In my second year at university, I disintegrated. I wound up on the acute ward of the mental hosputal on the edge of my university town. An anti-intellectual atmosphere prevailed on that ward. One day after having mislaid my copy of Bleak House  a nurse – a male nurse – typical ageing hippy with long greasy hair, an anti-perspirant allergy who obviously indulged in the recreational use of cannabis – entered the room and demanded to know what I was ‘up to’.  He despised me and I assure you, dear reader, the feeling was entirely mutual. ‘I’ve lost my copy of Bleak House.’

‘What are you reading that for?  No wonder you’ve got problems.’

‘So who do you think has stolen my book?’

‘Someone mentally ill, I expect.’

Bear in mind that I was an literature student at the time.

Later upon seeing me with a copy of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden Johanna Green, a New Zealand nurse otherwise known for her pragmatic good sense said, ‘Should you be reading this.’ In that hospital knowledge was not see as nourishment for mind and soul, it was seen as poison, and potentially lethal poison at that.

Margaret Thatcher on the 1981 Brixton Riots (or what some people, in a mad fit of historical revisionism, call The Brixton Uprising) in The Downing Street Years.

I love that woman. Don’t you?

She also had a lot to say about Noraid. Remember that?

http://tinyurl.com/6qbpprc

1/11/2012 2:29 PMClinton wrote:
Louise, as Dan said, Dalrymple was both a psychiatrist and a medical doctor. His patients were not poor in the objective sense, though they were almost certainly were in teh subjective, Western sense. The vast majority of his patients were not mentally ill. That is his entire point: that they wanted to blame their problems on a medical condition, when in fact they were simply ignorant of how to live. As he said in describing the typical patient-psychiatrist relationship, “The patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to treat him.”
Reply to this

‘Dalrymple was both a psychiatrist and a medical doctor. ‘

I think you’ll find that all psychiatrists are medical doctors. If you want to know how our system works then visit your nearest psych hospital. Your system is not that different from ours. If you want to know the damage that some psychiatrists have wrought in your own country then google ‘iatrogenic mpd’.

‘The vast majority of his patients were not mentally ill’

If this is true then he shouldn’t have been treating them. His employer was the publicly funded NHS and he was paid to treat sick people. Something you should be made aware of: I grew up in Birmingham and my mother is a recently retired psychiatric nurse. Many of his assertions are, according to her and some of her colleagues, quite simply factually untrue. And if it is true that most NHS psychiatric patients are not ill then maybe psychiatry is a luxury the NHS simply cannot afford. This would have implications for the US too.

‘As he said in describing the typical patient-psychiatrist relationship, “The patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to treat him.”‘

Yes, you’re right he did say this but he said it in the context of drug addiction. And doesn’t this make the doctor himself a fraud?

Dalrymple was a fraud?
His colleagues were frauds?
Is this what you are saying?

Oh, Doctor Dalrymple, with friends like these…

Is America’s long love affair with psychiatry coming to an end?

Watch this space.

Addendum: I suggested that Doctor D’s disciples deserve a better messiah. Maybe the reverse is true. Does the Messiah deserve better disciples?

An upstanding, mittelschicht Tory lady perhaps.

Or maybe not: http://tinyurl.com/6wn56oo

Addendum: Go here

http://www.swbh.nhs.uk/about-us

…for a portrait of a ‘slum hospital’.

Although would any semi-competent local health authority locate an eye clinic that serves most of the inhabitants of a major city in a slum? You decide.

“The Trust hosts the Birmingham and Midland Eye Centre which is a supra-regional specialist facility, as well as the Pan-Birmingham Gynaecological Oncology Centre, Birmingham Skin Centre, Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia Centre and regional base of the National Poisons Information Service.

Aside from being one of the largest providers of patient services in the Midlands, the Trust also has a substantial teaching and research agenda with several academic departments including rheumatology, ophthalmology, cardiology, gynaecological oncology and neurology.”

My mother claims that the permissive attitude of the younger doctors and nurses to the consumption of illegal drugs is partly to blame for the mess Birmingham’s mental health services are in.  She sees patients taking them openly in the presence of staff members.  This has always happened but at least they used to have the decency to hide what they were doing.  They call it self medication. The problem is that it often renders their prescribed medication ineffectual.  Also the staff do not know which comes first, which is the chicken and which is the egg, the mental illness or the drug addiction.  

As someone who has had my lucidity snatched away from me, I do not not much patience with those who surrender their lucidity voluntarily. I would give anything to have mine back.  To be devoid of muddle headed thinking, visions, dreams and voices. But is anyone permanently in that state, I wonder.  Clouded visions, dispatches from another dimension have their uses. But being like this all the time renders you completely dysfunctional and can deprive you of the ability to make any kind of meaningful contribution to the world.

And that is tragic.

Addendum: According to Our Esteemed Leader:

(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2065491/David-Cameron-I-end-sicknote-culture-acts-conveyor-belt-life-benefits.html)

‘An expert report for Downing Street suggested more than three-quarters of GPs admitted they had signed people off sick for reasons other than their physical health.’

Make of that what you will.

Oh, look, it’s the Ghost of Lord Kitchener:

No, not you. You suck. Nor you. You suck like a Dyson! And haven't I told you to go forth and multiply about ten times already!

The odour of death made me cry out loud,
the breath of the tomb
The rancid blood of the womb.
These were the disasters of revolutionary times,
of unfamiliar climes, of endless night,
For these are the inhabitants of the slums,
they are not like you and me.
A hollow hope sustains them.
And our pity demeans them

We judge them collectively from afar.
There is no singularity here.
We do not approach them directly.
We have never even met them
They are vermin, sewer rats.
We return to our townhouses,
our cars, our children, our lives
Enfeebled, simple common place facts
which do not make it into history books
or dry academic texts.

Simon Wiesenthal

http://tinyurl.com/6c7drrc