Clinical psychologist David Smail has long maintained that hardly any of the ‘symptoms’ of psychological distress, depression included, may correctly be seen as medical matters.

Smail reminds us that life can be very brutal to people and that it is important to remember that people don’t have some fatal flaw in themselves – people are hurt by the things that happen to them.

Smail maintains that the so-called psychiatric ‘disorders’ are nothing to do with faulty biology, nor indeed are they the outcome of individual moral weakness or other personal failing. They are the creation of the social world in which we live, and that world is structured by power.
Social power may be defined as the means of obtaining security or advantage, and it will be exercised within any given society in a variety of forms: coercive (force), economic (money power) and ideological (the control of meaning). Power is the dynamic which keeps the social world in motion. It may be used for good or for ill.

For  Smail, one cannot hope to understand the phenomena of psychological distress, nor begin to think what can be done about them, without an analysis of how power is distributed and exercised within society.

David Smail talks here about depression and psychotherapy in excerpts from Thames TV series on depression produced and directed by the late Nina Burr.

Watch David Smail’s Video