The Schizophrenia Commission Strikes Back!

Last year Rethink Mental Illness commissioned a report into care for people with Schizophrenia. In it they attack the appalling care for people in hospital, calling it 'catastrophic'. They say that not enough is done to provide calm, safe environments and the wards are mostly secure wards to prevent patients hurting others. Rethink believes and the commissioners from this report, that this is wrong. That most patients don't hurt others and those that do are more driven by drug and alcohol abuse than mental ill health. They say that the standard of care is poor, too focused on medication, too focused on locking people up and patients need more early intervention services and more access to psychological therapies. This is one of the most damning indictments of health services for many years.

I welcome this report, although I have only read a summary. What also stands out for me is that it sits at the very top of the stories on the BBC News website and Paul Jenkins was interviewed on the BBC morning show, talking about schizophrenia. Usually broadcasters and news organisation steer clear of the subject. If you feel up to it, go and find the report, read it and link it up to your Twitter accounts, Facebook etc, and get this report spread as far across the community as you can. Something has to be done about the care we receive. For far too long the NHS has been building lock up wards, while at the same time focusing exclusively on medication. When medication fails patients and become ill they're locked away until the doctors have finished with them. Many patients then leave hospital on huge doses of medication, that patients find hard to come off. This in turn leads to physical health problems. The Schizophrenia Commission recommends more focus on calm environments and alternatives to medication.

Consultation. What Consultation?

When the governments Office for Disability Issues, said they were going to consult on the UN Declaration of Human Right for People with Disabilities, you would think they would take in a wide range of opinions from lots of different people. Despite the fact that what is contained in the declaration, its basically a get out of hospital free card for mentally ill people, the ODI consulted one mental health charity. One. On the list at the back of their report, are about fifty organisations, almost all of which are charities and groups, for physically and mentally disabled and yet this UN Declaration doesn't really apply to physically disabled as much as it does to the mentally ill. So I wrote to every Mental Health NHS Trust in England and Wales, asking them whether they'd heard of the UN Declaration, whether the ODI had told them about it and what they did in response to it. All of them, (all 54), said they had not been told and had never heard of it. Shocking stuff. This is the greatest breakthrough in mental health ever. It compares easily with the Civil Rights movement and the suffragettes movement. The mentally ill have been locked up and forced to take meds that damage their mental and physical health for far too long. And the papers aren't interested either. We need to mobilise to get this UN Declaration implemented properly. Please download the manifesto and tell others about it, because contained within it is a starting point for full implementation. I don't pretend to be a lawyer, but this is what I came up with when I tasked myself with coming up with a plan.

Another Poor Soul

I found out a couple of days ago that a friend of mine has died aged 32. I don't know the cause of her death, but she has had more than one serious attempt at suicide in the past, one of which left her in a wheel chair. She leaves behind a sister and a young lad. This brings the total suicides of people from the mental health system that I have known personally, to 19. It isn't healthy to keep a tally, but given the sorry state of treatment and the general understanding of illness, I think its important to remember every one of them. She suffered from severe depression.

Milliband Strides Out for Mental Health

I have written to Ed Milliband several times, even posting him a copy of the Mental Health Manifesto, and this week he will make a speech, saying that mental health in the UK needs to be improved in terms of access to a full range of therapies, (referring mainly to talking therapies), and comparing stigmatisation of the mentally ill, to racism and sexism. He says that "Just as we joined the fight against racism, against sexism and against homophobia, so we should join the fight against this form of intolerance." He goes on to say that "There are so many people in Britain today who could be treated but who are intimidated from seeking help." By intitimdated I'm guessing that he means people with depression who are too aware of other peoples attitudes. Colleagues, family and so on. I don't think he means people with ongoing severe mental illness who are too scared of being sectioned to tell their mental health team that they're not feeling well? Good for Mr Milliband though.

In other news a survey of mentally unwell young people has surprised me, and must have surpried others. The headline figure said that 90% of young people with a mental illness had suffered some form of discrimination. Unfortunately I cannot locate the source of this research. I saw a news story on the TV. But if I find it I will let you know...

The Vast and Gruesome Clutch of Our Law

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Coffee and Escitalopram!

For years I have struggled with motivation and concentration and I still do. It would take me three weeks to wash up, three months to hoover. It took me five years to finish my first book. I would struggle to get into town to do shopping and struggle back. I would end up spending the day playing cards on my computer and checking emails, mostly achieving nothing. I might do ten minutes work a day if that. I have suffered from depression for many years, and I put my lack of motivation down to not feeling like I had a future, or that I wanted one. But recently I have tried a cocktail of strong coffee and a low dose of the anti-depressant Escitalopram. I have tried anti-depressants before, and believe me I don't have much faith in them. Most of them are effective for about three months and then their efficacy drops off a cliff. So far I have taken it (when I remember) for about six weeks. I have also increased my caffeine intake. This combination seems to be working, but not always. I am a little more active and I am writing again, after a period of being totally blocked. I just didn't want to write. I felt silly, like I wasn't good enough. I plan to take Escitalopram for three months and see what happens. Not that I am recommending drinking loads of coffee and taking anti-depressants as a solution to chronic laziness, driven by desperately bad depression, but hay, what works, works. The trouble is my blood sugar levels have shot up, as a result of taking this drug. So as soon as I solve one problem I have effectively created another, potentially as serious as the one I was trying to solve. Prolong my life, by feeling happier, but shortened it via diabetes. I can't win.

Read my books! http://www.vagabond-unlimited.co.uk

The Vast and Gruesome Clutch of Our Law: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0954969189/

Super Red: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0954969170/

Has The Science Been Lost in Big Pharma?

Over the last year I wrote to several leading science journalists and scientists, one of whom was lamenting the loss of two major drug companies to neuroscience. They didn't want to develop drugs for the brain any more, and while I sighed with relief, others were calling it a tragic loss to brain medicine. In my letters I explained the following: 1) We don't yet fully understand the normal brain and how it functions. 2) We don't yet know what causes schizophrenia and 3) we prescribe expensive and risky drugs, based on what exactly? The science just isn't there to justify millions of presciptions, to millions of people across dozens of different drugs. But not only are we taking them in large quatities, we are also forced or intimidated by the health authorities to take them.

One of the people I wrote to was Ben Goldacre, a journalist and author, who has recently published his new book, Bad Pharma, published by The Fourth Estate. Even though he never replied to me, I read an excerpt from his book on the Guardian website and in it he describes an industry that has lost all sense of scientific rigour, lies to and manipulates doctors, withholds vital data, and issues drugs that are not only completely useless, but also cause unpleasant and dangerous side effects. The drug companies are not held to account by the regulators and they are deliberately using ineffective regulations to push drugs that have very iffy efficacy data. Goldacre says that 'Because researchers are free to bury any result they please, patients are exposed to harm on a staggering scale throughout the whole of medicine. Doctors can have no idea about the true effects of the treatments they give.' This admission is just unbelievable. The trouble is though, governments and politicians cannot move against big pharma to sort this out, because of lobbyists, who will hound and buy off politicians, with offers to fund campaigns. In America if the government moved to tighten regulations, the right would block any major restrictions against dodgy drugs. The reason for this is that because a lot of drugs are implicated in this scandal, the pharmaceutical industry would be threatened with almost total collaspe. Goldacre claims that so many drugs are ineffective, with masses of withheld data, held back by drug companies, that every type of illness would be effected, from anti-depressives to statins.

Also, Goldacre explains about one scientific journal who published an article about the scandal. The journal Jama, explained the situation and the regulator in Denmark, Lif, went on the offensive and attempted to refer the authors to the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty. They presented zero scientific evidence that the authors had been dishonest, but the investigation was conducted any way, eventually being dropped after a couple of months. This is what doctors can expect who don't tow the line of a system that has lost all perspective about scientific rigour in medicine. And in the meantime we all suffer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/21/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-goldacre