‘Medical pretenders’

Dec 31 2007 by Andrew Flynn, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

THE tragic deaths of Roger and Sue Goswell have resulted once again in the finger being pointed squarely at the mental health profession for letting down a family. Roger Goswell, released from a psychiatric hospital only days earlier, is suspected of battering his wife to death before driving his car into a tree, resulting in his death.

A Department of Health report from December 2006 entitled Avoidable Deaths was, perhaps unintentionally, critical of the psychiatric profession. That criticism appears to be pertinent again in this case.

The report detailed how 29% of patients who committed homicide had seen mental health services in the previous week. The report also highlighted that 49% of those who committed suicide had been in contact with services in the previous week, and 19% in the previous 24 hours.

It doesn’t take much to work out that something is going desperately wrong with mental health services for such disastrous outcomes to be occurring. Significantly, these homicides and suicides occurred after the person had been to see the mental health services. In other words, after they had seen the psychiatrist.

Mental health “experts” have justified these appalling figures by saying “the patients weren’t taking their medication,” and that mental health staff have become “desensitised to the risks they are dealing with.”

Statistics and facts show it is the psychiatric drugs themselves that can create the very violence or mental incompetence they were prescribed to treat. “Wasn’t taking his medication” as the cause of senseless violent acts, is the falsehood perpetrated by the vested interests of the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatrists alike.

In the last five years, the government has invested £22.2bn in adult mental health services, only to be presented with a report that demonstrates psychiatry is a profession that has to continually advertise its failures to obtain more government appropriations.

According to psychiatric thinking, the solution for everything from the most minor to most severe personal problem is strictly limited to diagnosing symptoms, assigning a mental illness label and designating a restrictive, generally coercive and costly range of treatments.

This unilateral approach leads only to upwardly spiralling mental illness statistics, continuously escalating funding demands, and away from cures.

Fortunately many non-psychiatric humane and workable practices exist in the quest for the achievement and recovery of mental health, even for the most severely disturbed individuals. While psychiatry strenuously denies it, non-psychiatric professionals administer much knowledgeable and skilful help.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights has every respect for medicine practised as medicine, in a spirit of honest ethical endeavour, and with due consideration to primacy of the patient’s needs and health. However, it has every argument with the seduction and contamination of medicine by medical pretenders whose abject failures, as demonstrated in the Department of Health report, threaten to pervert not only the position, honour, humanity and value of medicine, but to wreck the lives of millions of patients who simply came to medicine for help.

Brian Daniels

National Spokesman, Citizens Commission on Human Rights (United Kingdom)