Whether it relates to children, adolescents, adults or the elderly, there has been a constant stream of news stories in recent times referring to mental health.
Any reference however to mental health has been inverted. The pessimistic narratives in the stories often relate to the difficulties experienced by people during these difficult times but they don’t focus on mental health. The stories focus on mental illness.
There is an appalling irony that has surrounded the mental health sector for decades. Over the years, psychiatry has continually called for more public funding, which continues to this day. While the investment has been forthcoming, psychiatry continues to report how the number of people suffering mental illness is increasing.
For any other sector which reported what are essentially failings, public funding would be stopped or refused until that sector got its house in order and started producing effective, tangible results. Psychiatrists however blame the patient when things go wrong rather than holding their hands up to the documented dangers associated with their prescribing habits or their use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
It’s also important to recognise that historically, psychiatry has struggled to recruit doctors to the profession. Despite lengthy and extensive recruitment campaigns over the years, psychiatric vacancies are still a major concern.
It’s a given that medical doctors want to do something to help patients achieve recovery with a renewed ability to function in life. While psychiatrists may have a similar hope, their ‘treatments’ produce a different story, causing more illness for the patient along with the potential of addiction to psychiatric drugs or brain damage as a result of ECT.
Many people who have turned to psychiatry for help have ended up as life-long patients. Treatment, whether voluntary or involuntary, hasn’t worked. The concept of a cure for problems labelled as mental illness hasn’t happened.
In an act of compassion and empathy, doctors, whether in primary or secondary care, should be encouraged to help their day-to-day patients of all ages as they themselves would like to be helped, assisting them with real solutions and real medicine instead of referring them to psychiatry where cures are just wishful thinking.
