A Psychiatrist with Questions...
Just a British psychiatrist trying to make sense of what they've been doing to people for years now. Was any of it ever right?
The idea to start this substack came to me like a bolt out of the blue from a good friend. Another ethical doctor who I know and trust. As soon as the words came out of their mouth I could feel instant excitement and an all-encompassing knowing that this is something I must do. You see the thing is that I became a doctor because I genuinely thought I would be able to help people, but after working as a consultant psychiatrist for many years I am now at a stage where I am questioning whether it is even possible to be an ethical doctor within the national healthcare system and is there even such a thing as an ethical psychiatrist?
The nonsense and lies of 2020 and 2021 opened my eyes to the extent of the corruption of medical education, the NHS, the Royal Colleges and the General Medical Council. All of them seem to sadly be in bed with the big corporations such as Big Pharma and Big Food. The GMC, after all, invests huge amounts of money paid by doctors in the form of professional fees, into the pharmaceutical industry and the industrial food industry. Patients in hospital are fed “food” that makes them sicker and more dependent on the system, all the while surrounded by artificial lighting and an environment that makes them worse. Chances are that if you are admitted to hospital you won’t just come out the other side on 1 medication, but often 3,4 or 5! A drug to counteract the side-effects of another drug, then another one for the second drug that causes more side-effects, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile there is no real education or interest in trying to get people better. People are told that their lifestyles don’t matter. We are simply papering over the cracks with drugs that suppress symptoms, because every diagnosis has a drug protocol attached to it. And guess what? See several different psychiatrists and chances are you’ll come away with different diagnoses! And the sad reality is that in psychiatry, often these drugs can make the longer-term outcomes for patients worse. Some of the drugs can even cause the same psychiatric symptoms or worse. I’ve seen plenty of people develop OCD on Clozapine and then there are the withdrawal symptoms. More on that another time…
If you stop and think for a minute, isn’t that just a perfect business model for Pharma? Get people on medications that lead to adaptations in their body, resistance over time to the therapeutic effects of drugs, so that clinicians need to increase the dose repeatedly to suppress the symptoms and eventually the person is deemed “treatment-resistant,” so they end up on multiple drugs, not just one or two! The doctors are well trained to only make a “diagnosis” in order to prescribe more pills. They don’t know anything about trying to treat the underlying cause of the symptoms because they were never trained to! See a psychiatrist and you’re pretty much guaranteed that medication is the answer. Meanwhile the drugs are making people fat, sedated and increasing their risk for all sorts of chronic physical health conditions.
I could go on for many more pages but I’ll refrain – save it for another post.
I hope for this substack to give some insights into modern-day psychiatry and the contradictions therein. I have more than a few amusing anecdotes that I’ll share and I have chosen to remain anonymous as we all know that the GMC can’t stand ethical doctors – they want doctors prescribing more and more drugs to keep their Pharma sponsors happy. They will outright persecute high-profile doctors who whistle blow on the system in order to make an example of them, discourage other doctors from coming forward and a reasonable question might be whether their raison d’etre is for doctors to commit suicide, based on how they conduct their investigations and their tendency to contact doctors on Friday afternoons and around the time of notable holidays. Some of the figures in relation to deaths of doctors under active investigation are shocking. I have seen first-hand how abusive and demeaning their communication and interaction with doctors is, and the underhand tactics they will use to intimidate and persecute doctors, while turning a blind-eye to the truly unethical doctors (usually those who prescribe lots of drugs and in large amounts). As a psychiatrist you can prescribe eye-watering large doses of drugs to the extent someone ends up in hospital in intensive care, yet the NHS and the GMC won’t be in the slight bit interested.
Some of the practice that goes on in the NHS is shocking, and my experience has been that health boards aren’t interested in dealing with problem clinicians. They just move them around or turn a blind eye. The NHS is entirely mismanaged and an unwieldy, inefficient and out-of-date monstrosity of a “healthcare” system. Don’t expect to get evidence-based treatment as it takes decades for research to filter through and management is so poor that most staff are burnt out, dissatisfied and simply going through the motions to get their pay check at the end of the month.
More to come on all of this…I know this was a serious one as I had to get some of it off my chest – but there will be some light-hearted anecdotes in future - that I promise.
Thank you for this and please keep writing and shine the light
Not me, but my wife was on SSRIs for 25 years.
Broke it with no help from the medical profession whatsoever. Not ONCE in that 25 years was her prescription reviewed.
Four years ago we both went carnivore (that's another story); within a year or less my wife had felt such a mood uplift that she was now clearly recognising the numbing effect of her anti-depressant. She got them to prescribe a liquid form, and then proceeded to titrate down, a half at a time, until she felt able to come off them. Last couple of doses the hardest, as one would expect. Now been free of them for the best part of 2 years.
The "another story".
In 2017 my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. V poor treatment at the RUH in Bath, who were negligent in the extreme. Annual scan after (cancer had spread to her right side lymph nodes - all removed or irradiated) cleared. Dec 2020 she skipped it as she felt great, and hospitals were hell during Covid. Despite being empty... Dec 2021, one year after we went carnivore, she was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. 6 to 9 months to live. Refused chemo as it was SO horrible first time round. Two and a half years on, 6 monthly scans, NO change in lesions, number or presentation.
Her oncologist astounded. But go to YouTube and you will find my wife is by no means alone in this, and many many have found huge health improvements, and been able to stop long term medication for whatever,
Consider this. Ignoring our predecessors, Homo sapiens has bene around c250k years. Until 6000 years ago, meat, with seasonal fruit and berries, the occasional honey and eggs was our staple diet. We are completely adjusted to a meat only diet. It our our species-adapted diet.
Even the BBC, which I would suggest is crawling with Veggies and self-harming Vegans agrees!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67917294
"It also discovered that humans' ability to digest milk and other dairy products and survive on a vegetable-heavy diet only emerged about 6,000 years ago. Before that, they were meat-eaters."