Suggestions
My first suggestion would be that all formal interviews with mental health patients be recorded to prevent this kind of vicious, systematic and orchestrated abuse. The recording would be the property of the patient.
Every member of staff should identity him/her self by name, their formal role and what they are there to do. They should wear labels. They should try to be friendly and human.
Nurses should not be allowed to prescribe drugs without a doctor's approval because that amounts to diagnosis. I was prescribed a highly addictive drug for no good clinical in a frighteningly irresponsible manner.
A sheet with the answers to the following Mind guidelines facts that should be known should be given to patients before a drug is prescribed.
What do I need to know before I take medication?
Before deciding to take any drug it's important to make sure you have all
the facts you need to make an informed choice. As a starting point, you
should feel confident that you can answer 'yes' to all of the following
statements.
I understand:
what the drug is
why I've been offered it
what alternative treatments are available, such as talking treatments or
local support groups
what the possible benefits and risks are, including if there is a risk I
could become dependent on it
what the possible side effects are
how, when, and how much I should take
how long my doctor expects me to take it for
how to store it safely (for example, in the fridge)
how to stop taking it safely
what different names the drug might be called
I based my letter to Dr McAree on a subset of these questions. It is my view that her reply was incompetent, deceitful and abusive.
In my opinion, bullying a patient into taking drugs which have side effects or are addictive should be a specific crime. Deceiving a patient by misdiagnosis, by for example misrepresenting their symptoms should also be a criminal offence. Mark McAllister told me that I appeared 'elated' which I most definitely wasn't. . I do not believe even he doesn't know what the word means. It is commonly used in the context of football.
A patient should be told at the start that he/she has the right to complain and be assigned an independent advocate to help them through the process if they wish to do so..
Complaints should not be handled by the managers of those involved. Especially following Mid Stafford where the managers were the problem.
A test should be applied to everyone prescribing drugs, at the minimum a declaration that they aren't receiving an income (or any form of benefits/inducement) from a pharmaceutical company. Anyone found to be receiving such benefits should be disqualified from prescribing. The pressure put on me makes it natural for me to have some suspicion. I asked head of admin Jean Still if they kept a register of doctor's interests. They don't.
Where appropriate (for example anxiety, depression), non pharmaceutical treatment should always be offered first. For example counselling, meditation, Tai Chi, mindfulness. Staff should be aware of these. Dr McAree doesn't even know what 'Tai Chi' means.
Nurses should not investigate complaints against doctors. It is clear that the ones involved simply aren't capable . It is outrageous that I was told I had a mood disorder and that Olanzapene could be used for anxiety when it is actually not indicated and the circumstances were in no way exceptional. It is possible (likely) they took advice from the doctor concerned and that is preposterous.
Managers should keep their original designation of nurse doctor etc. and not hid behind Mr, Ms Mrs. It lets patients know who they are dealing with. For example Nurse Phillips, Nurse Hernon.
There should be an end to the practice of those dealing with complaints being trained /ordered not to answer questions. It is an utterly repulsive way of managers protecting themselves. No human being should be asked to degrade themselves to below the level of a machine the way Jean Still does. A modern Bill Sykes like thug ordered to go out and do the dirty work of others. Behaving as badly as that that must be causing serious, long term mental health issue. This seems to be very common, practice in the NHS.
Useful references.
I am not qualified to have an opinion, I am sharing those of people who are.
Mindfulness for mental wellbeing
It can be easy to rush through life without stopping to notice much. Paying more attention to the present moment – to your own thoughts and feelings, and to the world around you – can improve your mental wellbeing. Some people call this awareness 'mindfulness', and you can take steps to develop it in your own life. Good mental wellbeing means feeling good about life and yourself, and being able to get on with life in the way you want.
You may think about wellbeing in terms of what you have: your income, home or car, or your job. But evidence shows that what we do and the way we think have the biggest impact on wellbeing. Becoming more aware of the present moment means noticing the sights, smells, sounds and tastes that you experience, as well as the thoughts and feelings that occur from one moment to the next.
Tai Chi May Improve Mental Health
A recent assessment of over 40 studies is giving positive results using Tai Chi for improving mental health. Tai Chi is a gentle Chinese martial art of slow meditative physical exercise designed for relaxation and balance and health. This helps combines mental concentration, slow breathing and dance-like movements to increase life force energy.
Skepticism of the medical model of psychiatry while fully acknowledging the role of drugs in serious conditions.
People should stop taking antidepressants as their benefits are exaggerated and they would be healthier in the long-term without them, a leading scientist has said.
Prof Peter Gotzsche, director of a Danish research centre said patients could stop taking millions of psychiatric drugs without coming to any harm.
He said that drugs given to patients with depression, attention deficit and dementia were responsible for the deaths of more than half a million people aged 65 and over each year in the Western world.
Writing in the BMJ, he said: "Their benefits would need to be colossal to justify this, but they are minimal."
He said trials on several drugs, including fluoxetine, better known as Prozac, had shown that after a few days, they had little impact beyond a placebo effect.
• NHS tests and drugs 'do more harm than good'
• 'Staggering' rise in prescribing of anti-depressants
Prof Gotzsche said death rates of those taking such drugs were frequently under-reported, highlighting a study by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in which he had estimated there to have been 15 times more suicides among people taking antidepressants than claimed.
In an opinion piece, he said conservative estimates from a number of trials suggested that antidepressants increased death rates by 2 per cent, while antipsychotic drugs, sometimes given to patients with dementia, and benzodiazepines, sometimes prescribed as sleeping pills, were each found to increase death rates by 1 per cent.
Ben Goldacre Bad Pharma How Medicine is Broken, and How We Can Fix It
Ben Goldacre puts the $600bn global pharmaceutical industry under the microscope. What he reveals is a fascinating, terrifying mess.
Doctors and patients need good scientific evidence to make informed decisions. But instead, companies run bad trials on their own drugs, which distort and exaggerate the benefits by design. When these trials produce unflattering results, the data is simply buried. All of this is perfectly legal. In fact, even government regulators withhold vitally important data from the people who need it most. Doctors and patient groups have stood by too, and failed to protect us. Instead, they take money and favours, in a world so fractured that medics and nurses are now educated by the drugs industry.
Saving Normal: An Insider's Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life by Allen J. Frances (born 1942) is an American psychiatrist best known for chairing the task force that produced the fourth revision of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) and for his critique of the current version, DSM-5.
The British Psychological society's extreme skepticism about the validity of
mental health diagnoses.
The British Psychological Society Response to the American Psychiatric
Association:DSM-5 Development
Diagnostic systems such as these therefore fall short of the criteria for
legitimate medical diagnoses. They certainly identify troubling or troubled
people, but do not meet the criteria for categorisation demanded for a field
of science or medicine (with a very few exceptions such as dementia.)
Scientific American The nonsense of the chemical imbalance theory.
In reality, however, depression cannot be boiled down to an excess or deficit of any particular chemical or even a suite of chemicals. “Chemical imbalance is sort of last-century thinking. It's much more complicated than that,” neuroscientist Joseph Coyle of Harvard Medical School was quoted as saying in a blog by National Public Radio's Alix Spiegel.
Indeed, it is very likely that depression stems from influences other than neurotransmitter abnormalities. Among the problems correlated with the disease are irregularities in brain structure and function, disturbances in neural circuitry, and various psychological contributions, such as life stressors. Of course, all these influences ultimately operate at the level of physiology, but understanding them requires explanations from other vantage points.
Guardian - Mindfulness as effective as pills for treating recurrent depression - study
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy may be as good as pills at stopping people relapsing after recovering from major bouts of depression, according to a study.
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) was developed from mindfulness techniques, which encourage individuals to pay more attention to the present moment, combined with cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), specifically to try to help people who have recurring depression.
The Real Suicide Data from the TADS Study Comes to Light
NIMH hid suicide risk in pediatric study
The Scandal
The TADS study has been used to justify the prescribing of Prozac-and really, by extension-other SSRIs to children and adolescents. The TADS researchers reported that the drug treatment was effective and didn't increase the risk for suicidal events, as compared to placebo. Adding CBT to medication "enhances the safety of medication," the TADS researchers wrote. All the while, the real suicide data was being hidden.
The TADS investigators weren't disclosing the number of suicide attempts, and they weren't reporting that all but one of the suicide attempts were in fluoxetine-treated youth. Instead, they made it appear that a similar number of suicidal events had been seen in the placebo group, and, at one point, even wrote that 15 in this group had attempted suicide. The real suicide data didn't appear until Vitiello's 2009 article, and even then it had to be dug out from a table, which Göran Högberg did.
The FDA Is Basically Approving Everything. Here's The Data To Prove It
Remember when the FDA rejected drugs?
We just got treated to a whole lot of drama this week as to whether Addyi, a drug to boost women’s libidos, would be approved. But based on the data, that approval was probably a foregone conclusion.
As recently as 2008, companies filing applications to sell never-before-marketed drugs, which are referred to by the FDA as “new molecular entities,” faced rejection 66% of the time. Yet so far this year the FDA has rejected only three uses for new chemical entities, and approved 25, an approval rate of 89%.
Those numbers come from a new analysis commissioned by Forbes from BioMedTracker, a division of publishing giant Informa that helps investors track events in the pharmaceutical industry. And if you dig into them, the drop is even sharper.
This is me showing understanding to IHTT staff they didn't show toward me.
Working as a mental health nurse in today's NHS drained me of compassion
When I assess that my patient is actually planning to kill herself today, I find myself sighing. I hope she hasn’t heard. I look at my home visits and decide who to cancel. I manage to get my patient to agree that she will keep herself safe until 1pm when I will be able to visit her at home. It’s only later when I am in my car and have a minute to myself that I am able to reflect that this is not the type of nurse I want to be. This is not who I am, someone who sighs and finds it inconvenient that a patient is so low they want to end their life. Where is my compassion?
By the end of my first year as a doctor, I was ready to kill myself
Doctor suicide is the medical profession’s grubby secret – but it’s unclear why some of those dedicated to preserving life silently plot their own deathsDoctor suicide is the medical profession’s grubby secret – but it’s unclear why some of those dedicated to preserving life silently plot their own deaths
By the time I neared the end of my first year as a doctor, I’d chosen the spot where I intended to kill myself. I’d bought everything I needed to do it. All my youthful enthusiasm for healing, big dreams of saving lives and of making a difference, had soured and I felt an astronomic emptiness. Made monumentally selfish by depression, I’d ceased even to care what my husband would think of me, or that my little boy would grow up without his mother.
Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry.
CEP exists to communicate evidence of the potentially harmful effects of
psychiatric drugs to the people and institutions in the UK that can make a
difference.
Excellent video made by a human being
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQZ2UeOTO3I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQZ2UeOTO3I