I am reading it - so far it's brilliant.
His early experience working in the NHS was similar to mine. He is right that in those early 1980s patients with any physical illness were not accused of "somatasation". Freud was being kicked out of the ball park because it was recognised that his ideas were based on his personal misogyny and rather dubious fixation with sex. No one took him seriously any more. Now, I grant you, we had taken on Maslow and worse still Rogers (How does it feel for you) and the "I'm ok, you're ok" stupidity but while this was taught in the schools, most of us saw pdq that it wasn't a practical approach at the coal face. (One tutor introduced me to Frankl's Logotherapy and I've never looked back. Why Freud took hold and Frankl didn't I don't know. If you've never read "Man's Search For Meaning" you've missed a treat)
But it was drummed into us "check all physical illness first". All new admissions had all sort of blood and urine tests done in those days. By the time I left we had to beg for even drug screening for obviously "high" admittees.
We watched videos of insulin therapy and "the box" (ECT at it's scariest) as warnings of how psychiatry can go wrong. (ECT was still happening. It still does...)
But while Ralph didn't see the dark side until he became ill, I began to see it increasingly as the years went by. Patient care was suffering and by the time I left psychi nursing and went to the Children's Hospice, it was clear that something was very rotten indeed in the state of psychiatry in the NHS. Corruption was rife, bed shortages made caring for patients horribly difficult and new staff were being chucked out of Uni with a degree in nursing, an no discernible skills.
Vested interests were sucking up the money that was thrown at the bloated system and I think Wessley et al saw the gravy train and hopped aboard.
By the time I became ill in Nov. 2002 the rot was well established.
No one even tried to dx what was happening to me and I was left in limbo for over 7 years. My first inkling that things would go badly happened when two registrars stood on either side of my hospital bed that Nov, one an OB (I was 6mths preg) and the other a neuro and they argued about whether I was to get an MRI, and they weren't arguing over the safety of my baby. His welfare wasn't even on the neuro radar - but then neither was mine. The OB won and the neuro reluctantly signed off for me to have the MRI.
It went missing immediately afterwards. Hospital manager had to be involved to find it.
And so it began.
