Tag: Psychiatry

Moods

lindagask1 Comment

Not everyone who gets depressed recognizes the experience of simply ‘feeling low’. The pain of emotional suffering comes in many different forms. The agony of heartache; the exhausted feeling of weariness with the world; the anguish and torment of ruminative thoughts of guilt and despair; the perception, which can develop into a terrible sensation of being beyond any feeling at all, that all of the joy has simply gone out of being alive. A sense that the world has gone from being a place where there is still a potential for happiness, to one which seems empty, hopeless or even dead.

But each day I am aware of something I call my mood. I have more time now to reflect on my life from moment to moment than when I was working. Rushing around all day meant that I was probably less acutely aware of it and yet my mood is a key part, for me, of my experience of ‘being in the world’. It’s the lens through which I see what is happening around me- and its qualities on any particular day colour, clarify or even completely distort the different ways I am able to think about myself, the world around me and what will happen in the future- just as when I was a child, the Hall of Mirrors in the fairground warped my reflection: sometimes I was amused by the altered image that was reflected back to me. Other times it horrified me.

Mood is more than simply ‘feelings’ or ‘emotions’- it’s a longer lasting state of mind and it encompasses everything you are thinking about- it can transform how you view events around you and change something which yesterday you thought was a great opportunity into tomorrow’s disaster in the making. We aren’t always aware of our mood but the people around us often are. My mood is not only the spectacles I wear but the overcoat I show to the outside world.

My mood is both me and yet not me, simultaneously. I cannot manage without my glasses. I know, rationally, when I feel down that if I could will myself in some way to change them to a different pair, the world wouldn’t look as bad as it does to me at that moment, but those are the only ones I possess. Tomorrow, or even tonight things may appear differently though them, brighter, sparkling and full of hope. My mood has never been ‘high’ –However I do have periods of irritation and agitation when I can get very angry with people around me when I don’t think they are doing what I think is the ‘right’ thing. But what I perceive as ‘right’ can also change with my mood. When I’m feeling positive even the things I find most boring can seem worth doing. At times my mood seems to be balanced on a knife edge- it can change within the space of a few hours. But then it can remain stable for months.

When something really seems to shift in my mood, it is as though some unseen being in my brain pulls a lever.  Usually this happens in response to a build up of life events (yes, social factors play a key part), and when these events are of a particular kind that holds an inherent threat to my sense of who I am (the psychological part), then my mood is much more likely to shift, and quite rapidly too. When I was working full time I could move from feeling anxious, but keeping my head above water, to quite a different state of mind, within a day. When I am there I feel quite different. I don’t only feel sad, I feel physically ‘changed’; heavy of limb, tired, unable to sleep yet also very agitated. I ruminate about things that at other times I would be able to cope with easily. I am full of fear as the negative thoughts I have about myself the world and the future come flooding back.

If I am going to manage my moods more effectively I know that I need to work harder at challenging my familiar, but hard to live up to, rules about how to live in this world that I identified in therapy. But I mustn’t beat myself about the head if I am not able to do it every time. Making another rule for living that I cannot keep is not the answer. I fantasize about being the kind of disciplined person that meditates every morning, exercises every afternoon and eats a healthy supper in the evening, doing everything that I know is ‘good’ for mental health.

I want to be able to keep the awful low periods and those hopeless suicidal thoughts at bay if I can, but if I don’t succeed I have to remind myself that, with time and care, the way I see the world usually changes once more.

The first rule we often have to challenge in life is that it is unacceptable to fail.

My memoir: The Other Side of Silence: A psychiatrists’s memoir of depression is available now.

The morals of medication

lindagask9 Comments

Is taking medication for depression the ‘easy option?’ I come across this viewpoint regularly on social media. Usually there is a suggestion alongside that therapy, which I completely agree is hard work, is somehow a purer way to recover. The right way.

The history of psychiatry is rich in references to morality. Is a person ‘mad’ or ‘bad’? Is there really something wrong in the brains of those society labels as bad? Is addiction an illness or simply a behaviour choice? Are we excusing bad behaviour by medicalising it?

Many people who consider medication for depression will find themselves wondering whether it is a ‘good’ thing to take it. When you are depressed it can be very difficult to decide what is the best thing to do, and decisions are taken not only on the basis of discussion with health professionals- moral judgments also play an important part.

  • How does taking antidepressants affect how I feel about me? Does it mean that I am weak?
  • Is it the easy option?
  • Shouldn’t I be able to sort myself out without them?
  • What will other people think- my family- my friends…will it change how they see me?

Alice Malpass and her colleagues identified two parallel journeys that the depressed person embarks on. The ‘medical’ journey goes something like this:

  • I have a duty to be well. Other people need me to be well.
  • If I recover then there won’t be any risk of being seen as ‘mentally ill’.
  • I can get back to my old self and be in charge of my life again.

I’m sure I’ve used some of these arguments in conversation with patients. Any doctor who says they haven’t is not telling the truth- but to consider these are the only things of concern about medication is inherently simplistic and paternal, and reminds me of the cartoon of a couple walking along a beach, smiling and carefree, who say they feel so good they must be in a pharma advert.

In parallel the person is perhaps also on another journey- the ‘moral’ one.

  • I feel awful because I have to ask for help.
  • I feel even worse because I need to take tablets.
  • Is this person the real, authentic me? Am I now my old self or someone else? Or am I only this person because I am on tablets?
  • Am I hooked on these now?

Damien Ridge, who has analysed many interviews with people who are depressed talks not only about the lack of legitimacy for tablets, but also for what they are being prescribed for.

  • Is ‘depression’ real?
  • Shouldn’t I just ‘pull myself together’? Isn’t that what everyone else thinks?

There is a great deal of literature on whether ‘depression’ is ‘real’ or simply no more than unhappiness. And if it isn’t real, then the treatment for it cannot be legitimate either, little better than using street drugs- as one person in Ridge’s paper calls his tablets: ‘My dirty little habit’. I’ve spent my career arguing that to use the term depression is not simply medicalising misery but giving a name to a particular experience and quality of suffering which is not just unhappiness but a deep, dark, hopeless, despair. It has many causes, and it isn’t a single ‘phenomenon’ whatever DSM tells us. But it’s a state of mind that many people with different stories share in common. I experience it too. I have asked all of these questions of myself. I have watched colleagues who work in mental health look a little embarrassed when I get out the tablets at breakfast. Perhaps I do that simply to show I am not ashamed- but I do wish I could have lived my life without them.

All of the above supposes that antidepressants do actually work. Many people think they don’t, and others think they can do harm. You can find my views on these points elsewhere on this blog. I take them myself and they keep me reasonably well, but I have friends and colleagues for whom they have not worked- the medical journey is inherently optimistic- just like the pharma ads, but in reality life is far more complicated. And they are never sufficient on their own.

If doctors, and sometimes friends and family, try and influence you to focus on the ‘medical journey’ then others will try to steer your moral journey. It is really hard to focus on what is right for you when you cannot think clearly. When you are depressed, you are already struggling with guilt and shame and sometimes that can tragically end with the decision that the world is better off without you- that this is the right thing to do.

So I would only ask those who make even subtle comparisons between the easy way to ‘block out the pain’ with meds and the hard way of suffering through therapy to think before they write. It is only human to want to alleviate pain, and sometimes the tablets are the only thing that will do it. To infer that a person needs to suffer in order to be blessed is one of the ultimate moral judgments- and can be found in most religions.

Depressed or not, clinician or service user, expert or lay person-none of us have the right to sit in judgment over others.

My memoir: The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir of Depression is available now.

 

 

 

 

Authenticity

lindagask2 Comments

Oxford dictionary: Authentic – adjective: ‘relating to or denoting an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive, and responsible mode of human life’.

My 60th birthday has come and gone. My body is beginning to fall apart but I still feel 16 inside. Life is a ‘work in progress’, or at least that is how it has always seemed for me. I get depressed from time to time and it’s such a truly awful experience that it’s hard to believe there can be any positives from suffering it, even if evolutionary biologists suggest there might be. But I recognise that its impact on my life has enabled me to begin to see more clearly what is really important : my relationships and my writing.

When you are someone with mental health problems it can be difficult to work out who is the real ‘authentic’ version of you. Even if people aren’t really talking about me, am I the oversensitive person who will always think they are? Or maybe that is one side of me, amongst many different faces. There are times still when I wonder whether the medicated me I’ve been for so long is the ‘real’ me, or are these tablets simply suppressing the person I truly am? When I worked in addictions people would ask me the same kind of questions.

‘Who will I be without the alcohol? Will I be able to live with myself? Will other people?’

‘Why am I so different when I’m drinking heavily? Yet sometimes that feels like the real me- the one who is trying to get out and cause havoc?’

One of my patients used to give me brutal feedback about the colour of my nail polish (I had a gothic period- which on reflection I’m still passing through) when she was going high. When she was well she would insist on apologizing when she really didn’t have to- she was just expressing another, very perceptive, part of herself that was usually kept in check.

When my mood is irritable and agitated, I can come out with the kind of comments that would be much better left unsaid- and certainly not shouted. From psychodynamic therapy I learned about the parts of me I was repressing, but they don’t have the best of social graces. In cognitive therapy I found ways to manage the way I ruminate about being me in this world. It’s far from a perfect fit, but who is to judge what is perfect?

Damien Ridge highlighted 4 different aspects of recovering from depression after talking to people who were, or had experienced it. (I am talking here about recovery in its original meaning as a personal journey not a service driven imperative).

  • Preventing depression from occurring in the first place
  • Limiting the impact of actual episodes of depression
  • Recovering from the effects of depression in the short and long term
  • Re-working the self so that is more functional or authentically felt

I haven’t succeeded in preventing episodes and, as one reviewer commented about my book, perhaps it would be fair to say my story illustrates well the limits of medicine. Neither talking nor tablets, separately or together, have provided a complete answer. My current doctor thinks I would have been in hospital over the last few years without the treatment I’ve had, and I think he is probably right. I can limit the impact of episodes now, and I’ve been able to live and work while experiencing bouts of depression.

I cannot always remember what the ‘depressed me’ is like until she wholly inhabits me once more. I can only say that being ‘her’ is not a good feeling in any way, it means feeling cut off from the rest of the world, unable to communicate, as though there is a thick ground glass screen between me and the rest of life. I can hear and see something of what is going on but I don’t feel any part of it, and it fills me with fear. I don’t want to be her, and so far I’ve managed to get away from her much of the time in the last 20 years, but has that been the right thing to do?

The writer Will Self, who is fiercely against taking tablets for depression has said that ‘from the stand point of the 20th century, to be melancholic is good mental health’. He has been able to employ his own personal experience of it to gain insights into extraordinary ways of viewing the world. Would I have had a different perspective on life if I had persisted in trying to cope in a different way? For instance by writing, painting my way out of depression or seriously learning how to meditate – or even, dare I say it, attempting to rediscover the faith I had as a teenager?

The problem I have is that it’s been nigh on impossible to open a book when I’ve been severely low, never mind sit down at a laptop and type. I would love to have been able to write my way out of depression, but it’s not possible for me. I can only work when I’m ‘well’ and I cannot help but see the world through the lenses of the treatment I have had- the ideas I have taken on board from therapy, and in particular the medication I still swallow every morning and evening. They certainly seem to alter my perception of the world in some way to make it a less hostile place.

For thirty years my major role in life was being a doctor. It both satisfied me and punished me. The thought that I might ever have to return to work again as a doctor fills me with anxiety, but I’m still registered with the General Medical Council. The alternative was being ‘erased’ which sounded like I had done something wrong, when I hadn’t. The act of giving up my work as a health professional stands in the way of what I’ve felt was my raison d’etre – helping other people.

Last month, more than 2 years after retiring, I shredded all the paperwork relating to my annual appraisals over the last 15 years (or whenever they began). There is no going back even though I miss that sense of being part of the ‘real’ world on the front line of health care. Now I have time to find out more about the person I really am and what I want to do next. There is some important unfinished business with my ‘self’.

“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” C.G Jung

My memoir on depression and psychiatry: The Other Side of Silence- A psychiatrist’s memoir of depression, is available now.

 

 

Children and young people first

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There are some images from my six months as registrar in child psychiatry that stay with me.

It was the early 1980s and the social worker and I were visiting a young single parent living on the 9th floor of a tower block in Salford 6. She had just moved back to live with her parents after the breakdown of her relationship. As she opened the door we were greeted by her 6 year old daughter, a pretty little girl who danced towards us, twirling around in circles. Only she continued to twirl around, and around, and around the overcrowded space completely absorbed in in own world. According to her mother she spent much of the day performing an unearthly dance between the furniture and screaming loudly every time she was prevented from doing this. She had no words. I could see how much her mother and grandparents loved her, but their faces were lined with desperation. The young mother already had the air, and appearance of someone at least a decade older than her years.
“I’ve been told she’s autistic,” she said, starting to cry, “but I don’t know how to cope with her…I just can’t, and now my husband has left me.”

It wasn’t difficult to see what was needed was some intensive support for the whole family. It was then, as now, in short supply but that didn’t stop us trying to put it in place. In my time at the clinic in the old Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital in Salford (not the shiny new one at the Infirmary) I witnessed over and again the impact of serious mental health problems and difficulties on families already struggling to cope in unsuitable or substandard housing. And it reminded me, sometimes too often, of the impact that the problems of my younger brother, who developed obsessive compulsive disorder at the age of 7, had on my own parents’ physical and mental health.

As my friends will know, I’m not particularly ‘good’ with children (I have none of my own) so when I was on-call over the weekend I struggled to try and strike up conversations with silent teenagers in the paediatric ward, the day after they had taken an overdose. They usually went something like this:
‘Hello, my name is Doctor Gask. And your name is Jenny- is that right?’
Silence…no eye contact…a reluctant nod.
‘I really wanted to find out what happened to you- to see if we can help…is that okay?’
…’I suppose so.’
‘OK. So would you like to tell me what happened yesterday?’
More silence.
I soon learned, by watching the consultant I was attached to, a kind and extraordinarily astute child psychiatrist who was close to retirement, that direct questions were not the way to engage a young person in talking about their problems. If they turned up for a follow up appointment- and that often unfortunately depended on whether their parents saw the need for them to have any help, not only their own willingness to come, he would set about making a young person feel at ease, without actually appearing to make any effort at all. He would smile like a genial grandfather, and simply strike up a chat about things completely unrelated to the events that had brought them into hospital: their favourite pop stars (they were not called ‘bands’ then), hobbies, best friends and gradually build trust before moving onto the thorny question of why they had taken the tablets. After forty minutes or so he would be ready to ask: ‘So how would you like things to be different?’ followed by ‘I wonder how we can help you with that…should we try and look at that together?’

I realized quite soon into my six months working with children and young people that this wasn’t where I wanted to be for the rest of my career. I didn’t have the kind of skills and patience that the consultant had. I found it difficult to work with families where children whose apparently quite normal behavior did not meet the expectations of their parents. In particular I felt angry when parents failed to take up the offer of help because of their perception (perhaps rightly so) that we were suggesting the difficulties their children presented with had a great deal to do with their own life problems and parenting style.

However what I did learn, and has never left me, was the acute awareness of how the people I saw later in their lives with depression and anxiety, in their twenties, thirties and older, had first developed difficulties with their mental health in their youth. This was where their problems had begun.

I returned to work in Salford 20 years later and helped to set up a primary care based mental health team. Our base, at first, was in a building attached to the old Salford Royal Hospital where I had attempted and failed to strike up conversations on a Saturday morning. Only now the building, like many older hospitals, had been converted into luxury flats. As I discussed in supervision, with the Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners, the problems of the people being referred to us, I was acutely aware that the generation we had struggled to help back in the 80’s were the very people now presenting to the mental health services. What happens to us in early life- our relationships, experiences within our own families, continues to have an impact on our mental well-being for the rest of our lives.

Services for children and young people with mental health problems have never been well funded and now in the UK they have been cut more than ever before. What services do exist are withdrawn at school leaving age and very many of those who have succeeded in getting help fail to meet the ever more selective criteria of adult mental health services, unless they have been lucky enough to be seen in some of the newer services which don’t recognize this traditional cut-off point, which is completely unsupported by what we now know from research:

‘not only that adult mental health disorders are common in the population, but that most of them have their onset by adolescence. This period of life after puberty also sees a range of important organisational developments in the brain that last until the late 20s and usher in adulthood as might be defined from a developmental rather than a social or legal point of view.’

Yet this is exactly the period when adequate mental health care is perhaps most difficult to access.

I was recently asked in an interview (by Ruth Hunt) what my priority would be for funding when the new money promised for mental health care, too little once more, finally arrives. I didn’t hesitate. It has to be for children and young people, if we are going to begin to try and prevent the cycle of suffering. More families failing to cope and the next generation experiencing the same problems.
It has to be children and young people first.

My memoir about depression and Psychiatry: The Other Side of Silence is available now

I’m a psychiatrist and I live with depression

lindagask29 Comments

I am a psychiatrist, and I’ve had depression on and off for most of my adult life. I’m now retired from practice. I’ve written about depression in a book, and people are saying how brave I am to ‘come out’ and say it. Yet if I had written about having arthritis, or some other physical condition, no one would have described my ‘coming out’ in such terms. Why should it be such a surprise that a a person who worked as a consultant psychiatrist for almost 25 years, and has spent her life researching and teaching the subject, should have first hand experience of it herself? Probably because, in the health professions, the last thing we usually want anyone to know, particularly our colleagues, is that we too are vulnerable to exactly the same stresses and problems as our patients. We like to see ourselves as strong; indeed maintaining our position on the career ladder often seems to depend on that. There is stigma related to having depression, even though mental health workers profess that they are always ‘fighting’ it. Depression is something that others suffer from, not us.

It is exactly this ‘us’ and ‘them’ attitude that I set out to challenge in the book. It started off as a memoir of my own fairly extensive treatments for depression, both with medication and psychotherapy. However as I began to write it, the close parallels between my own experiences, and those of the people I had tried to help throughout my professional life just became more and more obvious to me. There certainly wasn’t a clear boundary between my own experiences and those of my former patients. We all had complex lives- experienced loss, grieved for those who have gone from our lives, felt lonely, wanted to be loved, and sometimes felt compelled to self medicate with alcohol to ease our distress. Some of us made the same mistakes in our relationships over and over again. Many of us wanted or even tried to end our lives. The stories I tell in the book are taken from my own work as a psychiatrist but have been extensively altered and merged to create people who are true to life, but not ‘real’ case histories. However my own story is very real indeed. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to have been so open when I was still practising- when people came to see me the focus was rightly on their problems not mine. When I was unwell I withdrew from seeing patients until I was recovered. I’ve never tried to hide my illness from colleagues. I’ve just never been quite so public about it.

So far, I’ve had some interesting reactions. As I mentioned above, I’ve been described as brave by some, but others are still clearly unsure what to say to me. When I’ve talked in the past about treatment, in particular the fact that I’ve taken antidepressants now for the last 20 years, I’ve certainly picked up from some of my colleagues that ‘this isn’t the sort of thing one talks about’. Why not? Isn’t this exactly what mental health professionals talk about every day? How can we challenge stigma in society if we cannot face up to our own tendency to stigmatise both our colleagues and, even now, our patients?

I have listened to junior members of staff describe people with depression who are not actively suicidal, or psychotic as the ‘worried well’. I’ve been told that depression is not a ‘severe’ mental illness warranting more investment of psychiatric and mental health nursing resources. I’ve read articles written by my colleagues, which describe it as ‘medicalising misery’. Only people who have never experienced the pain, despair and hopelessness could talk about depression in such terms. I’ve spent my life challenging such attitudes. I made it as far as being a Professor of Psychiatry, despite repeated episodes of depression. I know I’ve had better treatment than many people ever receive and my aim has always been to improve access to, and quality of care for depression. I’ve managed to live with depression and found ways of coping with it- though that has been far from easy. That is also what my book is about. I refuse to be ashamed of it.

Nobody should be.

My book, ‘The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir of Depression’ is published this week by Summersdale.

Take up thy bed and Work

lindagask3 Comments

The first time I heard the term ‘worklessness’ I remember a shiver running down my spine- it was the way in which it was being used to describe an apparent ‘human condition’ in which there was a sense of this being a lifestyle choice. We were told that it meant not simply being ‘unemployed’ but not actively seeking and/or being available for work; but it was not applied to the idle rich or others members of society, myself now included, who have concluded that work is not particularly good for their health but do not need to claim benefits (although my University Pension, funded partly through the state is still a benefit). At a time when the drive towards viewing employment as the desired outcome for people with mental illness was beginning to take precedence over other more used-centred outcomes it was a prescient warning of changes about which we are now only too aware- the move to treat people with physical but also particularly mental health problems as essentially capable of taking up their own beds and walking to the Job Centre, regardless of their condition.

I’m very suspicious of terms that are used by governments to describe those who do not comply with what is expected of them in our societies. As a psychiatrist I have been accused of being an agent of the state on more than one occasion, but the role played by British psychiatrists is a long way from that which was played by Nazi psychiatrists in the Third Reich who colluded in ‘euthanasia’ or by the psychiatrists in the Soviet Union who were willing to label political dissidents with the diagnosis of ‘sluggish schizophrenia’- which resulted in the expulsion of their organization from the World Psychiatric Association. The use of diagnoses to both label and treat dissident citizens continues to this day- for example in the controversial treatment in China of the practitioners of the Falun Gong meditation movement who are deemed to be psychotic and undergo ‘treatment’. We have also recently seen the notorious collusion between psychologists in the USA and torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Professionals who were willing to behave unethically in the service of the state for payment.

You may say these are extreme examples, but I think we should be concerned when political and social issues are described in terms which a) infer that the problem lies within the individual rather than society b) dresses this up in pseudo-psychological terminology and c) infers that there is a treatment, psychological and/or physical for this.

The report this week from Birkbeck College highlighted the way in which being unemployed is increasingly described in policy documents as a problem of the individual, who lacks motivation or the ‘right attitude’ to obtain a job. This is deemed to be ‘treatable’, although for a professional to engage in such enforced treatment, without which a person will lose his or her benefits has been described as ‘not only unethical but probably illegal’.

It’s difficult to see how a person with severe mental illness would be capable of acquiring the ‘right attitude’ when they are still struggling with the everyday tasks of life. Yet there are people in our government who clearly think this is possible, which is not only senseless but very, very scary. It reminds me of the attitude of some of the people I worked with over the years, who truly seemed to believe that mental illness is itself a ‘lifestyle choice’, which the person suffering not only had power over, but could choose to change if only they wanted to do so. An attitude which not only lacks basic empathy, but has a seductive simplicity which has emerged recently in the imperative to declare oneself ‘well’ and ‘recovered’, and has been around for many years in some so-called ‘self-help books which tell you that you can ‘climb out of your prison’ without any help in unlocking the door.

It’s a worrying trend in a society, which seems not only to care less than ever for those who have disabilities but to declare that a person has, within him or herself, the power to overcome their problems, if they choose to, and obtain a job with or without the aid of some motivational therapy. And what happens if they don’t take up their beds and work? The Rt Honourable Ian Duncan Smith would seem to believe they must work, because it is in itself a form of treatment. For as it famously said on the gates of Auschwitz, Arbeit macht frei ‘Work Sets You Free.’

A life in the NHS

lindagask1 Comment

I arrived in this world seven years after the birth of the National Health Service. My life has been framed by it. I was born in a cottage hospital and regularly weighed by the nurse at the district clinic. As I grew I was taken to the General Practitioner who for many years had a surgery attached to the side of his home. I don’t remember much about those visits other than on one occasion my mother took me along expecting the GP to advise her (and me) what should be a reasonable bedtime. I know she was disappointed by his response.
‘She’ll sleep when she’s tired.’
An American psychiatrist I met many years later suggested I may have had ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder.’ I remember retorting, ‘No I’ve just always been difficult.’ My mother certainly seemed to think so anyway.
When I left school, I studied medicine, and qualified as a doctor and then as a psychiatrist, working in the NHS in Scotland and the North of England for over 30 years. I was, and still am, proud to have been part of the massive social experiment that began the day Aneurin Bevan was symbolically handed a large bunch of keys by the matron of Park Hospital in Davyhulme.

I’ve seen firsthand what life is like in a country where the market governs healthcare. Several years ago I spent a few months studying the American health system as a Harkness Fellow in healthcare policy. A few memories from my time travelling between clinics in Washington State remain with me, indelibly burned into my memory.

• The young woman with poorly controlled asthma stifling her tears because she had to say goodbye to her doctor even though she was not moving away from town. She had changed jobs and her new employers’ insurance system contracted with a different ‘provider’.

• The middle-aged man on the telephone in the waiting room pleading with his friend down the line. ‘Can you lend me some money…I can’t afford to pay for my insulin.’

• The young man in paint splashed overalls who lay flat on the front seat of the bus writhing in agony, getting himself to the Emergency Room by public transport; probably to avoid having to pay for an ambulance he could not afford.

• The general practitioner who told me how she struggled to help a young woman in her clinic who was acutely psychotic. Her basic state medical insurance didn’t cover specialist mental health care, so the visiting psychiatrist, who was in the next office, was unwilling to either see her or advise.

• The nephrologist who specialized in treating African Americans in a southern state with a high prevalence of diabetic renal disease who told me that he could personally ensure his low income patients without health insurance got the care they needed through his academic interest in them, but others would not. He seemed curiously accepting of the status quo. ‘That’s how it is here.’

Don’t get me wrong. The NHS is a complex many-headed beast, fraught with problems. I have not only benefited from it, but I have suffered from it, and seen others do so too. I have struggled with and been bullied by bureaucratic and hostile management and survived an attempt to remove me with some serious consequences for my mental health. I’ve also known visionary managers some of whom became friends. But I’ve also seen the NHS try and fail to entirely abolish traces of the mentality of the huge county asylums it inherited in 1948. I’ve worked with many extraordinarily compassionate and caring practitioners, yet I still hear service users relate examples of attitudes and behaviour towards them, which are all too familiar from my early days as a consultant in a decaying mental hospital.

The gap between physical and mental healthcare, which was wide even when the new district general hospital psychiatric units were attached to the rest of the hospital by long corridors, grew to a chasm with the separation into acute and mental healthcare trusts. Despite evidence that investment in mental health care might have significant impact on the spiraling costs of physical healthcare, the concept of ‘parity’ still seems something to which little more than lip service is paid. Mental health care has been cut by a greater percentage in funding than any other area. And now, with the decline in numbers of GPs and funding of primary care, where 90% of mental health care is provided, we should not be surprised that it is harder than ever for people to get the help they need when they are in acute distress.

Throughout my adult life I’ve been in receipt of mental health care, most of it provided by NHS staff, who went the extra mile even though I wasn’t always easy to help. I’m still and always have been contrary. No one ever suggested it wasn’t in his or her contract to treat me but the goodwill that used to ensure mental health professionals didn’t have to receive treatment in the places where they work has largely disappeared. Rules reminiscent of what I encountered in my times in the USA are becoming increasingly used to determine who gets help.
‘We’re not commissioned to provide care for people with (you name it- Aspergers, Autism, Personality Disorder, Analgaesic abuse….the list grows).’

And now I’m getting older, and I have recently been diagnosed with kidney disease, I know there is a very real possibility I will one day be as dependent (a sorely unfashionable word I know) on the NHS as the day I was born, only this time for dialysis. I’m worried about whether the NHS will exist when I really need it to save my life, or whether I will struggle, as the patients I saw in the USA, to obtain care from an uncaring system.

Last time I visited Park Hospital, now known as Trafford General Hospital, the black and white pictures of the great day the NHS was founded were still on the walls of a corridor in an old part of the building, but clearly forgotten and sorely neglected. Their state seemed to me to represent the ways in which successive governments have tried to forget, suppress or actively derail Bevan’s extraordinary achievement. For all of our sakes let us not sleep walk compliantly into a future when it will suddenly not be there for any of us to depend upon.

In order to do this we must never stop being ‘difficult’. I prefer to call it ‘creatively contrary.’

(Still) taking the tablets

lindagask15 Comments

Not so long ago, I asked my current doctor how he thought I would have been over the last 20 years if I hadn’t stayed on antidepressants continually. He said he thought I would have had at the least a period of in-patient care. When I asked my other half, who has known me for nearly 30 years, and remembers life before and after I had medication his response was simple.

‘You would be dead.’

Since I last somewhat reluctantly shared my views on antidepressant medication a year ago, (before that I’d kept my head below the parapet) there has been a continuing debate about them both on twitter, where I’m quite active, and in the media. My blog was paired with an article written by a fellow psychiatrist who has very different views from my own, who told the Daily Mail she wouldn’t take antidepressants even if she were suicidal. I was pleased our contrasting views went out together. Others have questioned me directly with comments such as ‘I can understand why you take them if they’ve helped you, but why do psychiatrists still prescribe them when they don’t work?’ and a little more personally: ‘well you would say they help because you’re a psychiatrist.’

When I joined twitter, I expected there would be primarily a view that medication was unhelpful and shouldn’t be prescribed. I guess that’s because that’s the message that the media often seems to prefer. There are several eminent mental health professionals who share this view and write about it frequently. Many of them are involved in the Council for Evidence Based Psychiatry and are active on social media. In fact, what I found, as well as people who share their views, was a substantial section of people who were willingly to talk of how medication has helped them. Some of them, like me, have also had psychological therapies, but many others have unfortunately not been able to access them.

NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) is about to start a new review of the evidence, but its current advice is that antidepressants should not be used in milder depression, should be offered as option in moderate depression, and should be used in addition to psychological therapy in severe depression. That’s why I prescribed them when I was still practicing and most other psychiatrists and GPs, still do. But unfortunately the difficulty in accessing psychological therapy makes it hard in practice to follow the NICE guidance as we should. Many people do not get offered evidence-based treatment. If this happened in cancer it would be a national scandal, yet untreated depression, as we know too well, not only causes great suffering but can also be lethal. There are people who wouldn’t benefit from antidepressants who end up on them unnecessarily and only experience the side effects. There are others who feel there is no other choice open to them without a long wait. In severe depression, treatment which doesn’t also include psychological therapy is incomplete. Medication alone is never the solution.

I’ve stayed on tablets because, as my doctor and husband agree, I don’t think I could have managed to live the life that I’ve been fortunate to have, if at all. It’s been a productive one, but it hasn’t been easy. I’ve still had relapses: I was unwell earlier this year again and am now recovering. I didn’t cope with work stress well at all, although latterly Cognitive Behaviour Therapy helped me to find new ways to manage that; and I know that I still react badly to loss events. I have a family history of mental illness, and one first degree relative was hospitalized. My early life almost certainly contributed to my susceptibility. I’ve written at much greater length about this in my memoir, which will be published this autumn. However I haven’t been as low or completely unable to function as I was prior to taking medication. Psychotherapy helped me earlier in my life, but couldn’t prevent me having more severe episodes in my mid-thirties. Each time I’ve relapsed, my medication has been changed. Sometimes things have been added in. I’m on a combination now once more. I know there will be people who will say my recoveries are due to the placebo effect, which can be very powerful, but last time, as previously, I’ve begun to recover in the time scale predicted by the evidence. This time it was around 3 to 4 weeks. It certainly was not immediate, in fact as sometimes happens, my mood continued to deteriorate after I started the new treatment.

Medication has some truly vile side effects; I’ve experienced many of them and still do. I’ve had withdrawal symptoms too. Some people cannot tolerate them, and others feel much worse. Fluoxetine made me so agitated I had to stop it. In young people that effect can lead to increased self-harm. Medicines can help, but they can also be dangerous too. Its always about balancing the risks and potential benefits.

To suggest I would only say medication was helpful because I’m a psychiatrist devalues my experience as a service user. Perhaps it’s not easy to be seen as both at the same time. But I know others have found medication helpful too so I’m not alone. When writers suggest antidepressants shouldn’t be used, those of us who have benefited find that very scary. We know we are not weak because we need to take them, but sometimes it can feel like others honestly think this of us. All I am asking is that those who don’t want to take them respect the choice of those who do and continue to allow people who may possibly benefit (and have potential problems on them too) to make a fully informed choice. As I said previously I have never forced anyone to take them.

I have been suicidal, and I chose to start taking an antidepressant. At that point I was still sufficiently ambivalent about death to try anything that might help.

I’m still here.

Listening to your body

lindagask1 Comment

“Listen to your body,” they always tell you…whoever they are. “If you are feeling tired and exhausted it means you are overdoing it.” I used to tell people that to. After all our body and mind are inextricably linked. What is going on inside my head will have an impact on how I am feeling, and vice versa.

But what if you don’t only ‘listen to your body’ but watch it too? Monitor it closely every day for changes. Observe how aches and pains seem to shift mysteriously from one joint to another. How your heart misses a beat, or speeds right up more often than it used to. How the pain that you woke with again today in your right arm (which you have self-diagnosed as tennis elbow) has increased in intensity as the small hand has moved around the kitchen clock…probably because you’ve been thinking about it all the time. And the more you dwell on it, the worse it becomes. “Is it arthritis?” you are beginning to ask yourself.

The fingers of both of my hands are stiff now every morning, and the base of my left thumb was painful again today opening the jam jar at breakfast. I know that my uncle developed rheumatoid arthritis when he was my age. He went from being a fit and healthy middle-aged man to a stooped elderly person wracked with pain in the course of only a year. Could this be happening to me? I told one of the GPs I see about my joint pains recently. I’m supposed to have a blood test- but I haven’t yet. I don’t know if I want to know the status of my anti-rheumatoid factor. I’ve started to worry much more about my health than I used to. The number of chronic conditions I have is slowly increasing…and with them my level of anxiety.

I’ve seen many people in my life with what used to be called ‘Medically Unexplained Symptoms, (MUS)’ (and have now been given the name Bodily Stress (or Distress) Syndrome although terminology differs between psychiatric classifications and will almost certainly change again). Symptoms for which there is no clear medical cause, although many suspect that if you look really hard you might find some physiological explanation for them. They were once called ‘functional’ symptoms and milder versions are really common in primary care and out-patient clinics. For example, around 50% of people who are seen in gastrointestinal clinics with new symptoms have a problem for which no obvious medical cause can be found. However, some people are severely disabled by multiple symptoms. They most commonly occur in the presence of other diagnosed and often chronic illness, and may be a sign of anxiety and depression, but this is not always the case. A person with otherwise unexplained symptoms often denies having any other problems that are worrying them, either psychological or social. Sometimes it becomes clearer later that they do indeed have a medical cause for their problems; we found this happened in about 10% of patients over an 18-month follow up period. Missing ‘real pathology’ is what a doctor fears (although they do seem less worried about missing mental health problems). I specialized in not only trying to help people with unexplained symptoms, but in doing research into how to train GPs to help them more effectively and be more understanding about their concerns. And I will admit here I have always experienced them myself to some degree too.

And now I find one particular person keeps coming back into my mind.

Jeff (not his real name) worried about pains all over his body, which he had for many years. He had multiple investigations, almost all of which showed nothing very much of note. We sat down together to go through his general hospital case notes together so we could discuss all the tests that had been carried out in several different departments. I always found this a helpful exercise in beginning to find a common ground with someone. Checking out what we could agree were the problems both in life and with health, and where we disagreed. Whatever the health worries, we could usually agree that the disability and pain interfered with their quality of life and relationships in a major way. Jeff was confined to bed much of the time, and found it very difficult to manage any kind of regular activity outside his home. He was angry and exasperated with the medical profession in their failure to either explain or help him. While we turned the pages Jeff asked questions, and I attempted to answer, explaining what particular phrases meant.

“So ‘at the top of the normal range’ it says there,” he pointed to a particular blood result, “that’s not good then is it, I mean its high isn’t it?”

“Well, it’s still within the limits of what is normal. That’s what’s important. It will also probably vary a bit each time its been checked.” We looked through previous pages and indeed the numbers went up and down. We were both relieved. We carried on much in the same way for about an hour then I noticed Jeff had fallen silent.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

He was looking down at his hands and flexing his fingers as though testing their range of movement. “Well I’ll be honest with you, doc.”

“Go on…”

“All these tests and scans…they’ve never checked my out here have they,” he said pointing to his left flank. “And that’s where the pain is worse at the moment. They’ve never scanned me right here have they?”

At that point I really didn’t know how to reply.

And now I know just how Jeff felt. Before my recent appointment at the kidney unit I was having persistent discomfort in my left flank too. I was constantly checking and prodding and trying to reassure myself, but it was only after the appointment, when I received the results of my latest scan, explained to my in details that I could understand, that I realized that the pains in my flank had actually disappeared completely. I had previously been told that the kidney on that side was enlarged, but this scan showed that wasn’t apparently the case. Only I now have pains elsewhere in my back, and in my joints too. Logically I know that the pains are worse when my mood is low, as I would have predicted; made worse by my level of anxiety. I focus on things I have reason to worry about due to my family history: such as heart disease and arthritis. I do have chronic kidney disease and now associated hypertension, hypothyroidism, irritable bowel syndrome, early signs of cataracts (yes my optician helpfully added that to the list this week) and a long-standing mood disorder. And now I have started to monitor my body just in the way (though not quite as obsessively) as one of my patients who used to chart the progression of unexplained spots across his body in his diary.

Reassurance doesn’t work. I’m worried about my health. The last thing I need to do is to watch or listen to my body. I really need to be distracted from it in a major way. I know that even if I am feeling tired if I don’t get out there and keep getting on with life, setting myself (achievable) goals, life will pass me by while I’m still checking my pulse!

I just have to keep reminding myself just as I used to remind my own patients of that…and keep going.

So that’s the plan then.

Grief

lindagask3 Comments

With so many people experiencing loss and hardship at the moment its not easy to admit the depth of grief I have been experiencing over the last month.  I’m sure I’ve glibly told many people over the years how ‘grief is a normal human experience,’ but that doesn’t make it any easier to bear. It may simply be an everyday kind of emotional pain, but it washes over me in waves of acute sadness and despair. One moment I’m fine, the next I’m in tears; and it hurts physically too. There is a pain my chest right above my heart. But this grief is not for a human being, but for an animal companion, my cat Sophie.

 

I’ve seen that wry smile on a colleague’s face when I tell them how it feels to lose a pet . Not that Soph was a ‘pet’, she was a fiercely beautiful but barely tamed Maine Coon cat who viewed the human race if not quite the enemy, certainly as all potential vivisectionists. But those who don’t understand how attached you can become to an animal are simply embarrassed by our tears; they don’t know what to say. Statements like ‘well you can always get another one can’t you?’ are unhelpful. Yes, I have another cat, but he isn’t her. He is different. I will probably have a few more in my life (or rather they will have me) but each one I have lost has left a unique shaped space behind in my heart that another will eventually fill- but not in quite the same way. Some colleagues of mine have written about the important part that animals play in providing support for people with long-term conditions. But we live in a society where older (and younger) people with mental health problems are regularly separated from their companions when they have to move into new rented accommodation due to the desperate state of our housing policy. I cannot imagine the pain of having to give up my companion animal. Perhaps I will have to one day.

 

Grief is something I know about. I treated many people in my career who were failing to grieve for someone, or something they had lost. It doesn’t have to be a person, it can be a career, a person, your health, or even your hopes for the future. The list is endless. The process IS normal but it can be frightening if you have never felt it before. It isn’t the same as depression although if a person fails to grieve properly depression may follow, and in the vulnerable, loss may trigger it. But it should not be medicalised as it has been in DSM-5 where two weeks of depressed mood following loss is taken to indicate depression. Two weeks? That’s crazy. Grief can take years, a lifetime to resolve. The key thing is the trajectory of the process and the severity of the symptoms. Is it gradually getting easier over time or unchanged in intensity? How low are you feeling? Have you had thoughts of suicide or wanting to join the dead person?  I failed to grieve successfully once when I lost someone very important.  I didn’t talk about it. I tried to work my way out of it at the hospital rather than go through it.  You cannot shut it out. You have to talk, remember …and weep.

 

Sophie was killed by a fox one night in August. She loved going out at night to hunt. She began her life as a pedigree puss and then heard the call of the wild. She escaped when she got very frightened as were taking her to a cattery and wriggled out of her harness. She would never travel in a cage. I missed her terribly but I always hoped she come back to us, and she did. She spent two years living rough before she finally trusted a lady enough to accept help, and was returned to us (due to her microchip) by the RSPCA. She would sit next to me on the sofa and purr loudly, demanding her share of my love. Her coat was soft and silky before she disappeared, but woolly and thick when she returned after two winters outside in Yorkshire. But she knew she was home and she embraced it with enthusiasm. She was a happy, healthy cat and she was only seven years old. It’s really hard to accept she could have survived so long on her own and then die now. But I couldn’t have kept her inside. That would have been unbelievably cruel.  Yet I still feel I should have been there to protect her. Grief isn’t just about sadness, but guilt and anger. And remembering.

I have some of her fur, and a library of pictures to remember her by. I can look at them now. It was very painful at first.

It’s getting a little easier each day.  That I’ve been able to write this is a sign I’m coming through it.

But I’ll always miss her.