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 by 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.
‘They were almost as bad as the riots we saw in America in the 1960s and the 1970s’
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?
My response to this:
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?
Addendum 2:
Just who should members of die untermenschen look to for ‘moral inspiration’?
An upstanding, mittelschicht Tory lady perhaps.
Or maybe not: http://tinyurl.com/6wn56oo
So Sick of Drowning 