‘but what goes without saying should surely go unsaid.’ Well, indeed, Doctor. Do you ever think of applying these sagacious words to yourself?
From: The Salisbury Review:
And, as always, his valiant acolytes leap to his defence: http://blog.skepticaldoctor.com/2013/04/04/the-psychobabble-of-murder/#comments
And the attack dogs are unleashed:
Well, that was like being savaged by a dead sheep.
Somewhere across the Big Pond they often advise trial lawyers to avoid asking questions of witnesses on the stand unless they are sure of the answer. A Texan gentleman by the rather peculiar name of Alphonsus Jr. might consider applying such advice to other areas of his life, such as his interactions with complete strangers on the internet.
http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/02/11/fat-wars-why-not-personal-responsibility
Alphonsus Jr.
MAR 07, 2013 @ 20:52:02
Your links don’t work.
Incidentally, you appear to be on a crusade against Theodore Dalrymple. I keep seeing you in com boxes speaking against him. Kindly explain.
Incidentally, have you ever hired a surgical hitman to commit surgical infanticide?
If ‘Alphonsus Jr.’ had conducted some research before he asked this rather unpleasant, ungentlemanly question he may have stumbled across my Catholic origins. I certainly stumbled across his. Just a word of advice ‘Junior’, abortion is a mortal sin, having oneself tattooed isn’t.
I asked my wise old 95 year old neighbour (ex RAF, paramedic, college porter) Nobby Clarke what I should do.
‘Nobby, some American accused me of committing a mortal sin. What should I do?”
‘And did you commit this mortal sin?’
‘Why, of course not.’
Brief silence. And then Nobby said ‘Nothing.’
That man is a genius. Although you’ll note that I did not follow his advice.
http://dalrymplewatch.wordpress.com/2013/03/16/what-should-i-do/
Apparently my charming interlocutor has a few identities on da web, including:
…in which I accuse World Renowned Pseudo Doc Theodore Dalrymple (aka NHS Consultant Psychiatrist “Dr” Anthony Daniels (well, for a rather pitiful decade and a half anyway)) of unleashing a deluge of Pork Pies…
This Telegraph article makes little sense. Dalrymple is using a single case to illustrate his own problem with these kind of cases being dealt with by the courts at all. (Does he think that perhaps these cases should not be the business of the legal system but of his own specialism: psychiatry?) Should we never require psychologically vulnerable people to take the stand? Does that include perpetrators? And surely the job of ensuring that witnesses are psychologically robust enough to take the stand are members of his own medical specialism: psychiatry.
And yet the main target of his criticism is (as always) the police. He mentions the CPS, of course, but only in passing. It is the CPS who decide whether or not to launch a prosecution. A casual glance at police internet fora reveals that the decisions made by the CPS are often a source of much consternation among rank and file members of the police force.
I do not believe I have every seen so many non-sequiturs and red herrings in a single op-ed piece.
What for example is this supposed to mean?
‘The police and CPS, moreover, have been heavily criticised for the low rate of conviction in cases of rape and sexual abuse, often by the very people who, in other circumstances, deny the efficacy or justice of punishment.
Why, after all, should the punishment of sexual abusers have a deterrent effect, but not that of burglars?’
Can he name the people to whom he refers in this passage?
And then of course comes the kind of evidence that Dalrymple relies on to support his often ill thought out theories: a single piece of anecdotal evidence:
‘I recall, for example, the case of a man who was wrongly accused of rape by a woman; the prosecution not only failed to prove the allegation beyond reasonable doubt, but the defence proved beyond reasonable doubt that it was false.
Yet after his release from prison on remand he was treated by those around him as if he were guilty, on the grounds that there was no smoke without fire.’
It is high time that Dalrymple learnt something from the methodology of the historian: that academic discipline has no problem with anecdotal evidence. It does insist, however, on the use of multiple sources.
Incidentally, the good doctor is back in Yeovil again.
He devoted an entire book to that small town in Somerset:
http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/02/05/a-program-of-integrated-frivolity/
Aimed at Americans, a fact made all too clear by the following: ‘Recently I stayed a few weeks in a small town in Somerset, England called Yeovil, pronounced Yoville.’ (because they are evidently too stupid to work that out for themselves.) I’m guessing that Wifey Dalrymple is there delivering ECT to the elderly mentalists of ‘the most important town in Somerset’. She is a geriatric psychiatrist (in more ways than one). I’m also guessing she’ll be working for a while yet. Fourteen years of service, even in the publicly funded NHS, doesn’t yield a terribly generous pension. Poor old lady hitched her wagon to the wrong star there. I’m thinking maybe an internet wide collection may be in order.
Addendum: This is the place in which Dalrymple acted as a kind of indentured servant to the NHS for fourteen years (some kind of record, surely.)
Or “Bonfire of the Inanities”
Now that’s what I call…a seriously dysfunctional family.
“When I was about nine or ten years old my father had a bonfire of Victorian paintings. Like many a person who was inclined by nature to hoard, he sometimes had fits of clearing things out to make space, presumably for something else to accumulate. The paintings shared a loft for several years with crates of tinned fruit that he had bought during the Korean War, in the fear that the conflict would spread and rationing re-introduced. He kept the fruit and got rid of the paintings.”
And the underclass are supposed to be emulating this?
Too funny.
I’m sure I’ve read this somewhere before. Recycling without the environmental benefits.
Oops. I think I offended the good doctor’s top disciples.
I expect to be struck by lightning any time soon.
I have been tried and found guilty in the court of Texan brothers ‘Steve ‘n’ Clint’ and some other bloke who calls himself ‘Gavin’ (Gavin? Sounds like an eighties football hooligan) of ‘ad hominem’:
Let us see what the good doctor himself has to say about ad hominem:
Why Intellectuals Like Genocide
Here I confess that I am entering the world of ad hominem.
However, when it comes to the questions of human motivation it is difficult altogether to avoid ad hominem.
Anything Goes
And as ich bin ein untermensch surely I cannot be judged more harshly than the good doctor.
“Is there any attitude more illiberal?”
Possibly but then I’ve never claimed to be anything other than ‘illiberal’.
And who says I’m ‘blaming’ anyone? I’ve read about this episode before. In the account that I read poor little nine year old Theodore was sobbing and pleading with his father not to burn the paintings.
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by that.
(I’ll remove it if anyone objects.)
Theodore Dalrymple shows us that there is much scope for sadism in the role of prison doctor and how he himself derived much pleasure from this aspect of his role. I suspect that it was almost as much fun as having patients “injected in the buttock” in his primary role as a consultant psychiatrist at an inner-city general hospital in Birmingham. Note that he and the sycophants who surround him have stopped calling it a slum.
Weak doctors leave prisoners hooked on prescription drugs
Theodore Dalrymple: Former Prison Doctor.
The Chief Inspector of Prisons has reported that abuse of prescription drugs in prisons has increased to an alarming extent. I am surprised only that it took him this long to discover it.
By the time I left the prison service after 15 years, I had formulated a rough-and-ready rule: if a prisoner was willing to take medicine, he didn’t need it; and if he wasn’t willing to take it, he did. There were exceptions, of course; but every prison doctor must remember that medication, especially if it has a psychological effect, is coin of the realm in prison. A pill may change hands many times before it is actually taken.
There are several reasons for over-prescription of drugs in prison. Many prisoners arrive already on prescription drugs they don’t need. A high percentage of doctors have been assaulted or threatened by patients in the past 12 months, an even higher percentage in the areas from which most prisoners are likely to come, so doctors are inclined to prescribe potentially aggressive patients what they demand rather than what they need, which in most cases is nothing.
Doctors in prisons feel obliged to continue these prescriptions, partly because doctors do not like to stop other doctors’ prescriptions without deeper knowledge of the patient, and partly because it is easier. To stop a prescription is to court an unpleasant scene, in which the prisoner will accuse the doctor of negligence or worse, threaten to complain, shout and even menace. Not a few prisoners told me that if I did not prescribe the valium they wanted, they would attack or kill a prisoner or a prison officer.
“Let me give you a word of advice,” I would reply.
“What?”
“Don’t.”
They would look in my eye and see that I was not to be moved. Some would laugh, others would be angry with the anger of the justly accused. But it took experience and firmness to resist their blackmail.
Experience and firmness of character were just the qualities the NHS did not seek in its prison doctors when it took over healthcare from the Prison Medical Service. The prescription of codeine and other sought-after drugs shot up without the slightest medical reason.
In the modern world, compassion easily slides into sentimentality and moral cowardice. Doctors like to think that their patients are telling the truth. Prisoners are often not like that; but inexperienced and weak doctors are reluctant to recognise it or be “judgmental”, the worst moral failing in the modern world. And so it is Goldilocks against Genghis Khan.
Face it, Doc, your specialism is about as scientific as witch finding and your methods as sophisticated as the ducking stool.
Addendum: (11.2.2013) In 1994 in an article (an op-ed piece) in The City Journal (an American publication) entitled The Knife Went In Dalrymple writes: ‘As a doctor who sees patients in a prison once or twice a week, I am fascinated by prisoners’ use of the passive mood and other modes of speech that are supposed to indicate their helplessness. They describe themselves as the marionettes of happenstance.’ Once or twice a week? Interesting.
Sylvia Plath was given ECT without anaesthetic shortly before her first nervous breakdown and suicide attempt. Collective guilt, anyone? Think about it people.
Someone is biting the hand that fed him, for many years. And it still sustains him via his French born wife who is an NHS geriatrician. Let’s hope his dentures fall out.
The good doctor spent the latter part of his life as a state employee. Why? We do have a private sector, one that is particularly friendly to unconventional psychiatrists. Was he just not good enough? Did he fear that no one would wish to consume the service he was offering?
His American acolytes should plead with The Greatest Doctor in the Entire Universe to come out of retirement and start a whole new career in the good ole U.S. Of A. Let’s see how he copes with a more open Market. Given the litigious nature of the US I’d bet my bottom dollar he’d be in court before you could say ‘Class Action Lawsuit’.
Funny how the American airbases here in the UK never had a problem using the NHS to treat US servicemen. You’d think they’d want the very best for their armed forces.
Or maybe Dull Rumple’s American apostles share his disdain for the armed forces, illustrated perfectly in an ‘essay’ on Gulf War Syndrome which can be found here:
http://www.gulflink.org/GulfWeb/uk_news/te080397_1.html
‘Many servicemen – who appear to have joined up imagining that war was a thing of the past, and that armies are now purely ornamental or a form of disguised unemployment.’
The right wing ain’t what it used to be, that’s for sure.
‘It’s tragic for the mentally ill but the fact is that psychiatry does not attract the best minds in medicine.’
From my favourite, now defunct, NHS psychiatrist:
‘More than one patient in my medical career gave her profession as dominatrix. Some found their clients among the lower classes, and some among the upper. Those who flogged the lower orders tended to be older, smaller, weaker and less pretty; those who serviced the upper were beautiful in what might be called a strapping way.’
As if he himself is in a position to cast judgement on his patients’ aesthetic qualities. He clearly lives in a dimension devoid of mirrors:
Devastatingly handsome or is there something brutish about his countenance?
I can’t believe a ‘respectable’ broadsheet would publish this kind of obvious fantasy as fact.
A brute, a fantasist and a sadist – perfect qualifications for his specialism.
‘One even had an international clientele: she would travel the world to whip judges and other members of the local establishment or intelligentsia.’
Sure she did, Doctor. And why would she be seeing a NHS psychiatrist? My guess is that she was not the client.
Whatever floats your boat, Herr Doktor.
Addendum: And from a later article:
‘We are like children! We deserve no freedom! We must be beaten with truncheons!’
Whatever you say, Doctor.
I’m feeling slightly nauseated.
An extract from the recently published memoirs of Dr. Anthony Daniels who was, for a couple of decades, a consultant psychiatrist at a large Birmingham hospital, which he claims was located in the midst of a ‘slum’ and catered solely for ‘slum dwellers’. I wonder how many of his colleagues suspected that he was simultaneously waging a long and bloody secret war against his ‘underclass’ patients in a charming little right-of-centre publication called The Spectator under the nom de guerre Theodore Dalrymple (taken from a PG Wodehouse short story). The book is entitled ‘Fool or Physician: the Memoirs of a Skeptical Doctor’. I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about that one.
‘I began to wonder, as I saw a crop of self poisoners every day, whether a hefty fine would not be more appropriate than empathy and false promises of help to come. This was certainly the view of the casualty department staff, who washed out the stomachs of the overdosers not so much for medical reasons, but in the vindictive hope that so unpleasant a procedure would discourage them from repeating their action (it was a vain hope). Once a young girl, well-known to the hospital for her repeated overdoses, swallowed the contents of a bottle of mild analgesic, which she assumed was harmless because it was so widely available without prescription. But she had miscalculated, blood tests showed that she had irreparably damaged her liver. It was not without a certain exultation that she was informed of her unavoidable and imminent death (she was still conscious).’
(……….)
‘What sweet revenge it was on all the patients who had tormented staff by taking overdoses.’
And then:
‘Patients often held the threat of suicide over us like the sword of Damocles. I was once called to see a girl of twenty who was in psychotherapy with a social worker. The latter was at the end of her tether because the patient, who slashed her wrists regularly, was at the window threatening to jump out unless the social worker devoted even more time to her. I pointed out to the patient that as the window was not very high up she might only break her ankle. (…..). Why not go to a window a couple of storeys higher up? Or better still, find another building to jump off, a small favour to ask.’
Interesting technique. I wonder if he used it on any of his other parasuicidal patients and whether it ever actually worked.
Make of it what you will.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Finally, I have discovered someone else who is not star struck by Theordore Dalrymple/Anthony Daniels:
Theodore Dalrymple Andre Deutsch, pounds sterling8.99, pp 150 ISBN 0 233 98898 X
Writing under a pseudonym in his weekly column in the Spectator, Theodore Dalrymple presents a picture of a lawless world. Dr Dalrymple works at a hospital, and he makes regular prison visits. His life is threatened, and within the space of a week his car is broken into for the third time in a year, his secretary’s mother is attacked, and one of his patients is robbed and beaten in two separate incidents. Responsibility for this anarchy is placed squarely on both the courts and the police, who are either stupid, lazy, or interested only in clearing their cells.
Inhabiting Dalrymple’s world are an edentulous people, unable to read (with the exception of benefits pamphlets) and sometimes called Jason, who use words like “yoof” (for youth). His patients carry knives, and they tell stories of robberies, burglaries, and vandalism. Their tattoos determine their relationship with the world and proclaim a message which is either unambiguous (“Fuck Off”; “Made in England”; a swastika) or subtle (the Old Borstalians’ blue spot on the cheek). They are a whingeing breed “maintained if not created by the welfare state and whose every word is uttered with the dying fall of complaint.” Even in prison the standard British burglar, malevolent and self righteous, lives the life of Riley, endlessly replaying the violent parts of videos.
The environment matches its inhabitants. A community centre’s garden is barren because its clients urinate on the plants. Residence in a tower block is possible only if tenants are calmed with Valium. Housing officers and social workers are the targets for attack and manipulation. One man requested a transfer to a three bedroomed flat because his existing accommodation was too small for himself and his 40 ferrets.
Felons blame either drink or drugs. Young women, blessed with many nippers (sic)—who are mostly cared for by someone else—and deserted by their violent cohabitees, become pregnant in an attempt either to force their men to return or to have another person to give them love. Overdoses and threats of self harm have an added value, causing bad debts to be cancelled and those who have been disconnected from services to be reconnected.
A selection of Dalrymple’s articles is now available in a book, and the whole could be read as an exercise in satire, with invective and wit being used to dramatise the vice inherent in contemporary urban society. Some hint as to whether or not Dalrymple is a psychiatrist can be deduced from the following. (Of a patient frequently the victim of burglary): “It was fortunate…that she was too poor to have valuable possessions”; (speaking of giving evidence in court): “It gives me great pleasure to cook the goose of some of my more obnoxious patients”; (of a man tormented by hallucinations whose origins he believed lay in an intestinal worm): “No doubt advances in parasitology will soon result in a compact disc worm.” A last example is worth a thousand words, and in it he mocks in trenchant tabloidese: “Single mother victim of bag snatcher outside social security.”
Coming from a doctor’s pen it all has a certain shock value. But there is something sinister about a physician presenting in this way people to whom he has a duty of care. It is both exploitative and unremitting in its harshness. It is a perfect paranoid position: reason surrounded by feckless scrounging, short-termism, and greed. But is it not all a fabrication that panders to those who have the responsibility to change things from being what they are but choose not to do so? And do his patients know what he thinks of them?—PAUL BOWDEN, consultant forensic psychiatrist, Maudsley Hospital, London
So Sick of Drowning 