David Smail, who has died aged 76, was a leading clinical psychologist and an influential writer, whose work exposed the damaging psychological effects of an increasingly competitive and unequal society. His book Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety (1984) was an early analysis of how inequality spawns chronic insecurity, especially among those with the least power and control. In Taking Care: An Alternative to Therapy (1987) David analysed psychological expertise, showing how the mythology of "the talking cure" reflects a society obsessed with imputations of personal blame and responsibility, and how this benefits the powerful.
David wrote that Margaret Thatcher taught him more than anyone else about the misuse of political power as the basis of personal suffering. In The Origins of Unhappiness (1993) he described how, during the 1980s, he found himself working more and more with individuals afflicted by distress that they attributed to their own failures to adjust to the changing times. David saw that their malaise was in fact produced by the toxic social and economic policies of Thatcherism.
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