A few years ago, I discovered the work of anthropologist and psychotherapist James Davies. Davies rose to prominence with the boldly titled Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good, and later, Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis.

Having recently entered a period of disillusionment with modern psychiatry (and scientistic psychology more broadly), I was hungry for alternative views. I devoured the books and resonated with Davies’ core arguments. It was a quieter title in Davies’ back catalogue, however, that really intrigued me: The Importance of Suffering.

I quickly began the book and found page after page of insightful perspectives on suffering, reframing it is a call to transformation rather than something to be anesthetised or avoided. Reading this was like remembering something I had always known, something which had been germinating deep within but could now blossom under the light of Davies’ eloquent writing.

Initially trained as a medical doctor, but ever the psychologist at heart, I had planned on becoming a psychiatrist for several years. Despite the clear importance of the psyche in health, doctors are mainly educated in the physical sciences. My training, in turn, left me with little more than the medical model as a framework for understanding and treating emotional suffering.

Notwithstanding occasional glimmers of doubt, I had been sold on the idea that ‘mental illnesses’ like depression and schizophrenia were reducible to mere pathophysiology. And so it seemed logical that their treatments, both chemical and therapeutic, should follow medical lines.

In fact, learning about diagnostic criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) was strangely addictive. Aptly nicknamed “the Bible of psychiatry”, the DSM offers a disorder for everyone, from generalised anxiety to dependent personality disorder. I experienced a seductive pull to reassess my experience in the light of psychopathological labels, not to mention the private thoughts I started to entertain about my family, friends and colleagues.

Aloofness became schizoid personality disorder, shyness became social anxiety disorder and distractibility became ADHD. Suffering was no longer given room to breathe; it had to be categorised, scrutinised, dissected.

The dictionary definition of “psychopathology” is “the scientific study of mental illness or disorders”. Yet James Hillman, Jungian analyst and founder of archetypal psychology, argued that a more faithful definition would call on its Greek roots: psyche (soul), pathos (suffering) and logos (word, speech, utterance).

Psychopathology then becomes “the soul’s account of its own suffering”, a long-forgotten truth which books like The Importance of Suffering remind us of. Healing cannot take place without suffering; the two are conjoined. When we medicalise symptoms like melancholy, anxiety, or any understandable reaction to inner or outer turmoil, we forego the opportunity to care for our soul, which has much to say. If we have the courage to follow the symptoms, they will lead us to the real medicine within.

The following excerpt, taken from the book, serves as a great introduction to its main ideas. Davies distinguishes between a positive vision of suffering and negative vision, realised most clearly in the biomedical psychiatric model. This model not only undermines our ability to gain anything of lasting worth from discontent, but also worsens our suffering by way of the misleading explanations and remedies it offers.

If this strikes a chord with you, I recommend picking up a copy of the book.

Excerpt from “The Importance of Suffering” by James Davies

“In the West during the twentieth century there have been two cultural visions or of suffering contending for supremacy on the social stage – these visions I broadly separate into the ‘positive’ and the ‘negative’ kinds.

First, the positive vision holds that suffering has a redemptive role to play in human life; as if from affliction there can be derived some unexpected gain, new perspective or beneficial alteration. The motto for this vision of suffering I quoted in the Introduction: ‘If a way to the better there be, it first exacts a full look at the worst’. The positive vision of suffering, thus considered, sees pain as a kind of liminal region through which we can pass from a worse to a better place, a region from which can thus be derived something of lasting value for individual life.

Second, the negative vision of suffering asserts quite the opposite view – namely, that little of value can come of suffering at all. It says there is no new vista or perspective to be gleaned at its end, nor any immured insights to be unlocked from its depths. It is thus something to be either swiftly anaesthetised or wholly eliminated, for what good is an experience whose most obvious features are pain and inconvenience.

…

When we look at the history of Western attitudes towards emotional suffering in terms of this distinction, two things stand out when assessing the twentieth century in particular. First, that the negative vision of suffering has largely eclipsed the positive vision which prevailed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and second, that this shift towards the negative vision has significantly altered how we now perceive, manage and experience the more fallow seasons of our emotional lives.

One of the factors precipitating this shift towards the negative vision is what I would call the gradual rationalisation of suffering – namely, the process by which human discontent has increasingly become less a matter for spiritual, moral or philosophical consideration, than for biological, behavioural, political or psychiatric understanding and intervention.

We see this most clearly in the influence of biomedicine, where the growth of medical explanations for problems once understood morally or spiritually has spread medical treatment into areas it was never designed to go. For instance, ‘problems’ such as low achievement, certain kinds of truancy or under-performance now attract medical diagnoses and intervention. Many forms of tension arising from the demands of daily living are now medicalised as so-called ‘stress syndromes’ which can be biologically explained and pharmacologically treated.”