This is basic strategy for leveraging beaurocratic systems and very good advice. Often those systems ate impervious to change due to vested interests and inertia so I would advice also looking at direct action campaign strategy and movement building strategy. A good place to start is Strategy and Soul by Daniel Hunter. I used some of his techniques very effectively in a Campaign a few years ago.
I think you are saying work and school is often boring, which many of us know already, and to see the signs of our boredom as a disorder fits the boss very well.
Your suggestion that Aftab and co get good results from antidepressants because he and some other psychiatrists are good at forming “therapeutic alliances,” and the results have little to do with the drug has a certain appeal as he is charming and erudite.
His inability to answer his critics with reasoned argument is another matter entirely.
Same as everyday life imho
I saw a video with Ritts on a left wing youtube channel. I was appalled by the inaccuracies of her arguments so I am glad to see this here.
All of that makes sense to me due to the shame that comes after lashing out and after drinking/drugging binges. It also raises raises questions about comparative risk of a “depression,” diagnosis, when psychiatry so often tells us that “depression, ” is a risk of suicide which is why antidepressants are needed, when plainly they increase the risk of suicide and other states of mind increase the risk more than this diagnosis. Also, suicide after failing rehab make a sense to me due to the feelings of shame and that raises questions as to whether rehab is the best firm of treatment, but as it is a profitable industry it, like psychiatry will be hard to challenge.
What individuals decide is up to them. What doctors and particularly psychiatrists decide is of legitimate public intetest. You can’t lock people up, force drugs and ECT on them, diagnose them with illnesses that may prevent them from getting employment and stop there physical illnesses being investigated and treated, psychiatrists can.
Masson is a giant in the world of investigative journalism. It is so good to hear from him again.
I am not a maths genius or an expert in experimental design but if the overall benefit of antidepressants is slightly better than placebo (but not to a clinically significant degree) but 16% show a much bigger improvement then by reason are there not a similar proportion of people significantly harmed? Would that not have to be the case to balance out the figure? If so does this not need investigating to find the true risks and benefits if these drugs?
As someone who has studied non violent direct action campaign strategy I think a class action would make perfect sense.
What is needed however is an organisation to take it on and develop a strategy alongside that to organise those harmed by antidepressants and others interested in the issue to push the issue in other ways.
I am reading Scull’s latest book. It is an indictment of psychiatry and gives an excellent explanation of why a patients liberation movement was, and still is, needed.
A class action would be strategically very clever. It would get lots of news coverage and put the APA on the defensive and highlight links with Big Pharma.
You ask some good questions. The very distressed people you write about are often going through a crisis. Once they calm down they are usually discharged into the community with little support and at that time the interventions described in the article would come in use, as I have witnessed.
I also think some people in extreme distress, such you describe, would fit into the system described in this video https://youtu.be/JV4NTEp8S2Q
Nah, it’s drugs ECT or psycho social interventions and it’s easy to find the outcomes, they are measured and published by governments.
If you ask non psychiatric patients about there treatment they will moan about how few staff are employed but mainly they sing the praises of the doctors and nurses caring for them.
“Treatment resistant” is a euphemism for, “will not do what I say,” and should be a banned phrase. Try reading up on Open Dialogue which is usually effective and doesn’t really have any “Treatment resistance.”
Yup, if you tell people there anxiety is a MH problem and not due to some frightening circumstances they tend to dwell on it and feel worse instead of figuring out the causes and if possible addressing them.
Yo, Mark – an antidepressant survivor and skilled, spirited researcher. Great combination.
Joanna’s work is always good.
Nice team I say.
The paper gives evidence which can be used by strategists to oppose psychiatry. It is strategic campaigns that have the impact.
Psychiatrists: they really don’t know what they are doing do they. They are prison wardens and probation officers with added tranquilizers. When they kill people there is about as much fuss as when people die in prison.
UK therapy is being outsourced to charities. They now compete for a slice of the pie which means there critical voice is weakened an overall services are cut.
:These are powerful stories that people take to be real malfunctions within themselves so they become self limiting self full-filling prophesies and everyone around them can also often see the person as mentally ill – all behaviour becomes viewed in this way.”
I met someone who was doing that today. He had completely swallowed the various diagnosis put on him by the system and was now seeing all his problems through that lens. He said talking therapies will give him a bit more therapy and then he will train for a job
He has been saying it for years.
I wonder if you have read Adorono? He wrote that women will come to fear there social worker more than there drunken husband. He saw therapy as adjusting people to a sick society.
I don’t entirely agree but it is seems a good place to start an investigation.
The thing about seeing a GP being as good as a few weeks IAPT treatment implies any friendly contact is helpful – duh, like we didn’t know that!
Late capitalism can be a lonely place and IAPT is no cure for that.
” a rebellious, promiscuous, pot-smoking teenager who didn’t know how to lie.” Sounds pretty normal to me! The beat poets made careers out of such lives, although it m7st he said, they were mainly men and therefore given more leeway than women.
However: “Self-care is how you take your power back,” is patronizing rubbish. The institutions have turned from tranquilizer dominated prisons to tranquilizer dominated prisons run by the soft police.
A depressing read/listen and an accurate summation of psychiatries miserable and destructive history. What Scull misses is the way capitalism and psychiatry are entwined. Psychiatry started out as do goody doctors taking charge of the extremely mentally distressed and became a business opportunity which they ruthlessly exploited as asylums fitted in with the development of industrial capitalism, it provided a way to remove disruptive non criminals from the bussiness dominated society. From that logic sterilisation, lobotomy and ultimately death camps evolved. Scull also misses the emiseration that capitalism causes and the way the rhetoric of Mental Health individualises distress and distracts from its social causes. The mental health industry is a core way capitalism continues, it’s ideology is part of the way modern capitalism is maintained, we are all sick in the head now, not miserable because of the poverty of everyday life.
Your experiences with this woman reminded me of a friend who was in a long term relationship with a man who was running a tiny psychotherapy cult. That story is long, complex and fraught but the multiple family members being involved in your account in the way the therapy was adminstered and what you are calling boundary violations made me think of the experiences of people who have escaped psychotherapy cults.
I’d like to read more of your work. You write well and your life is very interesting.
I think mass drugging with Prozac egg took off in the 80’s as neoliberalism took hold and ADHD, nuerodiversity etc took off in the wake of the 2008 crash. This analysis goes along with the idea that psychiatry’s main function is to distract from the causes of distress.
Actually the hearing voices network has opinions and some psychiatrists listen to them.
How about Chronic Misery? Or being, ” A right miserable bastard,”? Seems about as valid as and dsm diagnosis to me.
An utterly brilliant podcast. Thanks.
Your description of home treatment teams is all too familiar. However I believe Pat Bracken’s team was different. I hope so anyway.
IAPT is a business selling snake oil. The therapists hate delivering it as they can’t do a proper job, some are off sick with depression – lol – the good ones leave and go private. The assessment interviews are gruelling and pointless apart from IAPT providers gathering data to use for there next grant application. I met a guy who worked doing admin for them, he did a bit of research for his own interest and found out they got loads of returnees, which basically showed the treatment length is arbitrary and insufficient, the manager didn’t want to know as it would upset the business modle. They screen out the very distressed leaving the mild to moderate but there is evidence that these folk will get better in six months anyway.
IAPT is one of the worst examples of marketised, tick box medicine ever imho.
Wow – pretty damning.
I was a member of a mental healthday centre and a lot of the members, myself included, had experienced sexual assault and family violence. This is routinely ignored by psychiatric staff. Day centre members had no reason to lie. My experience is backed up by research. While Satanic Ritual Abuse may well have been wildly exaggerated the horrors that my friends and fellow day centre members are not.
“Dr. Aftab’s contentions in this quote are essentially unproven – and probably unprovable – platitudes.”
I have read some of Aftab’s work before and it mainly, perhaps entirely, consists of unproven platitudes, some of them dis-proven and roundly so. It doesn’t stop him pontificating like he is some kind of expert though, and probably getting a nice little fee for doing so.
The full story of the abuse you suffered, and which the so called therapists went onto do to others, reminded me of a hypnotherapist I know who has been accused of sexual assaulting two men I know. The accusations are that he used his hypnotherapy skills, possibly with drugs of some sort, to gain unwanted sexual access to handsome younger men.
I doubt these stories are the only ones, there will be others.
A few years later lots of the IAPT therapists are off sick due to stress and anxiety due to impossible case loads and trying to fulfill overly managerial targets. They ache to do real work and help people but the contracts, which are nice little earners for senior managers, prevent that.
It is a rubbish programme that fits nicely into the political and philosophical believes of the era. It looks like the government is providing help while conditions of life for many deteriorate. A psychological sticking plaster for a horrid age.
In other words, lets pretend Schizophrenia etc exists because it works for the Doctors, who get paid quite nicely, and lets ignore what everyone else says, including the patients.
This is my non peer reviewed opinion:
We had a growing number of people diagnosed with Depression and on pills since 1980, ie when Thatcher and Reagon got in power, decimated the unions, started selling off public services and reducing workers rights. This resulted in growing inequality. The encouragement to label misery as an illness and get the pills did two things:
1 provide product for Big Pharma, paid for out of health insurance.
2 distract people from the societal causes of their misery.
The depression market if just about saturated but after the crash on 2008 another means was needed to individualise misery and distract from societal causes and all the varieties of Nuerodiversity does that very well. What if you are anxious, a bit out of the ordinary (and ordinary is becoming ever more closely defined) and struggle at work? Maybe it is not because work is a badly paid living Hell with ever rising cost of living but rather an inherent, possible inherited, may genetic disorder that results in you being anxious, not able to concentrate and throwing wobbles (now called Melt Downs). Great explanation that lets the boss and the state off the hook and slows down unions and community groups organizing and fighting back if you ask me.
Well that’s my two pennyworth worth for the evening.
Personally I have diagnosed myself with Moody Cow Disorder and I expect Reasonable Adjustments under UK disability legislation. I find it a very helpful diagnosis when I question the validity of ADHD, Autism and Nuerodiversity with people who identify as such. My condition is every bit as real as theirs and I am just as offended by people questioning it’s validity as they are when I question the validity of their diagnosis. I don’t think anyone who does not have this diagnosis should in anyway comment or draw it into question – qed get out of jail free card init?
about 12 years ago I wrote a play which deconstructs psychiatry. The play is called Mental, it has a scene about ADHD and rips the construct apart in a knock about comedy manner. Now I find people writing scholarly articles about it which are much more learned, but mine version is funnier.
Scene 5: PSYCHIATRY IS EVERYWHERE!
Suzannah: My daughter had a problem with an educational psychologist you know. They’re a kind of therapist. The special educational needs coordinator at her school sent her to see one.
Mark: What did they say it was, ADHD?
John: Or was it Sadburgers, sorry, Aspergers.
Mark: Oi, don’t’ be rude.
John: Just because you’re a bit of train spotter does not mean you’ve got a disorder. Just a bit annoying, unless you like trains that is. Personally I think a diagnosis of Aspergers is about as useful as knowing what star sign someone is.
Suzannah: What’s your star sign John? Are you a fire sign?
John: As it happens, I’m Sagittarius.
Suzannah: Ah, that explains it.
John: Well Suzannah, I’m not really into Astrology, but it’s a lot less dangerous than a psychiatric diagnosis.
Mark: Tell us about your daughter then Suzannah.
Suzannah: They said she had ADHD.
John returns to the Tourettes syndrome symptoms.
John: Idiots.
Suzannah and Mark look odd at him as if he might have ADHD.
Suzannah: The school. The special educational needs coordinator and the educational psychologist wanted to put her on Ritalin.
John: Idiots! Ritalin’s all over schools these days, just like head lice.
Suzannah: I know, people end up on it for life sometimes. And it makes the children look really drugged up. My daughter kept playing up and getting into trouble, but she hated her teacher and was getting bullied by the other children in her class.
Suzannah and Mark sit down and start acting out naughty school children. Mark pulls Suzannah’s hair, she makes as if to hit him, looks at John and sits down.
He barks it out like a teacher shouting out orders.
Mark and Suzannah start sticking tongues out at each other and acting like naughty children, throwing things at each other, getting up and looking at John like he is the teacher.
John: Attention Deficit.
Mark speaks an aside to Suzannah.
Mark: Thinks he knows it all.
Suzannah: Oi, Sir, is you gay?
John: Now, now, Suzannah, get on with your work
Mark giggles, gets up and pushes Suzannah in a bullying way, John looks at Mark.
John: Oi you, stop talking to your mate and pay attention boy. Attention Deficit – not paying attention. Well that’s not a disorder.
Mark gets up and sneaks behind John, Suzannah stands up and follows him.
John: Hyperactivity.
Mark stands on a chair and makes like a monkey.
John: Right, you, Mark, sit down, over there. And you, Suzannah, sit down, over there. And get on with your work.
John: To audience Hyperactivity: Not sitting still, running around. Well that’s not a disorder. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD, its pants. ADHD, yes, ADHD it’s pants. What does ADHD mean? It’s the doctors medicalizing a particular distress. What kind of distress? Well in this case naughty boys.
Suzannah: And a few girls.
They start acting like naughty kids in school. Throwing things, getting up from the table and looking at John like he is the teacher.
Mark: But mainly boys.
John: And what do Dr’s do with naughty boys?
Suzannah scowls at John.
John: And girls. Give them drugs. In this case Ritalin.
John: Is there something you two would like to share with the rest of the class?
They calm down, lean over table and get on with work.
John: Ritalin has almost the same effect as cocaine. Or speed. But for some reason it slows kids down, probably because it’s poisoned their brains.
Mark: He raises his hand. Sir, the headmaster won’t let me in school unless I’ve taken my Ritalin.
John: Yes, well the less said about that sadistic idiot the better.
Mark: I’m telling on you Sir. I’ll tell the headmaster you called him a sadistic idiot.
John: Get on with your work Mark.
Suzannah: My mum likes me to have Ritalin. When she runs out of money she takes my Ritalin off me and sells it to her mates down the pub.
John: Now I think that is the better option. Drug free children, adults taking responsibility for their drug taking, stimulates the local economy; it’s all good! Imagine if what happens in school happened at work. You have your annual review, your appraisal, whatever. Just you and your manager in a little cubicle, and she says:
Suzannah and Mark sit at table opposite each other. Suzannah as manager, Mark as employee.
Suzannah: Now Mark, I’m afraid you’ve not been hitting your targets.
Mark: Ah, sorry.
Suzannah: I’ve been noticing that you’ve been finding it hard to concentrate. We’ve paid for you to have extra tuition on your computer and it hasn’t helped; you keep making spelling mistakes, which, as I am sure you are aware, is not acceptable in this line of work.
Mark: Sorry.
Suzannah: Also, Sally, the manager in sales says you’ve been wandering in there and talking to John and Sarah. Sally’s put in a complaint about you distracting them from their work.
Mark: Oh.
Suzannah: I’m going to recommend a referral to the occupational health team for a psychological assessment.
John: Next thing you know they won’t let you back into work unless you’re on class B drugs.
Mark pretends to pick up a phone.
Mark: Hello, is that Unison? My line manager is refusing to let me into the office unless I take Ritalin. I agree. It’s an abuse of my human rights. What can I do?
John: There’d be an outcry!
Suzannah: Unless you’re a kid of course, when a doctor can give you a dodgy diagnosis and force you to take class B drugs, possibly for the rest of your life.
John: Mind you, some people like that!
Suzannah: My daughter doesn’t pay attention and plays up when she’s bored or angry.
Mark: I wonder if lot of kids diagnosed with ADHD are like that?
John: Hey, lets not look at that, just in case someone starts to wonder why the kids are so bored and angry at the world.
Scene 6: CAPITALISM MAKES YOU SICK
………….
wow – this interview is just so damning of psychatry and Big Pharma. I especially like the explicit links to class and racism that occur repeatedly through the article.
It sounds fascinating, both as a garden and a recovery centre.
Ah yes, object and you are drugged up, object more and you are put in seclusion, do it again and you are threatened with ect. If it wasn’t banned they would give the persistent objectors labotomies.
same as it ever was, from the early days of psychiatry in the 1800’s doctors have fought off any challange to there hegenomy despite there being no proof that they help anyone.
40 years ago I knew a woman who fled a very violent man. She had a breakdown and the people who gave her sanctury called the services as they did not know what to do. She was sectioned, detained, seperated from her kids and drugged up. The hospital had no interest in the reason for her breakdown. When she calmed down she was sent back to her very violent husband. Luckily her friends once again helped her escape, this time with better preparation and she went very quickly into a womens refuge.
I doubt my friends story or the story in the blog is unusual.
Fightin talk – I want more of that
I partly agree, but I also think it is a fine piece of working class writing showing what life at the bottom is like and how the state oppresses the poor – and you don’t get much of that in mainstream media. As such it is one of the best pieces on the site imho.
Thanks for raising this important issue. In the early 90’s I met a man who had suffered, “electric shock “therapy.” He said don’t ever do it. I had no intention of doing any such thing.
Your school and psychiatrist were evil. People deserve compensation for these sorts of harms. Sadly that is unlikely to happen.
Nice analysis of an excellent article. I also think James Davies thinks that capitalism can be reformed, or maybe a revolution instigated, by professionals taking action where as I think it probably has to be from the working class, and that includes service user/survivors of psychiatry leading.
This is a tragic, gruelling story. That it is happening to thousands more, many living in poverty is a scandal. It deserves a mass direct action campaign
When the occupations of psychiatrists offices start wake me up.
I find it weird to see the UN saying something I have been banging on about for nearly 30 years. I shall take this article to my local Crisis House, where all psychiatrists and social workers are banned without prior consent of the people who run it.
it is weird to hear what I have been banging on about and putting into practice, in small ways, for decades, spoken about by someone from WHO
Wow – corruption always seems to go with bullying. I admire your persistence. Keep it up.
The corruption seems endemic.
Your experiences are horrible, you have my sympathy. However I think the original comment was aimed at psychiatrists and researchers who make very good livings poisoning people or doing useless research while people like you are ignored, shunned or locked up and drugged.
I personally would like all the money these people get taken back and given to you and people who support people like you.
Time to read Brave New World again I fear.
These are brilliant articles showing how drug policy is used by politicians to garner votes while the real causes and solutions to problenatic drug use are ignored.
Great interview. It covers a lot of stuff.
Your view is the one I like the most:
Follow the money, as ever, is the motto here.
Peterson has made a small fortune peddling his strict Daddy self help rubbish and he and his publisher needed another book to consolidate his fortune. The benzo story added to the drama and as in all his mutterings there is no coherence, just what passes for intelligent thought.
“Stopping medications is an important part of the job of a psychiatrist, yet it has received relatively little attention,” or just not prescribe them in the first place.
Or better still resign and retrain as a gardener or a flower arranger or something that doesn’t actually harm people.
Excellent article.
I am very glad the support groups exist and congratulate them for developing there skilled work and for John Reeds excellent assessment of the situation.
The situation is however likely to continue until direct action campaigns from survivors emerge.
Out of the support groups, onto the streets.
I think this article ultimately points to either anarchism or communism as self reliance is an ideal that is promoted by and benefits rampant capitalism.
A better question would be:
Why is there not a direct action campaign against Electro Covulsive Torture?
Geart but horrific article though.
Blunt, condemning and a breath of fresh air from what is often a mealy mouthed medical establishment, even when they know how bad things are.
The outcomes of those in care are not good in the UK. I imagine they are worse in the USA.
This is disgusting: it is like charging prisoners for upkeep, education and any help they get while they are in prison and expecting them to pay it back when they leave out of any earnings they get.
Why not have kidnappers who forcibly drug the people they kidnap demand money from there victims for upkeep too?
Perverse or what?
When does the rebellion begin?
I liked the whole article till it got to this point:
“They propose that this kind of research could inform public policy efforts to combat social and economic inequality and the deleterious mental health effects that can result from such “toxic” environments.”
It is fine to propose this sort of research. It would be good sociology, anthropology and have an impact on lessening the present drug based model. But it is naive to think that public policy will change from academic research alone. Those street children in Brazil will only go when the poor organize and rise up to get rid of the rich in those gated communities. They need to be aiming this research at those who fight poverty, not those that enable it such as governments. The researchers are revealing there own class background by making this statement. They are middle class academics hoping to influence and then implement policy for the ruling class. They are not the oppressed.
True and that is to some degree covered in the report
I cannot see in the article if it refers to type 1, type 2 or both. That is important as type 1 is thought to be an autoimmune disease and type 2 the result of excess fat which cpuld be caused by comfort eating due to ACE’s.
That is a really interesting article. Thanks for publishing it. It makes the link between prison abolition and psychiatry abolition very nicely.
What it points to is how psychiatry mainly oppresses the poor. It is a tool of capital to keep a lid on dissent.
Speak for yourself luv. I’m as mad as a hatter.
I quite like calling myself the names my oppressors call me. It takes the sting out and shows society that their standards are just ideas that can and are constantly remade.
There is a strong disability rights movement that says peoole are disabled because of society excluding people with impairments. The antipsychiatry movement could be seen as part of that just as it could be seen as part of the prison abolition movement.
Thanks for the fascinating critique of PTSD
Excellent chapter.
I am heartened by the description of what happens in Italy where hospitalization is very limited and where community support with big service user input is common.
I agree. I also think that there are therputic communities within the prison system that are humane and effective and also that psychiatric drugs are dolled out on prison wards.
I think we need to hear from inmates from both institutions as well as looking at outcomes from both. They all sound pretty dismal to me.
Medication only – no improvement (except for drug company profits and health provider wages) but lots of risks to the client.
Nuff said
Psychiatric patients’ physical health problems are are routinely ignored. I know three people whose physical health was ignored in psychiatric hospitals.
Diagnostic overshadowing is a known phenonema.
That isn’t self centered. That is an appalling story of child abuse by drug obsessed psychiatry.
I am glad you have survived the poisoning and lies.
Great study and a total indictment of psychiatrists and GP’s who prescribe these drugs so readily and then are useless at helping people stop them.
A brilliant piece and a vital piece of survivor history. Thank you so much for writing it.
In the UK a few years ago the government kept banging on about how employment was good for people’s mental health. They used this to push conditionality, where by people had to go to ridiculous lengths to look for jobs, applying for 30 jobs a week for example and going on mickey mouse training courses, to get benefits. If they don’t comply they are sanctioned. So thanks for unearthing this research to show that this is all built on a lie.
This reminds me of:
“All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
As Prof John Reed once said, can we have the money back?
I love this as it uses one of my core principles, which is to turn complex sounding ideas into plain English (or as some physicist once said, if you can’t explain it to an eight year old you probably don’t know what you are on about). Most therapy is based on a few simple ideas really so I am glad you are making that explicit.
I also like the idea that, “A market economy requires ongoing selling to sustain itself. It needs consumers to feel a bit better, but not in any sustained way, so they keep coming back for more.” As that is my experience of therapy.
Conversely if I on a retreat, an intense group experience, my whole outlook changes and after I leave I cope with the world much better for a while. So I can see how the Open Dialogue and other community based approaches could work, they reflect my experience of groups being encouraged to get to know and struggle with each other to the benefit of all of them.
Indeed
I think your comments on IAPT are intetesting in the context of previous chapters on neoliberalism. The same target cuture, excessive managerialism and dire results are found in teaching. Good teachers leave or are pressired out, teachers do not set the class, they ate expected to teach lesson plans set by year heads. Teachers and pupils are micromanaged and fed up, just like IAPT clients and therapists.
At the most TMS is a sophisticated placebo procedure. Expensive treatment requiring assessment by a well paid expert, big impressive machine that makes muscles move by magic that you are told calibrates the machine to your particular brain, then treatments that are expensive with the machine and technicians every day for a few weeks and which cause people to feel disorientated, maybe have headaches and such like discombobulation. Who wouldn’t feel better for a while with all that attention? Just as long as you don’t get the brain damage…..
” There are over 500 different forms of therapy documented and every year new ones come on stream.” A bit like religions then. As a young man my friends and I joked about inventing a new religion. Now a days we would joke about inventing a new therapy.
I met a therapist a few years ago who worked on IAPT. They were doing a bit of admin for the team and did there own analysis of the data. They found out that they got lots of returners. If it worked so well that wouldn’t happen of course. The manager was not pleased….
I am utturly shocked by the TMS advocates in these coments. Their comments are junk science at there worst. It reminds me of the kind of “science” proposed by homeopathy or dowsing. You cannot map the mind with any kind of electric stimulation to show which bits cause u happiness and then use any kind of electromagnectic stimulation to clear brain pathways so that new and nicer ones form. This is dangerous junk science.
If you really could clear brain pathways then you could by accident clear the ones that say what someones name is or where they live. Then they may decide they are called simething else or live next door.
If you really believe TMS clears brain pathways you are saying it causes brain damage and that brain damage stops people feling miserable. Lets hope real doctors see that for the dangerous sham it is.
This reads like junk science to me. States of mind do not correlate to brain areas. You cannot map out which ares need attention and which are ok.
You can’t clear pathways in the brain, only damage them.
Brains change all the time. Any teacher will tell you that. New pathways ate created as a person learns something new. Teachers do not use electricity to help people have space in there brain to learn more maths.
If you have been told tms clears pathways in the brain you have been lied to. It probably works on a placebo effect at the most.
It disturbs me that TMS is even allowed. States of mind, no matter how painful, are not medical problems. Therefore medical treatments are not justified.
This is just awful. Thanks for writing this up. I am so sorry you went through this. I hope you find a good lawyer and are able to sue the psychiatrist who did this to you.
It is so important this story gets out.
It is a superb essay. It is very generous of the authhor to publish it here for free.
I was wondering about the low number of commments compared to some other blogs. My guess is that the subject of this chapter, which is about how the politics of the last forty years have influenced both the psyche, culture and the development of mental health and other services, is not of direct relevence to the lives of those harmed by psychiatry. For myself I think that the broad background of the ploitics of the last forty years is important in understanding how the harms of psychiatry have expanded so that we now talk routinely of, “Mental health, ” and so many are on damaging and addictive drugs.
What I would like to see more if is how the neoliberal model has influenced and degraded the commisioning and implimentation of services and also what part the left plays in all this.
Neoliberalism trimphed because the left failed and continue to fail. Inequality is still growing. Inequality is also related to trade union membership. More equal countries have more trade unionists per head of population. Yet trade unions are weak as we can see from both there reactions to both austerity and the covid 19 crisis.
The bigger question for me is how much can we really change psychiatry without changing society?
Hm, I am a gardener by trade. I have a client who is a doctor, a consultant in ICU as it happens, which means he is of importance in treating server coronavirus cases at the moment. I call him Andy as that is what he seems to want to be called. Although it must be said I call him Dr Andy to my friends as he is rather cute and I harbour a Chic Lit fantasy of him rescuing me as I mow over my toes one day and we miraculously end up married – sigh, one can dream. Meanwhile I need to order some aconites for his garden (not to mention getting a life…)
This is basic strategy for leveraging beaurocratic systems and very good advice. Often those systems ate impervious to change due to vested interests and inertia so I would advice also looking at direct action campaign strategy and movement building strategy. A good place to start is Strategy and Soul by Daniel Hunter. I used some of his techniques very effectively in a Campaign a few years ago.
http://www.strategyandsoul.org/Strategy_%26_Soul/Home.html
I think you are saying work and school is often boring, which many of us know already, and to see the signs of our boredom as a disorder fits the boss very well.
Your suggestion that Aftab and co get good results from antidepressants because he and some other psychiatrists are good at forming “therapeutic alliances,” and the results have little to do with the drug has a certain appeal as he is charming and erudite.
His inability to answer his critics with reasoned argument is another matter entirely.
Same as everyday life imho
I saw a video with Ritts on a left wing youtube channel. I was appalled by the inaccuracies of her arguments so I am glad to see this here.
Here is the vid for those that want to see it.
https://youtu.be/fxqI83pUzi4
All of that makes sense to me due to the shame that comes after lashing out and after drinking/drugging binges. It also raises raises questions about comparative risk of a “depression,” diagnosis, when psychiatry so often tells us that “depression, ” is a risk of suicide which is why antidepressants are needed, when plainly they increase the risk of suicide and other states of mind increase the risk more than this diagnosis. Also, suicide after failing rehab make a sense to me due to the feelings of shame and that raises questions as to whether rehab is the best firm of treatment, but as it is a profitable industry it, like psychiatry will be hard to challenge.
What individuals decide is up to them. What doctors and particularly psychiatrists decide is of legitimate public intetest. You can’t lock people up, force drugs and ECT on them, diagnose them with illnesses that may prevent them from getting employment and stop there physical illnesses being investigated and treated, psychiatrists can.
Masson is a giant in the world of investigative journalism. It is so good to hear from him again.
I am not a maths genius or an expert in experimental design but if the overall benefit of antidepressants is slightly better than placebo (but not to a clinically significant degree) but 16% show a much bigger improvement then by reason are there not a similar proportion of people significantly harmed? Would that not have to be the case to balance out the figure? If so does this not need investigating to find the true risks and benefits if these drugs?
As someone who has studied non violent direct action campaign strategy I think a class action would make perfect sense.
What is needed however is an organisation to take it on and develop a strategy alongside that to organise those harmed by antidepressants and others interested in the issue to push the issue in other ways.
I am reading Scull’s latest book. It is an indictment of psychiatry and gives an excellent explanation of why a patients liberation movement was, and still is, needed.
A class action would be strategically very clever. It would get lots of news coverage and put the APA on the defensive and highlight links with Big Pharma.
You ask some good questions. The very distressed people you write about are often going through a crisis. Once they calm down they are usually discharged into the community with little support and at that time the interventions described in the article would come in use, as I have witnessed.
I also think some people in extreme distress, such you describe, would fit into the system described in this video https://youtu.be/JV4NTEp8S2Q
You might want to try contacting Lumpen journal in the UK. They might publish some of your stuff. https://www.theclassworkproject.com/lumpen
Nah, it’s drugs ECT or psycho social interventions and it’s easy to find the outcomes, they are measured and published by governments.
If you ask non psychiatric patients about there treatment they will moan about how few staff are employed but mainly they sing the praises of the doctors and nurses caring for them.
“Treatment resistant” is a euphemism for, “will not do what I say,” and should be a banned phrase. Try reading up on Open Dialogue which is usually effective and doesn’t really have any “Treatment resistance.”
Yup, if you tell people there anxiety is a MH problem and not due to some frightening circumstances they tend to dwell on it and feel worse instead of figuring out the causes and if possible addressing them.
Yo, Mark – an antidepressant survivor and skilled, spirited researcher. Great combination.
Joanna’s work is always good.
Nice team I say.
The paper gives evidence which can be used by strategists to oppose psychiatry. It is strategic campaigns that have the impact.
Psychiatrists: they really don’t know what they are doing do they. They are prison wardens and probation officers with added tranquilizers. When they kill people there is about as much fuss as when people die in prison.
UK therapy is being outsourced to charities. They now compete for a slice of the pie which means there critical voice is weakened an overall services are cut.
:These are powerful stories that people take to be real malfunctions within themselves so they become self limiting self full-filling prophesies and everyone around them can also often see the person as mentally ill – all behaviour becomes viewed in this way.”
I met someone who was doing that today. He had completely swallowed the various diagnosis put on him by the system and was now seeing all his problems through that lens. He said talking therapies will give him a bit more therapy and then he will train for a job
He has been saying it for years.
I wonder if you have read Adorono? He wrote that women will come to fear there social worker more than there drunken husband. He saw therapy as adjusting people to a sick society.
I don’t entirely agree but it is seems a good place to start an investigation.
The thing about seeing a GP being as good as a few weeks IAPT treatment implies any friendly contact is helpful – duh, like we didn’t know that!
Late capitalism can be a lonely place and IAPT is no cure for that.
” a rebellious, promiscuous, pot-smoking teenager who didn’t know how to lie.” Sounds pretty normal to me! The beat poets made careers out of such lives, although it m7st he said, they were mainly men and therefore given more leeway than women.
However: “Self-care is how you take your power back,” is patronizing rubbish. The institutions have turned from tranquilizer dominated prisons to tranquilizer dominated prisons run by the soft police.
A depressing read/listen and an accurate summation of psychiatries miserable and destructive history. What Scull misses is the way capitalism and psychiatry are entwined. Psychiatry started out as do goody doctors taking charge of the extremely mentally distressed and became a business opportunity which they ruthlessly exploited as asylums fitted in with the development of industrial capitalism, it provided a way to remove disruptive non criminals from the bussiness dominated society. From that logic sterilisation, lobotomy and ultimately death camps evolved. Scull also misses the emiseration that capitalism causes and the way the rhetoric of Mental Health individualises distress and distracts from its social causes. The mental health industry is a core way capitalism continues, it’s ideology is part of the way modern capitalism is maintained, we are all sick in the head now, not miserable because of the poverty of everyday life.
Your experiences with this woman reminded me of a friend who was in a long term relationship with a man who was running a tiny psychotherapy cult. That story is long, complex and fraught but the multiple family members being involved in your account in the way the therapy was adminstered and what you are calling boundary violations made me think of the experiences of people who have escaped psychotherapy cults.
I’d like to read more of your work. You write well and your life is very interesting.
I think mass drugging with Prozac egg took off in the 80’s as neoliberalism took hold and ADHD, nuerodiversity etc took off in the wake of the 2008 crash. This analysis goes along with the idea that psychiatry’s main function is to distract from the causes of distress.
Actually the hearing voices network has opinions and some psychiatrists listen to them.
How about Chronic Misery? Or being, ” A right miserable bastard,”? Seems about as valid as and dsm diagnosis to me.
An utterly brilliant podcast. Thanks.
Your description of home treatment teams is all too familiar. However I believe Pat Bracken’s team was different. I hope so anyway.
IAPT is a business selling snake oil. The therapists hate delivering it as they can’t do a proper job, some are off sick with depression – lol – the good ones leave and go private. The assessment interviews are gruelling and pointless apart from IAPT providers gathering data to use for there next grant application. I met a guy who worked doing admin for them, he did a bit of research for his own interest and found out they got loads of returnees, which basically showed the treatment length is arbitrary and insufficient, the manager didn’t want to know as it would upset the business modle. They screen out the very distressed leaving the mild to moderate but there is evidence that these folk will get better in six months anyway.
IAPT is one of the worst examples of marketised, tick box medicine ever imho.
Wow – pretty damning.
I was a member of a mental healthday centre and a lot of the members, myself included, had experienced sexual assault and family violence. This is routinely ignored by psychiatric staff. Day centre members had no reason to lie. My experience is backed up by research. While Satanic Ritual Abuse may well have been wildly exaggerated the horrors that my friends and fellow day centre members are not.
“Dr. Aftab’s contentions in this quote are essentially unproven – and probably unprovable – platitudes.”
I have read some of Aftab’s work before and it mainly, perhaps entirely, consists of unproven platitudes, some of them dis-proven and roundly so. It doesn’t stop him pontificating like he is some kind of expert though, and probably getting a nice little fee for doing so.
The full story of the abuse you suffered, and which the so called therapists went onto do to others, reminded me of a hypnotherapist I know who has been accused of sexual assaulting two men I know. The accusations are that he used his hypnotherapy skills, possibly with drugs of some sort, to gain unwanted sexual access to handsome younger men.
I doubt these stories are the only ones, there will be others.
A few years later lots of the IAPT therapists are off sick due to stress and anxiety due to impossible case loads and trying to fulfill overly managerial targets. They ache to do real work and help people but the contracts, which are nice little earners for senior managers, prevent that.
It is a rubbish programme that fits nicely into the political and philosophical believes of the era. It looks like the government is providing help while conditions of life for many deteriorate. A psychological sticking plaster for a horrid age.
In other words, lets pretend Schizophrenia etc exists because it works for the Doctors, who get paid quite nicely, and lets ignore what everyone else says, including the patients.
This is my non peer reviewed opinion:
We had a growing number of people diagnosed with Depression and on pills since 1980, ie when Thatcher and Reagon got in power, decimated the unions, started selling off public services and reducing workers rights. This resulted in growing inequality. The encouragement to label misery as an illness and get the pills did two things:
1 provide product for Big Pharma, paid for out of health insurance.
2 distract people from the societal causes of their misery.
The depression market if just about saturated but after the crash on 2008 another means was needed to individualise misery and distract from societal causes and all the varieties of Nuerodiversity does that very well. What if you are anxious, a bit out of the ordinary (and ordinary is becoming ever more closely defined) and struggle at work? Maybe it is not because work is a badly paid living Hell with ever rising cost of living but rather an inherent, possible inherited, may genetic disorder that results in you being anxious, not able to concentrate and throwing wobbles (now called Melt Downs). Great explanation that lets the boss and the state off the hook and slows down unions and community groups organizing and fighting back if you ask me.
Well that’s my two pennyworth worth for the evening.
Personally I have diagnosed myself with Moody Cow Disorder and I expect Reasonable Adjustments under UK disability legislation. I find it a very helpful diagnosis when I question the validity of ADHD, Autism and Nuerodiversity with people who identify as such. My condition is every bit as real as theirs and I am just as offended by people questioning it’s validity as they are when I question the validity of their diagnosis. I don’t think anyone who does not have this diagnosis should in anyway comment or draw it into question – qed get out of jail free card init?
about 12 years ago I wrote a play which deconstructs psychiatry. The play is called Mental, it has a scene about ADHD and rips the construct apart in a knock about comedy manner. Now I find people writing scholarly articles about it which are much more learned, but mine version is funnier.
Scene 5: PSYCHIATRY IS EVERYWHERE!
Suzannah: My daughter had a problem with an educational psychologist you know. They’re a kind of therapist. The special educational needs coordinator at her school sent her to see one.
Mark: What did they say it was, ADHD?
John: Or was it Sadburgers, sorry, Aspergers.
Mark: Oi, don’t’ be rude.
John: Just because you’re a bit of train spotter does not mean you’ve got a disorder. Just a bit annoying, unless you like trains that is. Personally I think a diagnosis of Aspergers is about as useful as knowing what star sign someone is.
Suzannah: What’s your star sign John? Are you a fire sign?
John: As it happens, I’m Sagittarius.
Suzannah: Ah, that explains it.
John: Well Suzannah, I’m not really into Astrology, but it’s a lot less dangerous than a psychiatric diagnosis.
Mark: Tell us about your daughter then Suzannah.
Suzannah: They said she had ADHD.
John returns to the Tourettes syndrome symptoms.
John: Idiots.
Suzannah and Mark look odd at him as if he might have ADHD.
Suzannah: The school. The special educational needs coordinator and the educational psychologist wanted to put her on Ritalin.
John: Idiots! Ritalin’s all over schools these days, just like head lice.
Suzannah: I know, people end up on it for life sometimes. And it makes the children look really drugged up. My daughter kept playing up and getting into trouble, but she hated her teacher and was getting bullied by the other children in her class.
Suzannah and Mark sit down and start acting out naughty school children. Mark pulls Suzannah’s hair, she makes as if to hit him, looks at John and sits down.
John: ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
He barks it out like a teacher shouting out orders.
Mark and Suzannah start sticking tongues out at each other and acting like naughty children, throwing things at each other, getting up and looking at John like he is the teacher.
John: Attention Deficit.
Mark speaks an aside to Suzannah.
Mark: Thinks he knows it all.
Suzannah: Oi, Sir, is you gay?
John: Now, now, Suzannah, get on with your work
Mark giggles, gets up and pushes Suzannah in a bullying way, John looks at Mark.
John: Oi you, stop talking to your mate and pay attention boy. Attention Deficit – not paying attention. Well that’s not a disorder.
Mark gets up and sneaks behind John, Suzannah stands up and follows him.
John: Hyperactivity.
Mark stands on a chair and makes like a monkey.
John: Right, you, Mark, sit down, over there. And you, Suzannah, sit down, over there. And get on with your work.
John: To audience Hyperactivity: Not sitting still, running around. Well that’s not a disorder. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD, its pants. ADHD, yes, ADHD it’s pants. What does ADHD mean? It’s the doctors medicalizing a particular distress. What kind of distress? Well in this case naughty boys.
Suzannah: And a few girls.
They start acting like naughty kids in school. Throwing things, getting up from the table and looking at John like he is the teacher.
Mark: But mainly boys.
John: And what do Dr’s do with naughty boys?
Suzannah scowls at John.
John: And girls. Give them drugs. In this case Ritalin.
Mark and Suzannah speak in a speedy way.
Mark: I’ve got ADHD me.
Suzannah: I’ve got ABCD me.
Mark: I’ve got HIJK me.
Suzannah: I’ve got ICUP me.
The giggle, John gives them a dirty look.
John: Is there something you two would like to share with the rest of the class?
They calm down, lean over table and get on with work.
John: Ritalin has almost the same effect as cocaine. Or speed. But for some reason it slows kids down, probably because it’s poisoned their brains.
Mark: He raises his hand. Sir, the headmaster won’t let me in school unless I’ve taken my Ritalin.
John: Yes, well the less said about that sadistic idiot the better.
Mark: I’m telling on you Sir. I’ll tell the headmaster you called him a sadistic idiot.
John: Get on with your work Mark.
Suzannah: My mum likes me to have Ritalin. When she runs out of money she takes my Ritalin off me and sells it to her mates down the pub.
John: Now I think that is the better option. Drug free children, adults taking responsibility for their drug taking, stimulates the local economy; it’s all good! Imagine if what happens in school happened at work. You have your annual review, your appraisal, whatever. Just you and your manager in a little cubicle, and she says:
Suzannah and Mark sit at table opposite each other. Suzannah as manager, Mark as employee.
Suzannah: Now Mark, I’m afraid you’ve not been hitting your targets.
Mark: Ah, sorry.
Suzannah: I’ve been noticing that you’ve been finding it hard to concentrate. We’ve paid for you to have extra tuition on your computer and it hasn’t helped; you keep making spelling mistakes, which, as I am sure you are aware, is not acceptable in this line of work.
Mark: Sorry.
Suzannah: Also, Sally, the manager in sales says you’ve been wandering in there and talking to John and Sarah. Sally’s put in a complaint about you distracting them from their work.
Mark: Oh.
Suzannah: I’m going to recommend a referral to the occupational health team for a psychological assessment.
John: Next thing you know they won’t let you back into work unless you’re on class B drugs.
Mark pretends to pick up a phone.
Mark: Hello, is that Unison? My line manager is refusing to let me into the office unless I take Ritalin. I agree. It’s an abuse of my human rights. What can I do?
John: There’d be an outcry!
Suzannah: Unless you’re a kid of course, when a doctor can give you a dodgy diagnosis and force you to take class B drugs, possibly for the rest of your life.
John: Mind you, some people like that!
Suzannah: My daughter doesn’t pay attention and plays up when she’s bored or angry.
Mark: I wonder if lot of kids diagnosed with ADHD are like that?
John: Hey, lets not look at that, just in case someone starts to wonder why the kids are so bored and angry at the world.
Scene 6: CAPITALISM MAKES YOU SICK
………….
wow – this interview is just so damning of psychatry and Big Pharma. I especially like the explicit links to class and racism that occur repeatedly through the article.
The link to Redhall Walled Garden is not working. This one is though
https://www.greatbritishgardens.co.uk/scotland/item/redhall-walled-garden.html
It sounds fascinating, both as a garden and a recovery centre.
Ah yes, object and you are drugged up, object more and you are put in seclusion, do it again and you are threatened with ect. If it wasn’t banned they would give the persistent objectors labotomies.
same as it ever was, from the early days of psychiatry in the 1800’s doctors have fought off any challange to there hegenomy despite there being no proof that they help anyone.
40 years ago I knew a woman who fled a very violent man. She had a breakdown and the people who gave her sanctury called the services as they did not know what to do. She was sectioned, detained, seperated from her kids and drugged up. The hospital had no interest in the reason for her breakdown. When she calmed down she was sent back to her very violent husband. Luckily her friends once again helped her escape, this time with better preparation and she went very quickly into a womens refuge.
I doubt my friends story or the story in the blog is unusual.
Fightin talk – I want more of that
I partly agree, but I also think it is a fine piece of working class writing showing what life at the bottom is like and how the state oppresses the poor – and you don’t get much of that in mainstream media. As such it is one of the best pieces on the site imho.
It is a piece that would not be out of place in the UK Lumpen journal. https://www.theclassworkproject.com/lumpen
Thanks for raising this important issue. In the early 90’s I met a man who had suffered, “electric shock “therapy.” He said don’t ever do it. I had no intention of doing any such thing.
Your school and psychiatrist were evil. People deserve compensation for these sorts of harms. Sadly that is unlikely to happen.
Nice analysis of an excellent article. I also think James Davies thinks that capitalism can be reformed, or maybe a revolution instigated, by professionals taking action where as I think it probably has to be from the working class, and that includes service user/survivors of psychiatry leading.
This is a tragic, gruelling story. That it is happening to thousands more, many living in poverty is a scandal. It deserves a mass direct action campaign
When the occupations of psychiatrists offices start wake me up.
I find it weird to see the UN saying something I have been banging on about for nearly 30 years. I shall take this article to my local Crisis House, where all psychiatrists and social workers are banned without prior consent of the people who run it.
it is weird to hear what I have been banging on about and putting into practice, in small ways, for decades, spoken about by someone from WHO
Wow – corruption always seems to go with bullying. I admire your persistence. Keep it up.
The corruption seems endemic.
Your experiences are horrible, you have my sympathy. However I think the original comment was aimed at psychiatrists and researchers who make very good livings poisoning people or doing useless research while people like you are ignored, shunned or locked up and drugged.
I personally would like all the money these people get taken back and given to you and people who support people like you.
Time to read Brave New World again I fear.
These are brilliant articles showing how drug policy is used by politicians to garner votes while the real causes and solutions to problenatic drug use are ignored.
Great interview. It covers a lot of stuff.
Your view is the one I like the most:
Follow the money, as ever, is the motto here.
Peterson has made a small fortune peddling his strict Daddy self help rubbish and he and his publisher needed another book to consolidate his fortune. The benzo story added to the drama and as in all his mutterings there is no coherence, just what passes for intelligent thought.
“Stopping medications is an important part of the job of a psychiatrist, yet it has received relatively little attention,” or just not prescribe them in the first place.
Or better still resign and retrain as a gardener or a flower arranger or something that doesn’t actually harm people.
Excellent article.
I am very glad the support groups exist and congratulate them for developing there skilled work and for John Reeds excellent assessment of the situation.
The situation is however likely to continue until direct action campaigns from survivors emerge.
Out of the support groups, onto the streets.
I think this article ultimately points to either anarchism or communism as self reliance is an ideal that is promoted by and benefits rampant capitalism.
A better question would be:
Why is there not a direct action campaign against Electro Covulsive Torture?
Geart but horrific article though.
Blunt, condemning and a breath of fresh air from what is often a mealy mouthed medical establishment, even when they know how bad things are.
The outcomes of those in care are not good in the UK. I imagine they are worse in the USA.
This is disgusting: it is like charging prisoners for upkeep, education and any help they get while they are in prison and expecting them to pay it back when they leave out of any earnings they get.
Why not have kidnappers who forcibly drug the people they kidnap demand money from there victims for upkeep too?
Perverse or what?
When does the rebellion begin?
I liked the whole article till it got to this point:
“They propose that this kind of research could inform public policy efforts to combat social and economic inequality and the deleterious mental health effects that can result from such “toxic” environments.”
It is fine to propose this sort of research. It would be good sociology, anthropology and have an impact on lessening the present drug based model. But it is naive to think that public policy will change from academic research alone. Those street children in Brazil will only go when the poor organize and rise up to get rid of the rich in those gated communities. They need to be aiming this research at those who fight poverty, not those that enable it such as governments. The researchers are revealing there own class background by making this statement. They are middle class academics hoping to influence and then implement policy for the ruling class. They are not the oppressed.
True and that is to some degree covered in the report
I cannot see in the article if it refers to type 1, type 2 or both. That is important as type 1 is thought to be an autoimmune disease and type 2 the result of excess fat which cpuld be caused by comfort eating due to ACE’s.
That is a really interesting article. Thanks for publishing it. It makes the link between prison abolition and psychiatry abolition very nicely.
What it points to is how psychiatry mainly oppresses the poor. It is a tool of capital to keep a lid on dissent.
Speak for yourself luv. I’m as mad as a hatter.
I quite like calling myself the names my oppressors call me. It takes the sting out and shows society that their standards are just ideas that can and are constantly remade.
There is a strong disability rights movement that says peoole are disabled because of society excluding people with impairments. The antipsychiatry movement could be seen as part of that just as it could be seen as part of the prison abolition movement.
Thanks for the fascinating critique of PTSD
Excellent chapter.
I am heartened by the description of what happens in Italy where hospitalization is very limited and where community support with big service user input is common.
In this blog I write about a project I was involved in which enabled service users to imagine what a service created by them would be like. It sounds remarkably like what happens in Italy.
https://www.madintheuk.com/2021/02/the-rose-and-thorn-a-participatory-theatre-project/
Good to see academic journals taking this on
I agree. I also think that there are therputic communities within the prison system that are humane and effective and also that psychiatric drugs are dolled out on prison wards.
I think we need to hear from inmates from both institutions as well as looking at outcomes from both. They all sound pretty dismal to me.
I looked at the video of Ben on https://www.kidsskills.org/ .
He looks fun.
As if we didn’t know.
From
Angry of Reading.
Medication only – no improvement (except for drug company profits and health provider wages) but lots of risks to the client.
Nuff said
Psychiatric patients’ physical health problems are are routinely ignored. I know three people whose physical health was ignored in psychiatric hospitals.
Diagnostic overshadowing is a known phenonema.
That isn’t self centered. That is an appalling story of child abuse by drug obsessed psychiatry.
I am glad you have survived the poisoning and lies.
Great study and a total indictment of psychiatrists and GP’s who prescribe these drugs so readily and then are useless at helping people stop them.
A brilliant piece and a vital piece of survivor history. Thank you so much for writing it.
In the UK a few years ago the government kept banging on about how employment was good for people’s mental health. They used this to push conditionality, where by people had to go to ridiculous lengths to look for jobs, applying for 30 jobs a week for example and going on mickey mouse training courses, to get benefits. If they don’t comply they are sanctioned. So thanks for unearthing this research to show that this is all built on a lie.
This reminds me of:
“All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
As Prof John Reed once said, can we have the money back?
I love this as it uses one of my core principles, which is to turn complex sounding ideas into plain English (or as some physicist once said, if you can’t explain it to an eight year old you probably don’t know what you are on about). Most therapy is based on a few simple ideas really so I am glad you are making that explicit.
I also like the idea that, “A market economy requires ongoing selling to sustain itself. It needs consumers to feel a bit better, but not in any sustained way, so they keep coming back for more.” As that is my experience of therapy.
Conversely if I on a retreat, an intense group experience, my whole outlook changes and after I leave I cope with the world much better for a while. So I can see how the Open Dialogue and other community based approaches could work, they reflect my experience of groups being encouraged to get to know and struggle with each other to the benefit of all of them.
Indeed
I think your comments on IAPT are intetesting in the context of previous chapters on neoliberalism. The same target cuture, excessive managerialism and dire results are found in teaching. Good teachers leave or are pressired out, teachers do not set the class, they ate expected to teach lesson plans set by year heads. Teachers and pupils are micromanaged and fed up, just like IAPT clients and therapists.
At the most TMS is a sophisticated placebo procedure. Expensive treatment requiring assessment by a well paid expert, big impressive machine that makes muscles move by magic that you are told calibrates the machine to your particular brain, then treatments that are expensive with the machine and technicians every day for a few weeks and which cause people to feel disorientated, maybe have headaches and such like discombobulation. Who wouldn’t feel better for a while with all that attention? Just as long as you don’t get the brain damage…..
” There are over 500 different forms of therapy documented and every year new ones come on stream.” A bit like religions then. As a young man my friends and I joked about inventing a new religion. Now a days we would joke about inventing a new therapy.
I met a therapist a few years ago who worked on IAPT. They were doing a bit of admin for the team and did there own analysis of the data. They found out that they got lots of returners. If it worked so well that wouldn’t happen of course. The manager was not pleased….
I am utturly shocked by the TMS advocates in these coments. Their comments are junk science at there worst. It reminds me of the kind of “science” proposed by homeopathy or dowsing. You cannot map the mind with any kind of electric stimulation to show which bits cause u happiness and then use any kind of electromagnectic stimulation to clear brain pathways so that new and nicer ones form. This is dangerous junk science.
If you really could clear brain pathways then you could by accident clear the ones that say what someones name is or where they live. Then they may decide they are called simething else or live next door.
If you really believe TMS clears brain pathways you are saying it causes brain damage and that brain damage stops people feling miserable. Lets hope real doctors see that for the dangerous sham it is.
This reads like junk science to me. States of mind do not correlate to brain areas. You cannot map out which ares need attention and which are ok.
You can’t clear pathways in the brain, only damage them.
Brains change all the time. Any teacher will tell you that. New pathways ate created as a person learns something new. Teachers do not use electricity to help people have space in there brain to learn more maths.
If you have been told tms clears pathways in the brain you have been lied to. It probably works on a placebo effect at the most.
It disturbs me that TMS is even allowed. States of mind, no matter how painful, are not medical problems. Therefore medical treatments are not justified.
This is just awful. Thanks for writing this up. I am so sorry you went through this. I hope you find a good lawyer and are able to sue the psychiatrist who did this to you.
It is so important this story gets out.
It is a superb essay. It is very generous of the authhor to publish it here for free.
I was wondering about the low number of commments compared to some other blogs. My guess is that the subject of this chapter, which is about how the politics of the last forty years have influenced both the psyche, culture and the development of mental health and other services, is not of direct relevence to the lives of those harmed by psychiatry. For myself I think that the broad background of the ploitics of the last forty years is important in understanding how the harms of psychiatry have expanded so that we now talk routinely of, “Mental health, ” and so many are on damaging and addictive drugs.
What I would like to see more if is how the neoliberal model has influenced and degraded the commisioning and implimentation of services and also what part the left plays in all this.
Neoliberalism trimphed because the left failed and continue to fail. Inequality is still growing. Inequality is also related to trade union membership. More equal countries have more trade unionists per head of population. Yet trade unions are weak as we can see from both there reactions to both austerity and the covid 19 crisis.
The bigger question for me is how much can we really change psychiatry without changing society?
Hm, I am a gardener by trade. I have a client who is a doctor, a consultant in ICU as it happens, which means he is of importance in treating server coronavirus cases at the moment. I call him Andy as that is what he seems to want to be called. Although it must be said I call him Dr Andy to my friends as he is rather cute and I harbour a Chic Lit fantasy of him rescuing me as I mow over my toes one day and we miraculously end up married – sigh, one can dream. Meanwhile I need to order some aconites for his garden (not to mention getting a life…)