Taking the King’s Shilling

My response to this:

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?

Addendum 2:

Tags: Anthony Daniels, Fraud, mental illness, NHS, psychiatry, Theodore Dalrymple