Mental Health Action

Campaigning to transform public sector mental health services

Arun Kundnani interviews Seda Gürses on the growing power of tech corporations in public health – transcript by Martin Blanchard

Martin Blanchard writes:

“In an interview with Arun Kundnani, Seda Gürses – a critical computer scientist at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands – discusses the ways tech corporations such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon  acquired new powers in public health as a result of the response to COVID, and the issues of corporate power and accountability that this raises. It’s an issue that’s generally been largely ignored, and Seda explains how these new developments do not fit earlier paradigms of privatization and algorithmic power. She brings some really thought-provoking ideas which raise profound questions about the new world being invisibly created around us. Seda works with a group called Programmable Infrastructures, which looks at developing  alternatives to corporate computing.”

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Allied Voices

Campaigners, clinicians and writers we work alongside.

Campaign

Keep Our NHS Public

The parent campaign defending the NHS from privatisation — where Mental Health Action began as a working group.

Campaign

Socialist Health Association

Our founding partner organisation, whose London branch mental health sub-group co-created this coalition in 2021.

Regional campaign

Save Mental Health Services, Norfolk & Suffolk

A long-established local campaign fighting cuts and closures across Norfolk and Suffolk’s community mental health provision.

Practitioner blog

Glenda O’Brien — Substack

A retired Registered Mental Health Nurse writing on thirty years’ experience across the full spectrum of NHS mental health care.

Research

Michael Scott — CBT Watch

Ongoing independent scrutiny of the gap between what short-term behavioural therapies promise and what they deliver.

Media

The Common Good — YouTube

Our channel on the politics of mental health, featuring interviews and discussion on the crisis in NHS provision.