MEDICAL ESSENTIALS FROM ENGLAND

Hugh Middleton MD, MRCP, FRCPsych is Associate Professor at the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham and NHS Consultant Psychiatrist, Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust. Following education and incuding training in Cambridge, Oxford and London,  he has practised medicine since 1974 and was appointed to his present post in 1994.

He writes: “Years in practice have taught me to respect what we don’t know better than the false uncertainties of those who think they do. This is particularly true in psychiatry where so many of our ‘treatments’ are only partially effective, and yet we wield immense power. Quite often people change in a helpful way, not because they have received an evidence-based treatment, but because they have been enabled in personal growth and development. I am interested in how this can be applied to how we provide ‘mental health services,’ and in what this can teach us more broadly about what it means to be human.”

Hugh Middleton, M.D. Some Thoughts on the Origins of Mental Illnesses

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February 14, 2013

One of the things debated and discussed in blogs such as this, and in a lot of other places, is the nature of “mental illness”. Is it biochemistry? Is it genes? Is it the result of stress? Does it exist …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents

Hugh Middleton, M.D. Psychiatry Beyond the Current Paradigm, and DSM-5

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December 10, 2012

Recently, two more waves of criticism have broken onto the beach of opinion concerning mental health services and practice. Allen Frances has mourned approval of DSM-5 in his Psychology Today blog and the British Journal of Psychiatry has published a paper by members of the UK Critical Psychiatry Network. What is notable about both of these is that they give further voice to criticism of conventional mental health services by those who have spent years providing and researching them.
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Categorized in: Blogs, DSM, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model

Hugh Middleton, M.D. Could the Glass Be Half Full?

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November 14, 2012

Many of the words published by Mad in America are critical of organised mental health services, conduct of the pharmaceutical industry, the motives of involved healthcare practitioners, and the hidden agendas of those committed to “research”. I would say Amen to all that, but something has happened recently in the UK that suggests many of these concerns might be better considered signs of a glass half full rather than one half empty.
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Categorized in: Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents

Hugh Middleton, M.D. Dig Till You Gently Perspire

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June 14, 2012

We have had some fun recently in the UK over the use of exercise in the “treatment” of depression. There has been something of a tea-cup storm following publication of findings from the TREAD-UK study in the British Medical Journal …
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Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents

Hugh Middleton, M.D. “Illnesses Like Any Other”: The Challenge of a Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Mental Health

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February 13, 2012

Recently, the Observer in the U.K. (29/1/12) carried at least three articles concerning mental health issues. One refers to the growth of brain cells from stem cells, themselves derived from skin samples of people with schizophrenia and bipolar depression with an …
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Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents