Post a Comment On: Bruce Charlton's Notions

*

I read a report about Schizophrenia services on the BBC (it was everywhere in the media) which contains a number of recommendations for government, and wondered who was the charity from which this report originated: a group called Rethink Mental Illness.

That is its name - Rethink Mental Illness!

Wikipedia (but not the charity website) revealed that Rethink... was a new name for the old established National Schizophrenia Fellowship.

And that Rethink... is almost wholly funded by the UK government, with some top-up from Pharmaceutical companies.

So Rethink... is not a charity at all - it is a government agency; a branch of the civil service.

*

What we have here - objectively, not as a matter of my opinion - is one branch of the government lobbying another branch of the government for more money; and the whole process labelled and presented as a radical conceptual re-framing akin to the 1960s anti-psychiatry movement.

*

The exceedingly unfortunate people with schizophrenia, and the equally unfortunate people (including children and teenagers) who have nothing of the kind but are compelled on pseudo-medical grounds to take and become physically-dependent upon 'antipsyschotic' drugs, which produce horrible effects including precisely the demotivation and un-employability of which this report complains... these people are just so many counters in the media spin on a bureaucratic inter-departmental wrangle over funding+.

*

Meanwhile, back in reality, the incidence of schizophrenia (as contrasted with 'early interventions' on people who have not and never would have schizophrenia) is declining...

http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000447.full

...which in the normal course of events would lead to a reduction in services; especially making saving on the expensive process of destroying healthy lives and manufacturing chronic patients by coercively prescribing expensive (on-patent) antipsychotics/ 'mood stabilizers' as an excuse for creating jobs for actively-harmful officials, warders and tormenters that are masquerading as health care employees.

*

+ Reference: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/charlton-bg.html

*