Tag: stigma

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.

 

 

 

 

Borderline Traits

lindagask3 Comments

A recent reviewer of my memoir about depression and psychiatry has noted that in describing the emotional mess of my early adult years and on-going struggles with low mood, I ‘courageously come close to defining traits of Borderline Personality Disorder’.

I really don’t mind her saying that- indeed part of me is actually surprised that she is the first person to do so. I purposefully included a description of my difficulty in relationships, mood swings and problems in trusting others alongside a description of similar problems in one of my own patients. I wanted to show not only the variety of ways that people can experience what we commonly call ‘depression’, but also how my own problems mirrored those of my patients, such that there was very little distance between us.

By this time, in my early thirties, I had already had quite a long period of psychodynamic therapy but was still having problems:

 I didn’t know how to begin to contain these frightening feelings when they took hold of me. There were times when I felt low in mood and physically exhausted, as though there was a weight bearing down on my chest, which prevented me from moving. On other occasions, it seemed as though anything and everything was possible. At those times I did seem to lose control and retreat from reality. It was then that the suicidal thoughts would return, although by then usually only fleetingly.

Nevertheless, I recognised only too well the persistent state of emotional chaos that Elizabeth Wurtzel described in her book, Prozac Nation. I particularly empathised with her when she talked about wanting a therapist who could help her to learn to be a grown-up and to show her how to live in a world where the phone company didn’t care that you were too depressed to pay the phone bill.   (From The Other Side Of Silence: A psychiatrist’s memoir of depression)

 I’m well aware that there are features of my personality and behaviour that could well be called ‘borderline traits’ and it’s interesting that no one else has mentioned this. Is it because I am a Professor of Psychiatry? Is this the kind of thing one shouldn’t  say to me?  Most people have been incredibly supportive about my honesty, but others- including one or two mental health professional colleagues, have seemed a little embarrassed by my openness. Some will have been on the receiving end of some of my irritability and anger in the past- which is always much worse when my mood is going down. If so, I can only offer my apologies, but might add that in my experience some mental health services can be less than sufficiently understanding of the emotional problems of those whom they employ.

As time goes by my views are changing, despite having written on the topic of Personality Disorder in the BMJ; and this largely because of my anger at the lack of access to appropriate therapy for people who need and deserve help, rather than abuse. I’ve always been aware that people like me who perhaps have ‘difficult’ personalities (I prefer to think there are also times when I can be very warm, creative and caring too) are often dealt a bad deal by mental health services, when they get depressed. Our difficulties with early attachments both make relationships difficult to cope with, and predispose us to longer periods of more severe depression and anxiety as well. I have considerable sympathy with the view put forward by Peter Tyrer that Borderline Personality Disorder is ‘neither borderline nor a personality disorder’. People given this label describe ‘symptoms’ for which they desperately seek help, and don’t demonstrate persistent and inflexible ‘traits’. Their problems are not necessarily lifelong (which I understand personality traits as being), and they can be helped to change over time.

My mood is still unstable at times, but not to degree it was before I had the right kind of therapy to help me comes to terms both my past with how to survive in the world. I also need medication to stop me from plunging down into prolonged despair- with all the associated physical symptoms of anxiety and depression.

People who have problems with their mood don’t fit into neat boxes. As I’ve argued before, diagnoses have their place in terms of research and predicting likely response to treatment, but they should be used alongside a plan that addresses their main presenting life problems, range of symptoms and underlying aetiological factors that may be maintaining the status quo. Some will call this a formulation, but it’s not simply a psychological one- it addresses all three of the key areas- biological, psychological and social.

We need to design the treatment around the person- looking at what they need, not excluding on the basis of a diagnosis that has become for many, a term of abuse. I know many will still want to use the term ‘borderline’ because it can help get access to the right kind of therapy; but we need to acknowledge that the difficulties some of us have with managing certain aspects of everyday life (without, for me, a little drama on occasions) are simply degrees of the extraordinary diversity of humanity- differences that we should learn to celebrate not abjure.

PS- my husband proofreads my blogs- and says life with me has always been a bit of a roller coaster at times- but he wouldn’t swap me for anything.

 

‘Putting it on’

lindagask3 Comments

At the recent Cheltenham Book Festival, The chair of the mental health panel on which I was appearing to talk about my new book asked me perhaps the most difficult question that I’ve been asked so far.
‘So, there is a scene towards the end of your book where something quite shocking happens. Is it alright with you if we talk about it?’
I felt my chest tighten, as I knew exactly what he referred to. It was the moment in which I confronted my mentally ill brother about why he could not get out of bed. It was, I’m still terribly ashamed to admit, the moment that I hit him. I didn’t hurt him, at least not physically- but I did it, I had written about it, and now I was having to face that moment again- only this time in front of an audience.
‘Yes, you can,’ I replied, feeling my anxiety level rise even more, I knew I couldn’t avoid it.
‘So, can you explain how, given your profession as a psychiatrist, you raised your hand in anger and brought a stool, was it?- down on your brother who was clearly mentally unwell?’

It’s one of those moments when you are forced to really admit your thoughts and feelings. Why did I do it? What on earth was going through my mind? I remembered how upset, frustrated and annoyed I was that he seemed completely unable to help himself, whatever I tried to do to support him. He had spent three days in a room and could not get himself dressed. Instead many of his clothes had been torn up and lay on the floor around him. By that time neither of us were functioning in any rational way. I was no longer thinking as the trainee psychiatrist I was at the hospital down the road. I was an exhausted, tearful and desperate person trying to care for someone who seemed to be refusing anything I offered; And I knew what was going through my head: I really thought he was simply refusing to do anything for me; he was perfectly capable of it, he was just ‘putting it on’ to thwart me. In that moment I treated him like many others had in the past. I was acting as though his problems were not real.

In a recent article in the guardian a medical student also admitted ‘before working in psychiatry, I didn’t think mental health problems were real’. I’m sure that is what many people think- that those who complain of mental difficulties are probably just acting in some way, or are simply weak-willed. That certainly seems to be the prevailing view of those who think that people with mental illness can be forced to find work and financially sanctioned if they do not. Logically this can only work if you believe they have considerable control over most of their symptoms and problems-which infers that they must be, to some degree, ‘putting it on’ doesn’t it? If you are responding to voices or convinced of something that is labeled as delusional, your problems may become more real, but then you may simply invoke fear (‘these people should be put away’); or pity, (these poor people need some assistance) an emotional response I have seen in those mental health workers who are sympathetic to people with more severe mental health problems, but still appear to view them as simply the more unfortunate ones in society- much deserving of charitable help, fascinating in an academic kind of way, but not somehow as their equals- real people with lives, dreams and desires of their own.

And those of us with ‘common’ mental health problems, anxiety disorders, OCD (my brother’s problem) and depression? Well we are almost certainly believed to be responsible for our actions and quite capable of changing our behavior. This viewpoint is in many ways reinforced by the fact that many treatments require us to actively change our behavior and confront the very fears we are paralysed by. ‘Response prevention’ works in OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) but it is extraordinarily hard, at least initially, to stop yourself doing something- the very compulsive behaviour that has for many years relieved your anxiety. Similarly activating yourself in Behaviour Activation works in depression, but you may have to force yourself very hard to start doing it. Small goals are helpful at first, like simply being able to get out of bed; but even that can seem impossible. My brother couldn’t do it. He was stuck in his own loop of intense anxiety. Unfortunately therapists can sometimes be remarkably unsympathetic too- if you cannot comply you are sometimes labeled as ‘not motivated.’ The responsibility that the therapist has for helping to motivate you is disregarded.

I’ve learned a great deal since that awful moment in my spare bedroom thirty years ago. Some of it I found out quite soon when I confided in a colleague who was a clinical psychologist. He helped me to understand how my brother had, paradoxically, been able to get out of bed, dress and leave the house when I insisted, despite having been quite unable to do it for the previous few days. That didn’t mean he hadn’t been struggling- desperately trying to deal with the anxiety that manifested itself in obsessional behavior; but he was, temporarily at least, quite disabled by it. I’ve known that helpless feeling too in the times I’ve been unable to get out of bed, get dressed or open a book because I couldn’t find the energy or interest to even try. Sometimes, when I am well, I stop and wonder if I have been putting it on too, because if I can sit here and type a thousand words in an hour this evening, then there cannot be anything wrong with me surely? (despite the number of pills I’ve had to swallow today). One of the many reasons people with mental health problems are stigmatized is that they are not believed when they say how difficult it is to do normal everyday things. It’s patently obvious to anyone with common sense that they can just get on with it- can’t they? I know this is how people think, because I can honestly say that even with my expertise and own lived experience, there are times that I have thought this too. I’ve been there. Real empathy and the power to confront stigma that comes with it, means not only believing that isn’t so, but acknowledging the times you too haven’t wanted to understand why a person with mental health problems cannot do what you would prefer them to do, and why.

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

Nothing like the common cold

lindagask5 Comments

Everyone disapproves of stigma, and yet that doesn’t seem to have had an impact on the way in which mental health professional themselves continue to stigmatize those with mental health problems. At this point I can hear all the professionals reading this saying ‘but I don’t do that,’ and indeed you (singular) may not. Yet those of us within the professions who have been mentally ill have experienced it. Mental illness is still something that happens to other people, but not to people like us.

A good friend of mine, Maureen Deacon, died this spring. She had been a Professor of Mental Health before taking her retirement, and I first met her more than thirty years ago when she was the ward sister in the Professorial Unit at Withington Hospital in Manchester and I was a Senior Registrar in the ward downstairs from hers. We had several friends in common and kept in touch over the years. I also knew her partner very well. In the early 1990’s Maureen persuaded me to recklessly join her on an overland bus journey from Manchester Piccadilly to Leningrad as it then was, which took 4 days in each direction. I remember someone getting on and asking if it was the Blackpool bus, and we all shouted ‘No, Leningrad’ to the interloper’s complete bemusement. You bond with someone when you both eat nothing but hummus and pitta: the only food you have brought with you for the journey, day in, day out. We hadn’t seen so much of each other in the last few years but we continued to meet every now and then for dinner and chat with our respective partners and to see each others’ feline companions.

Maureen had been unwell with cancer for some time. I wasn’t able to attend her funeral because I was in Orkney then, but I know she wanted everyone to dress in bright colours for her farewell, and not come in black. She was always very upbeat, hard-working, utterly reliable and a great friend. I also knew she had been depressed, both before and after her diagnosis with cancer. She never said much about it, but we talked briefly on occasions about what it felt like and taking antidepressants. She knew I had been unwell on occasions too. So it was a shock for me to read in the paper she completed just before her death, and published this month in the Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, that she had experienced six episodes of depression, and had seriously considered suicide during at least one of these. I’m ashamed I never picked up how bad things had been for her, but as she said in this personal account of her experience ‘I was an expert at hiding it.’

She wrote :‘being depressed is worse than having advanced cancer’ and at that time she had a life-limiting illness. She was acutely aware of the stigma that depression carries. This, she said, had two aspects. The self-stigma that is experienced by those of us who get depressed:

“…I tend to see my mood disorder as a character flaw-evidence of my weak and neurotic nature. Currently this is reinforced (for me) by the interest in mental health and resilience, clearly something I’m missing, in some sense at least. Secondly there is the guilt and worthlessness hat comes along for me with depression experience: ‘I should not feel like this I have a blessed life, a partner who loves me, a lovely home…’”

 

But also the stigma that depression carries, perhaps more so than ever, within mental health services in the UK. Even severe depression is not deemed to be serious enough for mental health nurses, working with Community Mental Health Teams, to be involved in the care of, except if the person is suicidal- and even then only for a limited amount of time. Depression, Maureen said, has been called one of the ‘coughs and colds of psychiatry’ and I’ve called out junior doctors for referring to anyone not under the care of mental health services who is anxious or depressed as the ‘worried well’. This kind of language doesn’t help the mental health professional in their company, quietly keeping their own counsel or indeed anyone with depression to feel any better about themselves. Diminishing their experience does not speed their recovery and discourages them from seeking help. When I was well such attitudes made me angry, but when I was unwell it certainly deterred me for a long time from publicly admitting I had any problems at all.

During my time as a consultant I saw and treated many nurses with mental health problems- students, mental health nurses, general nurses, ward sisters. After the case of Beverely Allitt, the nurse who murdered several children in a paediatric ward, I remember trying to help a seriously depressed young woman who was petrified that having treatment for depression would mean she was thrown off the general nursing course. There seemed, from her point of view, to be very little distinction being made between having treatable mental illness and potential psychopathy by her course directors. This was her understanding, but I would not be surprised if she was right. I’ve met health service managers with similar difficulty in grasping what mental illness actually is, how it affects a person, and how a person who suffers from it is more at risk of harm from others than vice versa. I’ve also seen mental illness treated very differently from physical illness by some managers. I was asked for information about a ward sister who was an in-patient on my ward through the inter-organisational route, following conversations between hospital managers, which was a blatant attempt to breach my patient’s confidentiality. Would this have happened ifshe had been receiving care for a physical illness? When I personally made my first very tentative visit back to unit I was working on when I had been off sick with severe depression, I received a letter from the Personnel manager a couple of days later, saying ‘You looked well. I hope this means you are returning to work soon?’

As Maureen said in her paper:

‘the sheer terror of work colleagues knowing I was unwell was enough to get me moving. Ironically, on the two occasions I was persuaded to take sick leave, I got better much more quickly’.

Reading her account fills me both with admiration…and regret. How I wish we had been able to talk more about how she was feeling, but she didn’t feel able to, and I never picked up the cues.

I will always miss her quiet wisdom and common sense.

Her conclusion was that, to really understand stigma as mental health professionals we have to get away from thinking mental illness is something that happens to other people . Not to us who are always resilient, invulnerable, immune to stress, and as a result far too ashamed to admit when we experiencing something which I can assure you is far from having something like a common cold.

Reference

Deacon M. Personal Experience: being depressed in worse than having advanced cancer. Journal of Psychiatric and mental Health Nursing, 2015,22,457-459.

Asylum and stigma

lindagask2 Comments

You don’t have to dig very far into the history of most families to find someone who spent some time in an asylum. More than one person in my own family has ended up in the building ‘round the bend’ in the road, out of sight. A story was told about my Scottish great uncle who stayed on voluntarily as a gardener in hospital for the rest of his life which was, I guess, the family way of lessening the stigma of having a husband and father who went into the asylum and never came out. A much closer relative spent many months in a crumbling monolith in Lincolnshire in the seventies. When I went to see him, everyone in the train carriage would watch as I got off the train in the middle of nowhere. There was only one possible destination: a place which carried the taint of madness. And then there was my father. Although there were times in his life when his mood was very bleak, he wasn’t admitted as a patient; he would never have dreamt of even seeking help. But he spent a period in his youth working contentedly on the farm at the Towers Hospital in Leicester alongside those inmates who were well enough to be let outside into the extensive grounds, to milk the cows, collect the hens’ eggs and care for animals. Unlike my uncle, I think he really was just working as a farmer.

So it’s been interesting in the last week to reflect on the nature of asylum and the associated stigma following the response to the new book by Barbara Taylor The Last Asylum describing her periods in Friern Hospital, which is now luxury apartments and the acclaim for ex- mental health nurse Nathan Filer winning the Costa book award with his novel The Shock of the Fall. I was extraordinarily moved by the article Nathan Filer wrote for the Guardian this week on the state of current in-patient care, Mental health care- where did it all go so wrong. He describes the experience of his best friend Bryon Vincent who was admitted to the place where Nathan himself had worked some years before, after attempting suicide. What is experienced by Byron as the patient, and Nathan as his friend and visitor, is a ‘care’ system which is in a ‘God-awful mess’. Unlike Barbara Taylor’s book, this is not an account from the past; an historic description of the last days of a Victorian relic. It’s a much more contemporary description, even though the ward into which Byron was finally admitted was itself due to close because of budget cuts.

As Byron says:

“There was a pervasive air that things were disintegrating, one day I found a member of staff hiding in a bush. Alarms would sound and not be switched off for hours. The ward was more a place of crisis management than one of respite. I really felt for most of the staff, it was obvious they were doing their best under what were clearly incredibly difficult circumstances”

There are times when a person is in such a dark and tormented place that they need a place to be safe, to feel listened to and to be physically cared for. Sometimes they may need this for weeks or months, yet there is constant pressure to reduce the length of stay in psychiatric in-patient beds to little more than a few days. Nathan Filer’s friend Byron describes the pervading atmosphere succinctly: “The modern system seems much more focused on bureaucratic risk avoidance than it is on care.” Mental health workers now spend a great deal of their time trying to find beds for people often many miles from where they live, and where it is almost impossible for family and friends to visit them. I’ve commented before in this blog on the physical state of some in-patient units. With the closure of many of the new wards purpose built in the last decade with exorbitant Private Finance initiative funding, the situation is only going to get worse.

Mental health care in this country is in crisis.

I began to train in psychiatry at a time when the old asylums were beginning to close. I worked in modern though not particularly homely units attached to large general hospitals. They were situated in the community in which they served. Families and friends could visit. Home visits were possible. The aim, which wasn’t nearly achieved, was nevertherless to try and destigmatise ‘mental illness’ by providing care in a different kind of setting from the dark places built out in the fields, and on the same site as people were treated for physical illness. Many of my patients had physical illness too and were treated in the other half of the hospital. People in the acute wards and the maternity hospital benefited from the proximity of mental health expertise.

When as a consultant I found myself with beds in an asylum, at Whittingham Hospital in Lancashire, I was horrified by some of the attitudes of the staff I met whose families had worked there for generations. There had been evidence of cruelty and mismanagement at the hospital in the 1960s and 70s and an inquiry, yet little seemed to have changed. So the asylum era is not a period I hold any romantic notions about. The old asylums not only failed to meet the needs of many of the (excessive) numbers of people who ended up there, but contributed greatly to the fear of mental illness and being ‘put away.’ Many people were subject to abuse and neglect within their walls. Yet now, we seem to be in a period in which, as local units are closed down and what beds remain are centralised, there is a danger of recreating these asylums. Places where you will have to be really mad to get admission to, in which an increasing proportion of people will be most probably detained against their will, and which will once again be a source of fear and great stigma.

If we are really going to combat the stigma of mental illness, one of the things we have to do as a civilised society is put greater value on how we care for people who are too vulnerable to care for themselves and who do not always fit in with society’s prevailing norms. These are the people who may find it difficult to trust you enough to give you ‘Time to Talk,’ because they will be fearful about what your motives are, and whom you will tell; who will need empathy, care, reassurance , financial support, tolerance and sometimes a place where they can simply just be. Much as I understand the motives behind the antistigma campaign that Mind is currently running in England, there are many people out there at the moment who need a lot more than a cup of tea and a chat to help them get by. They need asylum in the other sense of the word. A place offering protection and safety.

So when a colleague told me the intention was to close all the local beds and build a new mental health unit on a ‘greenfield’ site I suggested they might also want to build a farm too. And you know I wasn’t entirely being facetious.