Making medicines safer for all of us
Adverse drug events are now the fourth leading cause of death in hospitals.
It’s a reasonable bet they are an even greater cause of death in non-hospital settings where there is no one to monitor things going wrong and no one to intervene to save a life. In mental health, for instance, drug-induced problems are the leading cause of death — and these deaths happen in community rather than hospital settings.
There is also another drug crisis — we are failing to discover new drugs. [Read more…]
From the blog…
Gaslighting, Milgram and Madness
This image is from Wikipedia Gaslighting which gives the credit details. The word Gaslighting comes from the 1944 movie Gaslight about a husband’s attempts to get his wife to doubt her sanity. It caught on slowly but as this graph shows in the last decade its use has taken off. The greatest relative rise in…
Gaslighting in Healthcare
This post features Letters from Peter Scott-Gordon to Lade Smith – the originals are in the link. Readers outside Britain should assume that the gaslighting here applies to regulators and medical bodies in their country also and should not be fooled by this apparently polite correspondence. 4 February 2026 Dear Dr Lade Smith, PATIENT SAFETY I…
Health a Privilege of Wealth
This post was written 5 years ago. It is a sequel to a lecture posted last week on RxISK with its comments – Are Healthcare and Science Compatible? The comments brought out how we now have a system that gaslights both patients and doctors leading to tensions on all sides as this post illustrates. It…
The Once and Future Pharmacopsychology
Emil Kraepelin’s famous Textbook created modern psychiatry a hundred and thirty years ago. After the World Wars, Freud’s influence grew and his thinking dominated the US mental health scene after World War II. Nearly 90 years after Kraepelin established his framework, US psychiatry dramatically swept Freud away under the influence of a group of psychiatrists…
I Come to Praise SSRIs not to Bury Them
This talk was given in Maastricht at the invitation of David Linden, Scientific Director of the Mental Health and Neuroscience Research Institute on November 27 and again to a group of Primary Care Doctors in Sweden at the invitation of André Marx on Nov 28. There were some great questions afterwards. This post gives the…