…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…
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.
These are the untermenshen. Avoid them at your peril:
‘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.
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:
My mother retires in a few weeks. She is leaving the chaos that is the Birmingham mental health system. For the last few years she has watched it disintegrate. She is left wondering what went wrong.
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:
‘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!
NHS psychiatrists: this is how they roll:
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mentalhealthinfo/treatments/psychiatrists.aspx
Note the emphasis on team work.
Here’s a neat little moral dilemma. You are a consultant psychiatrist working for the NHS. You repeatedly witness your colleagues perjuring themselves, declaring in court that their patients are not ill when in fact these people are ill, often seriously ill, just so they are not obliged to confront the chronic shortage of beds. Do you:
a. Let the relevant authorities know immediately.
b. Have a quiet word with your colleagues, reminding them that perjury is a criminal offence.
c. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Then wait for a couple of decades until an American publisher offers you a big, fat book deal and a cheque that miraculously unleashes your memories.
http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/paleopsych/2005-October/004376.html
There’s a reason this guy never became a brain surgeon, people: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2011/s3292495.htm
And in the rigidly hierarchical medical profession you can’t get much lower than the prison doctor. In the eyes of his colleagues he’d be subterranean.
And if the good doctor’s patients were as parasitical as he claims then what does that make him? A parasite feeding off lesser parasites?
Addendum: someone else has spotted inconsistencies in The Dalrympian Anecdote:
http://hurryupharry.org/2011/08/15/can-we-trust-theodore-dalrymple’s-anecdotes/
In Life At the Bottom Dalrymple claims that psychiatric nurses confided in him about their own violent relationships. Very touching, until you look at the way in which NHS hospitals handle violent or distressed psychiatric patients. The psychiatrist simply gives the order. It is the nurses (mainly women) who restrain and sedate the patient. My mother is a psychiatric nurse and she nearly died laughing at the very thought that any psych nurse in her right mind would turn to an NHS consultant psychiatrist for advice. They are not held in high esteem by their underlings.
This is strange. Dalrymple began writing for The Spectator in the ’80s and returned to the United Kingdom in the ’90s to take up a post as consultant psychiatrist in a Birmingham hospital. He immediately started writing his medical column. The portraits he paints of his patients are not exactly flattering. Indeed, if he is to be believed, he doesn’t encounter a single one with a genuine psychiatric illness. Most of them, according to him, have absolutely nothing wrong with them. One wonders why he didn’t switch to something more useful such as brain surgery. It does not appear that he came to view his patients with such contempt as a result of observing them over a long period but rather that he viewed them with contempt even before he embarked on his career as an NHS consultant psychiatrist. He claims that the specialism appealed to him because it would give him the opportunity to ‘plumb the depths of human folly..’. As well as giving him lots of little titbits to toss at the readership of The Spectator. He had made up his mind about them before he started treating them. He despised them and had no interest in helping them. They served only to confirm Dalrymple’s own moral superiority and, by extension, the moral superiority of the readership of The Spectator. As I said you do the math. On his psychiatric ward no one is depressed, no one is manic depressive/bipolar, no one is personality disordered, no one is schizophrenic. Indeed, at no time does the good doctor make any kind of psychiatric diagnosis or prescribe any psychiatric medication. His average day seems to consist of him telling the patients there is nothing wrong with them and refusing them medication. He is on record as saying that anti depressants do not work. Could someone please inform the pharmaceutical company of this. And the psychiatrists they wine and dine in order to persuade them to prescribe their particular brand of psychoactive medication. He is however something of a cheerleader for neuroleptics. His objection to benzodiazepines is that they ’empty the mind of all thought’. This is not true, by the way. And neuroleptics also have this effect but he does not appear to object to that. Anything to ensure the patient’s compliance, eh Doctor. And nothing does that better than a good old solid, dependable, first generation anti psychotic. Where would you be without them? You may have to actually talk to your patients. He claims that he works in a slum hospital, in a slum and his patients are, without exception, slum dwellers. Now anyone who knows anything about the NHS should know that this is not how the organisation operates.
NHS psychiatrists have as little to do with their patients as possible. They leave all that ‘grunt’ work to the staff nurses who, in turn, delegate it to the health care assistants.
My mother has encountered several cases in which psychiatrists have suddenly and unaccountably stopped prescribing medication to patients who have been on it for years. She is convinced that some of it is down to the psychiatrist’s need to go on a power trip. Of course, the people who see the consequences of this are not the psychiatrists but the nurses. The psychiatrist just tosses the hand grenade and waltzes off.
Another objection he raises is that his patients never tell him they’re unhappy but instead tell him they’re depressed. Well, Doctor, maybe this is because you’re a psychiatrist and why would someone who is merely unhappy consult a psychiatrist in the first place. Of course, it is possible that at least some of his patients have mistaken unhappiness for depression but there is a referral process in the NHS. You don’t just turn up one day and get to see a consultant psychiatrist. Someone referred these ‘unhappy’ patients to Dr Daniels and that someone was probably their Gp. If his patients are mistaken about their own state of mind, it is perfectly understandable. If my GP were to refer me to an oncologist it would be reasonable for me to at least suspect that I might be suffering from some form of cancer.
Would a practitioner of any other medical specialism get away with being so whimsical?
If treachery had a face, it would be his.
So Sick of Drowning 
