It is now fifty years since I started working at the Brook Hospital in Woolwich, and more than forty years since I picked up my Springfield Hospital pager on my first day as a psychiatric trainee. I have done a lot of different things as a psychiatrist. Amongst them, I am most proud of what […]
Archive | Mental Health
Glenburnie Gate
Pre-registration house jobs were supposed to comprise twelve months working under close supervision whilst a decision was made whether the doctor should be allowed to work as an autonomous medical practitioner. In practice, it was unheard of that anyone should fail to move from provisional to full registration. My house jobs were due to end […]
Community care
When we first moved to our flat in Bromley, the adjoining Victorian villa was divided into two maisonettes, one of which was occupied by a young family. The street was designated for redevelopment, and when the occupants moved on, the building was left empty. After a while, we began to notice signs of activity and […]
Psychiatric Epiphany Part 3: The winter of discontent
Having decided to become a psychiatrist, I watched the autumn of 1978 fade into the notorious Winter of Discontent, the prelude to Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory. Leaving aside public sector strikes and severe cold weather, rather a lot of significant events in my life happened in the last three months of 1978. My long […]
Psychiatric Epiphany part 2: Formerly Surrey County Asylum
My wife has a habit of forgetting to tell me things. When she was at university, she neglected to tell me that her parents would be moving house before she came home for the holidays and I only found out by accident. She denies that this was an attempt to dump me and says she […]
Psychiatric Epiphany Part 1: Walking to Dartford Heath
When I was growing up, Bexley Hospital was the psychiatric facility for our part of London. “You belong in Bexley, you do!” was a regular childhood taunt. In 1968, when I was 12, my Auntie Peg was admitted to Bexley Hospital, where she was given a course of ECT and she was started on the […]
Small betrayals, Isaac Newton, John Milton and me
Most people might think that Isaac Newton and John Milton have very little in common with me, but they would be wrong. Despite some disparities with regard to stature within our chosen fields of endeavour, we belong to a select group. We (I like to think of the three of us as ‘we’) are all […]
The flame still flickers
I have had a good idea. Let’s acknowledge that the functionalised system of care in mental health was never a clearly articulated policy, that it was never based on proper evidence, that most patients and professionals dislike it and that it does not work. Let’s abandon it. All we have to do is to agree […]
*I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free
In recent months, I have found it difficult to prevent myself from continually blogging about the rise of the new brutalism. The next most pressing issue, as far as I am concerned, is the rapid and entirely unnecessary dismemberment of the NHS. I feel a bit trapped by the state of the world, which feels […]
A different drum beat
It is afternoon, and we are sitting in the peaceful setting of the courtyard of the Green Hotel, Mysuru, south India, drinking cappuccino and eating date and walnut cake. All of the ambiguities of the British relationship with India are here. The Green Hotel is run by a UK charity as a model of sustainable […]