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TRUST heals – distrust kills
This website is being re-constructed – please bear with us for a while.
I am participating in a debate at the Hay-on-Wye festival, as follows.
http://www.howthelightgetsin.org/tickets/all-sessions/
Event [99] Sunday 3 June 2012 12:00pm Philosophy Session Drugged Up John Cutting, Richard Bentall, Bob Johnson. Ritula Shah chairs. Medicating mental illness has never been more prevalent or more controversial. Is it too risky to abandon drugs in favour of softer treatments? Or is sanity itself the illusion? Award-winning psychiatric consultant and leading authority on schizophrenia, John Cutting, debates with clinical psychologist Richard Bentall, and outspoken psychiatrist Bob Johnson. Earlybird price: £5.00
Advance price: £7.00
Full-price: £9.00
My response is as follows =
“The Psychiatric Emperor has no clothes, s/he dumped them in 1978, but who dares tell the doctor s/he’s mistaken?”
An Open Manifesto For Reforming Psychiatry
1. A healthy mind is standard issue – we expect every child, first to walk, then to talk – the one needs healthy legs, the other a healthy mind – QED.
2. Intent is vital both for Sanity and for The Law – but intent (and its cousin ‘consent’) have been arbitrarily and indeed intentionally anathematised by psychiatrists since 1978 (DSM-III).
3. Dopamine doesn’t cause psychosis [1]. So ‘anti-psychotic’ drugs are really just ‘anti- dopamines’. Are they being mis-sold? Is re-labelling them required, legally? Detoxification needs careful timing.
4. Brains shrunk by 10% [2]. Giving anti-dopamines is like giving anti-insulin – they cannot avoid damaging all brain tissue, an irresponsible medical practice. (Recoveries happen).
5. Dopamines disable recovery – which a long term 15-year study [3] (& others) proves. Dismal outlook, unacceptable nerve tissue damage – the medical case against anti-dopamines is irrefutable.
6. All psychiatric drugs work by ‘intoxication’ [4] – none (including Ritalin) is better than alcohol. We all need calming down from time to time – let’s admit it, and handle transparently and responsibly.
7. Doctors are addicted to giving drugs – time to wean them. Ignoring robust and repeatable medical evidence is unethical. I wonder which nation will be the first to haul its doctors back to legality.
8. Trauma festers – a child reacts by ‘not-thinking’, by cognitive fog, by ‘irrationality’, which persists. The remedy is first to say, and then believe: “I had a lousy childhood, but it doesn’t matter now.”
9. Every psychosis is ‘bottled rage from bottled pain’ – unbottle both using the Healing Hand Of Kindness [5], plus insight. Sanity is sorting out a pain-free pathway for intent.
10. Our one and only evolutionary advantage as bipeds – would be if we were all born ‘Lovable, Sociable and Non-Violent’ – are we? Can ‘Truth, Trust and Consent’ stop us becoming extinct? [6]
Refs:[1]Moncrieff, Harv Rev Psychiatry 2009,17:214-225; [2]Jackson. ISBN 978-1438972312; [3]Harrow. J Nerv Ment Dis 2007;195: 406–414;[4]Moncrieff ISBN 978-0230574328 p 244;[5]Whitaker ISBN 978-0465020140;[6]Johnson ISBN 978-0955198502
Dr Bob Johnson Consultant Psychiatrist www.DrBobJohnson.org
Wednesday, 9 May 2012
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Psychiatry since 1980 has lost its way. For 40 years it has been marching resolutely in the wrong direction, leaving the comforting shores of Therapeutic Communities, in which I was thankfully trained, for the wilder reaches of an imaginary micro-neurological mire.
Sadly, the James Nayler Foundation which was founded in 1997, has run into funding problems – our workload exceeded the capacities of our unpaid staff, so this Charity is currently in the process of closing.
HOWEVER, we still hope to be able to keep the same spirit alive, by running workshops, establishing training programmes, and helping sufferers from emotional distress in the best wasy we can manage. Our aim still is to establish ‘fear free zones’ where emotional distress melts away.
I’m on Twitter => http://twitter.com/BobTrustConsent
VIDEO restored on http://tinyurl.com/PDvid