After reading this, I threw something away and noticed a finished box of Sertraline (my landlady’s) in the bin.
I don’t think it’s easy to be seen by a psychiatrist in the UK unless a serious crime or episode occurs, but it’s very easy to get drugs like Sertraline from a standard GP (once you get an appointment), and then polypharmacy after that- essentially the GPs doing the work for the psychiatrists. I imagine UK psychiatrists maybe a bit more nuanced at first but then eventually revert to drugs.
However, I do think there is something in what Szasz said as I read him, about a kind of folie a deux between doctor/patient where both know the patient is not ill but expect a treatment outcome. Hence the doctor/psychiatrist prescribe the drugs as they want to make the “patient” better, and the patient accepts as they want to feel a remedy has been issued (and I think some may also want drugs just to feel something different) as of course there is no time for a full assessment.
Although the true modern day spirit of psychiatry is still vey much alive-maybe Aftab doesn't look hard enough:
In a recent interview, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Tara Stewart claimed that it is possible to communicate with the dead, and favoured listeners with this insight:
“I’ve been part of teams that have locked people up and had them injected with stuff against their will” (on YouTube-the rest of the video is horseshit about how she thinks she can talk to dead people).
85% of antidepressants in Australia are started by GPs. In the main, drug reps don't bother seeing psychiatrists bc that's not where the money is.
Szasz was explicit that it's pretence on both sides. I don't agree. Patients are not making up their distress and the psychiatrist believes s/he has the cure. They're just wrong, that's all, stupid and too lazy to look into it but not duplicitous. Well, mostly not.
I read him as patients know they are not ill in the traditional sense (they are still distressed) and the GP/psychiatrist also knows this but the show must go on as in the medication must be prescribed to cure the patient to complete the exchange-hence a kind of shared charade.
Not so these days, they all believe it's biological because of the flood of propaganda. Not sure about the UK but in this country, if you go to a busy public toilet like an airport or train station, you will be assailed by posters saying "Are you feeling low? See your doctor." Who will prescribe drugs. They don't say "get a hobby" or "start exercising." You can't even have a piss in peace these days without the drug companies trying to worm into your head.
I haven't seen that level of advertising in the UK, but then I don't see much of the UK.
There is enough of it on the internet anyway and my feeling is that the meaningless neologism neurodiversity (which the UK loves, along with "being on the spectrum") is enough to convince people that the drugs help their condition and thus prescription through GPs certainly won't decrease.
I don't know-presumably on the black market somewhere, but you can get it from the GP easily enough.
Don't know suicide rates either (and how accurate any numbers would be) but I think others have documented worldwide they are increasing but don't quote me on that.
Actually quick check on ONS shows in England they have gone down since 1981 but increased in Wales over same time period.
Suicide rates are generally rising everywhere, recently hit a new peak in the US and in Australia. Dr Google says this just now:
"More than 6,000 people die by suicide annually in the UK, with the overall rate for England and Wales at 11.4 deaths per \(100,000\) people, marking the highest figures recorded since 1999. Men account for approximately \(74\%\) of all suicide deaths, making the male suicide rate more than three times higher than the female rate. " That's what I would expect. Scottish figures are kept separately but we Scots generally don't resort to suicide, we drive other people to it.
Possibly it all started with instant coffee. Then everyone wanted things immediately. Think, when heating up a meal in a microwave: looking at one’s lunch and bemoaning hunger and what seems a lifetime for 3 minutes to pass.
The public have their role too to play in this. Well and unwell alike. Time takes time. Understanding one’s anxiety and its roots takes time and billable hours.
The very marketing ploy, antidepressant medication is phoney, a misnomer. They are SSRIs nothing like antibiotics - penicillin one of the greatest breakthroughs in medicine. Thank you for your posts, they are thoughtful and well researched it is evident you took the time.
is a lucid commentary on one of the main unresolved issues facing mainstream psychiatry.
If we don't have precise definitions for the conditions that are being treated, how is it possible to have an argument about the best methods for treatment.
Kenneth Kendler has written numerous articles on the topic of nosology, so its not as though mainstream thinkers aren't aware of the problem. I think he describes it as a crisis. The solutions he posits are interesting, but hardly reassuring.
I seem to recall a video of Geoffery Lieberman speaking about his book "Shrinks - the history of psychiatry"; he seems to have co-authored so many books and papers he must write them in his sleep. When asked for his definition of mental illness, after circling the topic for a few moments he replied along the lines " you'll know it when you see it".
Not good enough !!
I used hypnosis as a practicing dentist for pain control, relaxation and management of anxiety for decades. I did my training in the 80's with psychologists and medicos including some psychiatrists. Freud was on the way out, but we utilised altered states of "consciousness" as a framework for our work. (I'm a big fan of Milton Erickson btw)
Psychotropics induce altered states, but subdued and numb is a world apart from calm and attentive. Because someone is no longer shouting at phantoms in the street, because they are medicated, does not mean that they have full control of their faculties, any more than someone inebriated by alcohol. Big mistake.
Re the NT diphtheria outbreak... The ABC led with the headline that it was one of Australia's worst diphtheria outbreaks... Seriously??? ONE person (adult) died, and it's considered a major disaster! I would not bother with vaccination against a disease that at its worst, killed one person in Australia a year. How many people do you think have died by suicide here in that time? Literally thousands. Dementia... Tens of thousands. Diphtheria... One. Most of the diphtheria is cutaneous anyway, which isn't going to do anything other than infect sores.
And Niall doesn't seem to have realised that most of the people diagnosed with diphtheria were vaccinated! So much for vaccination being a failsafe.
What Niall especially didn't mention, is that all the cases are in Aboriginal people, in remote areas, riddled with poverty, crime, crowded crappy housing, poor nutrition... It's a disease of poverty. That he participates in the delusion that vaccination cures the ills of poverty... Instead of providing decent housing, affordable nutritious food, jobs... No, Niall's solution is to feather the nest of big pharma by promoting mass vaccines.
(We have vaccines in Australia that are specifically for Aboriginal people, as if they have defective genes... No, it's yet more medicalisation of poverty. Sheesh.)
Diphtheria used to be common until immunisation prevented it. The cases in WA and NT are among inadequately immunised people. Nurses in remote clinics do their best but people move around, don't come back etc. Without immunisation, it would be the same scourge it used to be.
I went to the Kimberley in WA in 1987, the first truly isolated psychiatrist in the country and the most isolated in world, no staff or facilities, just a 4WD. I have been in dozens of remote communities and outstations, seen everything. For most of them there simply is no work, e.g. Balgo and Mulan on edge of Tanami, Kalumburu. Cost of food and housing is heavily subsidised but still much more than cities. Cost of building in Darwin in 1994 was $1160 psqm; in Hillarys, upmarket beachside suburb in Perth same year, for expensive housing, $390psqm. Remote housing costs 5-6x as much as down south. Housing in remote settlements is often damaged in grog fueled brawls, very difficult to repair. In wet season, often cut off due to flooding so fresh food hard to get.
"That he participates in the delusion that vaccination cures the ills of poverty..."
I didn't say or imply anything like that. You can treat your facts with imagination but you can't imagine your own facts. Health is fundamental to survival, one vital point is to stop contagious diseases spreading. Aboriginal people are given extra benefits as they are at risk, same as the young, elderly or immunocompromised.
As the patents on meds for polio tetanus etc expire big pharma cant cash in like they were used to.
So they create new hyper modern alternatives while using CRISPR tech.
Then patent it, phase out the known working cure. Just like they did with flu, call it covid, CRISPR up a new set of patented pfizer moderna johnson products against thd superflu.
And tell people not to use the known working cure. Even forbid the use of it..
If they can do this with flu, these greedy zionist pharma clowns will do it with anything.
I don't know much about Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats apart from what it stands for which I just found out.
But as mentioned last week, I think the Covid vaccine had a valid mechanism of action but the way it was tested, the ignored side effects, and insistence that everyone needs to take it caused unnecessary deaths and a different kind of coercion but coercion all the same.
The problem is that they forbid to use existing meds.
If you had the flu during covid, then on paper you became a covid patient.
But you would not have access to flu meds. You only would receive the EXPERIMENTAL 'covid treatment'. AS THAT was the money flow.
And as it was experimental it makes it worse to not have access to the normal known meds.
All because of money...
Well that was covid... but now it looks like every med that has an expired patent will receive a replacement with a brand new gen-tech designer med. Made with CRISPR like technology.
In order to get the diagnosis of Covid, you had to test positive for it. Clinically, the Covid illness was different from 'flu, easy to tell.
There are over 16,000 known viruses. We have moved beyond bacterial epidemics such as plague, cholera, typhoid etc, mainly because of improved diet, sanitation and rubbish collection, water supplies, housing, etc., i.e. not due to medical advances but to routine social advances which everybody in teh world could enjoy if we weren't spending so much money and time and effort on wars. Now, due to the exploding human population and matters such as factory farming, our biggest danger is the zoonoses, i.e. viruses jumping from animals to humans.. This includes the SARS viruses, etc. Virologists have been warning for 25 years about this, after SARS and ME variants, they warned louder, and were ignored. So Covid arrived and nobody was ready. Coronaviruses are not of the influenza type, can't be converted one to the other like an old Mini 850 can't be converted to a new electric Ferrari.
Covid is like the flu a 'corona virus' and at least over here (netherlands) all corona viruses went into the corona stats. With covid the gov and the one who diagnosed you could collect money from the EU.
Its tricky but thats how it seemed to work. And how the money flowed.
It was all about getting rich Quick and this also seems to be the case with other cures based on modern gen-tech meds. All about new patents, and phasing out the meds with expired patents.
By coincidence, yesterday I had my Covid booster and my flu booster, one each arm, today quite sore. As far as I know, they are distinct antigens with no cross-reacting properties. Somebody can ask Dr Google if that's correct.
I was taught by the Head of ED psychiatry at the satellite hospital here (a psychiatrist) that there's mania and psychosis, but that pretty much everything else is "life difficulties" and he couldn't differentiate between situational and personality factors and "clinical depression".
After reading this, I threw something away and noticed a finished box of Sertraline (my landlady’s) in the bin.
I don’t think it’s easy to be seen by a psychiatrist in the UK unless a serious crime or episode occurs, but it’s very easy to get drugs like Sertraline from a standard GP (once you get an appointment), and then polypharmacy after that- essentially the GPs doing the work for the psychiatrists. I imagine UK psychiatrists maybe a bit more nuanced at first but then eventually revert to drugs.
However, I do think there is something in what Szasz said as I read him, about a kind of folie a deux between doctor/patient where both know the patient is not ill but expect a treatment outcome. Hence the doctor/psychiatrist prescribe the drugs as they want to make the “patient” better, and the patient accepts as they want to feel a remedy has been issued (and I think some may also want drugs just to feel something different) as of course there is no time for a full assessment.
Although the true modern day spirit of psychiatry is still vey much alive-maybe Aftab doesn't look hard enough:
In a recent interview, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Tara Stewart claimed that it is possible to communicate with the dead, and favoured listeners with this insight:
“I’ve been part of teams that have locked people up and had them injected with stuff against their will” (on YouTube-the rest of the video is horseshit about how she thinks she can talk to dead people).
85% of antidepressants in Australia are started by GPs. In the main, drug reps don't bother seeing psychiatrists bc that's not where the money is.
Szasz was explicit that it's pretence on both sides. I don't agree. Patients are not making up their distress and the psychiatrist believes s/he has the cure. They're just wrong, that's all, stupid and too lazy to look into it but not duplicitous. Well, mostly not.
I read him as patients know they are not ill in the traditional sense (they are still distressed) and the GP/psychiatrist also knows this but the show must go on as in the medication must be prescribed to cure the patient to complete the exchange-hence a kind of shared charade.
Not so these days, they all believe it's biological because of the flood of propaganda. Not sure about the UK but in this country, if you go to a busy public toilet like an airport or train station, you will be assailed by posters saying "Are you feeling low? See your doctor." Who will prescribe drugs. They don't say "get a hobby" or "start exercising." You can't even have a piss in peace these days without the drug companies trying to worm into your head.
I haven't seen that level of advertising in the UK, but then I don't see much of the UK.
There is enough of it on the internet anyway and my feeling is that the meaningless neologism neurodiversity (which the UK loves, along with "being on the spectrum") is enough to convince people that the drugs help their condition and thus prescription through GPs certainly won't decrease.
Yikes! Can you buy Sertraline in the without prescription?
How many suicides are there in the Uk each year or on average per day?
I don't know-presumably on the black market somewhere, but you can get it from the GP easily enough.
Don't know suicide rates either (and how accurate any numbers would be) but I think others have documented worldwide they are increasing but don't quote me on that.
Actually quick check on ONS shows in England they have gone down since 1981 but increased in Wales over same time period.
Suicide rates are generally rising everywhere, recently hit a new peak in the US and in Australia. Dr Google says this just now:
"More than 6,000 people die by suicide annually in the UK, with the overall rate for England and Wales at 11.4 deaths per \(100,000\) people, marking the highest figures recorded since 1999. Men account for approximately \(74\%\) of all suicide deaths, making the male suicide rate more than three times higher than the female rate. " That's what I would expect. Scottish figures are kept separately but we Scots generally don't resort to suicide, we drive other people to it.
Similar to what ONS said but still a significant decrease in England from 1981 if their figures are correct:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2024registrations#suicides-registered-in-england-and-wales
Possibly it all started with instant coffee. Then everyone wanted things immediately. Think, when heating up a meal in a microwave: looking at one’s lunch and bemoaning hunger and what seems a lifetime for 3 minutes to pass.
The public have their role too to play in this. Well and unwell alike. Time takes time. Understanding one’s anxiety and its roots takes time and billable hours.
The very marketing ploy, antidepressant medication is phoney, a misnomer. They are SSRIs nothing like antibiotics - penicillin one of the greatest breakthroughs in medicine. Thank you for your posts, they are thoughtful and well researched it is evident you took the time.
This article :
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17522439.2026.2613935?__cf_chl_tk=8WxALD_cf0wsb5UM5_MeAohtr9muLUH0eIsj_Ig29Uo-1779971282-1.0.1.1-zvv2Tf3F3AAnkH5xm0yGfeQ71xckpSLEY.3qycIDxzo
is a lucid commentary on one of the main unresolved issues facing mainstream psychiatry.
If we don't have precise definitions for the conditions that are being treated, how is it possible to have an argument about the best methods for treatment.
Kenneth Kendler has written numerous articles on the topic of nosology, so its not as though mainstream thinkers aren't aware of the problem. I think he describes it as a crisis. The solutions he posits are interesting, but hardly reassuring.
I seem to recall a video of Geoffery Lieberman speaking about his book "Shrinks - the history of psychiatry"; he seems to have co-authored so many books and papers he must write them in his sleep. When asked for his definition of mental illness, after circling the topic for a few moments he replied along the lines " you'll know it when you see it".
Not good enough !!
I used hypnosis as a practicing dentist for pain control, relaxation and management of anxiety for decades. I did my training in the 80's with psychologists and medicos including some psychiatrists. Freud was on the way out, but we utilised altered states of "consciousness" as a framework for our work. (I'm a big fan of Milton Erickson btw)
Psychotropics induce altered states, but subdued and numb is a world apart from calm and attentive. Because someone is no longer shouting at phantoms in the street, because they are medicated, does not mean that they have full control of their faculties, any more than someone inebriated by alcohol. Big mistake.
With thanks, will check it. And Lieberman had the brains of a squid
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17522439.2026.2613935
This is the one I meant to post.
Sorry .
The other one was a citation
Re the NT diphtheria outbreak... The ABC led with the headline that it was one of Australia's worst diphtheria outbreaks... Seriously??? ONE person (adult) died, and it's considered a major disaster! I would not bother with vaccination against a disease that at its worst, killed one person in Australia a year. How many people do you think have died by suicide here in that time? Literally thousands. Dementia... Tens of thousands. Diphtheria... One. Most of the diphtheria is cutaneous anyway, which isn't going to do anything other than infect sores.
And Niall doesn't seem to have realised that most of the people diagnosed with diphtheria were vaccinated! So much for vaccination being a failsafe.
What Niall especially didn't mention, is that all the cases are in Aboriginal people, in remote areas, riddled with poverty, crime, crowded crappy housing, poor nutrition... It's a disease of poverty. That he participates in the delusion that vaccination cures the ills of poverty... Instead of providing decent housing, affordable nutritious food, jobs... No, Niall's solution is to feather the nest of big pharma by promoting mass vaccines.
(We have vaccines in Australia that are specifically for Aboriginal people, as if they have defective genes... No, it's yet more medicalisation of poverty. Sheesh.)
Diphtheria used to be common until immunisation prevented it. The cases in WA and NT are among inadequately immunised people. Nurses in remote clinics do their best but people move around, don't come back etc. Without immunisation, it would be the same scourge it used to be.
I went to the Kimberley in WA in 1987, the first truly isolated psychiatrist in the country and the most isolated in world, no staff or facilities, just a 4WD. I have been in dozens of remote communities and outstations, seen everything. For most of them there simply is no work, e.g. Balgo and Mulan on edge of Tanami, Kalumburu. Cost of food and housing is heavily subsidised but still much more than cities. Cost of building in Darwin in 1994 was $1160 psqm; in Hillarys, upmarket beachside suburb in Perth same year, for expensive housing, $390psqm. Remote housing costs 5-6x as much as down south. Housing in remote settlements is often damaged in grog fueled brawls, very difficult to repair. In wet season, often cut off due to flooding so fresh food hard to get.
"That he participates in the delusion that vaccination cures the ills of poverty..."
I didn't say or imply anything like that. You can treat your facts with imagination but you can't imagine your own facts. Health is fundamental to survival, one vital point is to stop contagious diseases spreading. Aboriginal people are given extra benefits as they are at risk, same as the young, elderly or immunocompromised.
The problem i see is pharma patents.
As the patents on meds for polio tetanus etc expire big pharma cant cash in like they were used to.
So they create new hyper modern alternatives while using CRISPR tech.
Then patent it, phase out the known working cure. Just like they did with flu, call it covid, CRISPR up a new set of patented pfizer moderna johnson products against thd superflu.
And tell people not to use the known working cure. Even forbid the use of it..
If they can do this with flu, these greedy zionist pharma clowns will do it with anything.
Polio, tetanus, running nosesium, hanta-porn.... anything.
I don't know much about Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats apart from what it stands for which I just found out.
But as mentioned last week, I think the Covid vaccine had a valid mechanism of action but the way it was tested, the ignored side effects, and insistence that everyone needs to take it caused unnecessary deaths and a different kind of coercion but coercion all the same.
The problem is that they forbid to use existing meds.
If you had the flu during covid, then on paper you became a covid patient.
But you would not have access to flu meds. You only would receive the EXPERIMENTAL 'covid treatment'. AS THAT was the money flow.
And as it was experimental it makes it worse to not have access to the normal known meds.
All because of money...
Well that was covid... but now it looks like every med that has an expired patent will receive a replacement with a brand new gen-tech designer med. Made with CRISPR like technology.
In order to get the diagnosis of Covid, you had to test positive for it. Clinically, the Covid illness was different from 'flu, easy to tell.
There are over 16,000 known viruses. We have moved beyond bacterial epidemics such as plague, cholera, typhoid etc, mainly because of improved diet, sanitation and rubbish collection, water supplies, housing, etc., i.e. not due to medical advances but to routine social advances which everybody in teh world could enjoy if we weren't spending so much money and time and effort on wars. Now, due to the exploding human population and matters such as factory farming, our biggest danger is the zoonoses, i.e. viruses jumping from animals to humans.. This includes the SARS viruses, etc. Virologists have been warning for 25 years about this, after SARS and ME variants, they warned louder, and were ignored. So Covid arrived and nobody was ready. Coronaviruses are not of the influenza type, can't be converted one to the other like an old Mini 850 can't be converted to a new electric Ferrari.
Covid is like the flu a 'corona virus' and at least over here (netherlands) all corona viruses went into the corona stats. With covid the gov and the one who diagnosed you could collect money from the EU.
Its tricky but thats how it seemed to work. And how the money flowed.
It was all about getting rich Quick and this also seems to be the case with other cures based on modern gen-tech meds. All about new patents, and phasing out the meds with expired patents.
By coincidence, yesterday I had my Covid booster and my flu booster, one each arm, today quite sore. As far as I know, they are distinct antigens with no cross-reacting properties. Somebody can ask Dr Google if that's correct.
Im one of those who didn't trust the science and refused to have the experimental injection.
We both live so its interesting how we both managed to survive the 'superflu' :-)
Easy to tear down a straw man...
I was taught by the Head of ED psychiatry at the satellite hospital here (a psychiatrist) that there's mania and psychosis, but that pretty much everything else is "life difficulties" and he couldn't differentiate between situational and personality factors and "clinical depression".
That's because he doesn't have a model of mental disorder, or of personality or personality disorder, etc.
Its mind boggling how many people are on anti depressants for gov. inflicted life problems.
That is not depression, that's legislation, very very bad legislation. Or dare I say evil legislation?