is the fundamental cause, We Sell Mental Illness begins with a meeting with Nigel Lawson, a former British MP who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer during Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as UK Prime Minister. Thatcher, along with former US President Ronald Reagan, was a key figure in spreading neoliberal values worldwide in the 1980s. Professor Davies argues that the neoliberal system’s emphasis on competition and efficiency, along with the imposition of debt, has harmed modern people’s mental health.

[How About This Book] A Debt-Promoting Society... People Losing the Light of Their Hearts

After World War II, the 1950s and 1960s were the so-called golden age of capitalism, with the global economy maintaining high growth rates. Inflation occurred in the 1970s due to the oil crisis. Thatcher, who took office in 1979, viewed labor unions demanding wage increases as a cause of inflation. She fiercely confronted unions and earned the nickname “Iron Lady.” As union power weakened, workers’ wages declined. Although inflation subsided, the wage decline, i.e., income reduction, caused another structural problem. Consumption of goods and services decreased, slowing growth rates. The wage decline accelerated as machines replaced human labor and the employment of cheap foreign workers increased.

The Thatcher government relaxed credit card regulations starting in the 1980s. The intention was to compensate for workers’ reduced consumption capacity through loans. Thus, debt began to increase under the neoliberal system.

Until the 1970s, debt was taboo except for mortgage loans or investment purposes. However, under neoliberalism, loans became an essential element to operate capitalism, and today most people live with debt. The change in perception that accepts debt as natural has unconsciously altered our ways of thinking and behavior.

For example, the world-renowned linguist Noam Chomsky argued that student loans ultimately have the side effect of making society more conservative. Chomsky viewed debt as forcing students to become economically conformist and to accept rather than oppose the economic realities of the system they are entering. Students facing the practical difficulty of needing to earn a lot of money to repay their debts inevitably make practical and realistic choices. They choose majors that lead to high-paying jobs. This is also a cause of the decline in applicants for creative and humanities majors. Chomsky explained that debt is a powerful socializing factor that integrates young people into neoliberalism and forces them to submit early to the current economic state.

The Thatcher government also believed that institutions receiving government support inevitably tend to be inefficient. It judged public services as inefficient because they existed outside market competition and introduced market principles into public services. It instilled goal-oriented compulsions to prove and improve efficiency and penalized failures to meet targets. The main targets were hospitals and schools.

The pursuit of efficiency in schools ultimately affected even young students. In 2011, about 20% of all students were classified as needing special educational attention, which was double the number from ten years earlier. Professor Davies points out that the emphasis on competition and efficiency in schools increased teachers’ workloads and inevitably led to neglect in student guidance.

As a result, since the Thatcher government, the use of medication to treat mental illnesses has steadily increased in the UK. Although the government increased budgets and implemented various policies to reduce the number of mental illness patients, it saw little effect. Professor Davies argues that despite remarkable advances in medical technology over the past decades, psychiatry has not progressed, as evidenced by the continuing rise in mental illness patients. He analyzes the failures of government plans and emphasizes that some studies even show antidepressants have little effect.

Professor Davies ultimately advises that we need to renew our understanding of the fundamental causes of the increase in mental illnesses and find those causes in today’s economic system.