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 its use may be in healthcare. Until recently it was inconceivable that patients would say their doctor was Gaslighting them. Now almost anyone suffering an adverse event on a drug reports medical gaslighting – see Gaslighting in Healthcare.
Authority
This image is from the Wikipedia entry on Milgram’s experiments.
In 1961, Stanley Milgram, an American social psychologist, recruited volunteers to participate in a study ostensibly about learning. The teacher (T) had to shock a learner (L) if the learner gave the wrong answers to questions and was told by the Experimenter (E) to increase the doses of electricity in the event of wrong answers. While many volunteer Ts were agitated at what they were doing, two in three continued to do as they were told up to lethal levels.
Milgram’s experiment casts hypnosis in a new light. Supposedly only some of us are hypnotizable and do crazy things at the suggestion of a dominant other. But Milgram showed that most of us in response to Authority obey crazy orders.
Prior to World War II, few could have believed that Germany, perhaps the most cultured and scientifically advanced society in the world, with a large Jewish population contributing significantly to its culture and science, could possibly have descended into civilizational erasure.
Milgram, like all Americans, especially psychiatrists and psychologists, believed the Holocaust pointed to a fundamental flaw in the German character. It couldn’t happen Here. The psych view was that the Nazis were latent or closet homosexuals. Psychoanalysis, a Judeo-German creation and immigrant to American shores, would make sure it couldn’t happen Here.
The recent movie, Nuremberg, based on The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai, outlines the encounters of US psychiatrist Douglas Kelley with Herman Goering that convinced Kelley it could happen Here. The dismissal out of hand of Kelley’s efforts after the War to tell Americans it could happen Here led to him developing an alcohol use disorder and to his suicide – 3 years before Milgram began his experiments. It turned out that Germans, even concentration camp guards, were no different to Americans.
RxISK’s Guilty until Proven Innocent post dealt with prescription-drug abuses through the medium of sexual abuse. The injured need to follow the example of women who have got fed up being assaulted and have become more assertive, almost literally taking the law into their own hands. They, the women, and we, the drug abused, need to stop depending on the system, on authority, to be fair and deliver justice. The system is rigged. We are at risk if we fail to realize this.
The Magic of Medicine
While there have always been abuses in medicine especially in psychiatry, up until 1990 doctors behaved semi-decently. If we decided we had a problem, we brought it to ‘our’ doctor who even came to our house if need be. They brought the magic linked to a wisdom borne from experience to bear on our problem.
From the 1950s, this magic came supplemented with new medicines. As the new drugs were viewed as unavoidably hazardous, they were made prescription only. Medical experience helped doctors bring good out of the use of these poisons by remaining observant and applying common sense.
Physicians then were professionals, which meant they prioritized our concerns – helping us to live the lives we wanted to live. See Getting Engaged to a Doctor and Who’s Afraid of Science. This was a forerunner of Relationship Based Medicine – more an experienced parent and inexperienced child then perhaps than the partnership of equals it needs to be now.
As professionals, physicians like lawyers were independent of Church, the First Estate, and State, the Second Estate (which had meant the aristocracy but increasingly came to mean a bureaucracy or Deep State) that from time immemorial had commonly wanted us, the third estate, to live the lives that suited them. The Gutenberg Revolution followed by the French Revolution had brought a Fourth Estate into view – independent academic and lay media.
Doctors are still decent people, as are regulators, company people and the media, but they have now been recruited to a mass Milgram experiment and, in principle at least thanks to Milgram, we now know a lot more about what decent people are capable of.
Prozac 20 milgrams
With Prozac and other SSRIs, companies managed to relocate the magic of medicine into their pills. The poisons have become sacraments.
Any token magic left in doctors lies in their ability to write a prescription – not in their ability to engage with us
Rather than us taking our problems to an experienced doctor looking for help to live the lives we want to live, on pain of being denied coverage health systems summon us for screening and, giving us problems we didn’t know we had, administer ‘sacraments’ to us. On average now, we take more sacraments daily than any cloistered religious folk ever did.
The Fourth Estate has ceased to exist. Doctors, regulators, and both academic and lay media are hemmed in by a ghostwritten, soon to be AI written flood of articles on the benefits of the sacraments. Not even the most famous medical journals dare blaspheme and publish any hint, especially one written by a doctor, that one of the sacraments might come with hazards – Silencing Doctors, Silencing Safety.
Doctors have been forbidden to go by experience or use common sense. Their wisdom is dismissed as anecdotal – as misinformation. The only acceptable truth about the sacraments comes from company publications, which extol their virtues to the point where Cardinals like Ian Hudson can tell juries that Evidence Based Medicine shows that paroxetine has no side effects whatsoever – See Gaslighting in Healthcare.
Guidelines rather than Angels bring us the Good News (Gospels) of Salvation. Angels bearing Guidelines stand at the Gates of Heaven with flaming swords in hand – none who deviate from the Way, the Truth and the Light can enter here. See – The NICE before Xmas.
The Angels bearing Guidelines take the place of Milgram. Doctors are caught between the patient whose body needs to learn to conform to the commandments and the Angels who insist the patient must stay on the treatment for at least 6 weeks and respond, or else the dose must be increased.
There are differences between the original Milgram experiment and now. For one, the patient (the learner) is real rather than an actor.
Another is that the electricity is real and rather than starting low and raising it in increments, the initial dose is at a lethal level – 20 milgrams of Prozac as the dose response curve below shows.
Lilly ran with a lethal dose of Prozac because it was proving very difficult to get Prozac licensed and they were taking no chances with their Golden Egg. In order to run their trials at 20 milgrams they had to put a large number of subjects on concomitant benzodiazepines in order to damp down the agitation so much milgraming can cause.
Despite also running a trial of Prozac 5 milgrams and finding it just as good as 20 milgrams, Lilly did not bring the lower dose on the market. Why not? Because they figured it would be easier to capture the market if Prozac was the once a day antidepressant and doctors didn’t have to start low and go slow, monitoring their patients closely as they did.
Instead, once licensed, Lilly perversely encouraged us to use benzodiazepines to damp down the serotonin pick-up syndrome SSRIs cause. Perverse? Well at the same time the central claim in SSRI marketing was the need to replace these hazardous benzodiazepines with safe antidepressants.
Thousands upon thousands of us are killed yearly because the system can now depend on decent doctors to do as they told. They gaslight their patients and in response to a real patient’s real agony right in front of them – not in a separate room as Milgram’s learner and teacher were – they tell the patient they need to keep taking their SSRI, and keep raising the dose – 40 milgrams, 60 milgrams, 80 milgrams.
Family and friends, patients in mental health units and prisoners in prison can see the harm being done but decent doctors can’t.
Many of us have been bewildered by a script for an antidepressant from a decent doctor when, like Woody Witczak, we came in hoping for something to give us a few nights good sleep – See Are HealthCare and Science Compatible.
Bewildered too when finding that despite telling him that things were unimaginably bad on treatment he told us to persist. Leaving everyone dear to us bewildered, when still operating on the basis of trust in a doctor they too perceived as decent, we did persist and ended up killing ourselves.
Worse again we have killed others. In cases like this, despite a cast iron not-guilty case, even with the resources to hire the best lawyers money can buy, there is no way to get a lawyer capable of fighting a not guilty case. If things go wrong on the pills, we are Guilty without Hope of being Proven Innocent. It is becoming increasingly impossible to point the finger of blame at the Sacrament.
Premiers will skip meetings on the world stage aimed at preventing civilizational erasure, aimed at preventing us being eaten alive, but dare not question whether we are safe at the health service table or whether we have already become the food being served up.
Others have been seduced by marketing fantasies about being Better than Well, bringing out our inner Van Gogh, and were impervious to the advice of a doctor whose experience with these new wonder drugs counselled caution.
All too quickly, these doctors quietly adapted to a new reality – one in which they were forbidden to learn from experience. When things go wrong for a patient like 15 year old like Dexter Johnson – In Memory of Dexter Johnson, whose doctor milgramed him up to 40 milgrams of Prozac – or 16 year old Romain Schmitt – Clinical Details Confuse Expert Doctors – whose doctor milgramed him up to 40 milgrams of Paxil, doctors get told by their medical insurers never to blame the drug – see Will Medical Insurers Stop Killing People and Tangled up in Bureaucracy and Who Will Make Medicine Great Again.
Authority
Between 1800 to 1900 in creating modern healthcare, doctors created public health and then indecently manned barricades in France and Germany in the 1848 Springtime of the Nations. Politics is nothing but medicine on a grand scale Rudolf Virchow said then. See Shipwreck of the Singular.
Instead since prescription status gave doctors power beyond the dreams of oligarchs, the ability for a few of us to control the supply of drugs for all and bend pharmaceutical companies to our will, this Script of Power, our Precious, has like Sauron’s Ring transformed us into Gollums, Smeadics (Smeagol) in this case, creatures of the night – See One Script to Rule Them All.
One Script to rule them all
One Script to find them
One Script to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them
in the Land of Mordough where the shadows lie
Our doctors are now employees of health services, even when apparently not. They are model doctors where a model is a shrunken replica of the real thing, practicing model medicine. They are not made of The Right Stuff.
They dish out Probity Blockers in a Transmedicine that increasingly pushes us to transition from members of the third estate into what in these days is more likely to be called Real Estate – something we can charge rents for and make money from.
The word Authority contains the word Author. In any theocracy, whoever has the power to write the script, the sacred text, whether a Holy or an A.I. Ghost controls the people.
We are not doing science. See Health Care and Science in Real Life. We have been swept up by a religious broom into a dustpan and risk like Road Kill being put out with the rubbish.
Rather than reading the Ghostly Books, doctors need to get back to recognizing that when we come to them, rather than when we are commanded to attend, we are the books they need to decipher. These days the harms of the probity blockers they give us are the most likely reason we will reach out to them. The harms of probity blockers are increasingly likely to be the cause of our death if they don’t intervene.
They need to start doing science and that can only be done cooperatively with us.
Great title and content –
All too quickly, these doctors quietly adapted to a new reality – one in which they were forbidden to learn from experience. When things go wrong for a patient like 15 year old like Dexter Johnson – In Memory of Dexter Johnson, whose doctor milgramed him up to 40 milgrams of Prozac – or 16 year old like Romain Schmitt – Clinical Details Confuse Expert Doctors – whose doctor milgramed him up to 40 milgrams of Paxil, doctors get told by their medical insurers never to blame the drug –
Bewildered too when finding that despite telling him that things were unimaginably bad on treatment he told us to persist. Leaving everyone dear to us bewildered, when still operating on the basis of trust in a doctor they too perceived as decent, we did persist and ended up killing ourselves.
Worse again we have killed others.
The 2,400 residents of Tumbler Ridge, BC, won’t know what has hit them.
Except the RCMP know what has hit them – bullets
The Doctors knew what has hit them – medications
If you could design a mass school shooting, in Tumbler Ridge, it might cause them to reflect that a shooting would not happen in Tumbler Ridge.
Never anticipated, circumstances not questioned, many residents have said we knew everyone in our small community. Unfortunately, under the radar, by residents, but not by the Police or by the Mental Health personnel who were aware of disturbing circumstances.
Alarm bells never went off. The Police allowed a family to have a slew of guns in their home. The Medical Teams plied a young man with medications.
You can’t expect the residents to have called this out.
There is a problem.
If this sort of thing happens, shocking a community, it will continue to happen, unless people start to join the dots, and see what is happening under their very noses.
It is excruciating to see the bereaved parents of the children massacred, trying to make sense of it, but there are people in their own vicinity who have let them down.
It’s ok to be worldly wise after the event, but as the ridge tumbles, shootings will continue to climb whilst an undercover young person goes on a rampage.
Dr. Josef@DrJosefWFeb 13
If we want prevention instead of politics, we have to investigate every factor. Ideology. Environment. Medications. Hormones. Access to firearms. The truth matters. The victims deserve that.
https://x.com/DrJosefWD/status/2022350524641874057
Psychiatrist Explains Canada’s Worst School Shooting in 40 Years
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oetL7mI7ehw
A giant chasm exists of links and Tumbler Ridge people, know all about giant chasms, being on the edge of the Rockies…
‘We are the books they need to decipher’. If only.
I recently fell off a ladder and fractured my heel. A mercifully brief hospitalisation was an opportunity to experience the system first-hand.
I know partialists specialising in Meccano health are low risk – compared to psychiatrists who mostly distinguish themselves by understanding neither the human being in front of them, nor the drugs they prescribe, nor the adverse drug reactions their patients are suffering. They’re locked into a ghostly, dehumanised script. But it was still the system in action.
As you say, as human beings most of the doctors were decent, even quite jolly, given the pressure they’re under. Warm human connection – until I dug my heels in (oops) and deviated from their algorithm.
A sweet-faced young doctor spent a long time trying to cajole me, reclining on my trolley, into agreeing to take daily anticoagulant injections to prevent blood clots. This was the guideline for everyone over 18 whose leg was in plaster. I admitted to being over 18, but remained recalcitrant. Didn’t I understand the risks? Indeed I did –the risks of blood clots were small, I was perfectly fit before the idiotic plunge, and the paradoxical risk of bleeding on these drugs I ‘d rather live without. I went through the same rigmarole with pain relief – no, I could manage without, thank you, I needed a clear head to keep an eye on them. Laxatives – no need, thank you – unlike the rather wonderful bunch of older ladies in my ward who were swigging morphine with laxative chasers.
This was just the surface of the experience. What was really going on was a perception we shared in https://davidhealy.org/its-healths-illusions-i-recall/ Lovely folk these doctors, but when their algorithm was challenged, they morphed into Cyborgs. They literally froze – physically, their eyes went – blank. They were lost -for words. The conveyor belt ground to a halt. I had tripped their switch. (And recovered, without their hazardous drugs).
Of course, this was a relatively comfortable, unthreatening system encounter. Quite unlike the gaslighting and human rights’ abuse endured by those in the psychotropic prescribed harm community and psychiatric system. The milgrammed (such a clever conceit). I still keep wondering –if there could be a role for a simple physical and emotional reaction tracker that we patients could use to capture our experiences on psychotropics – to confront – peacefully but firmly – a rigged system.
I know many of us are intimidated by the Cyborgs that lie beneath the bonhomie – and Rxisk reports and even the proforma have failed to deliver against expectations.. Would an experience tracker be less threatening to the system?
I don’t honestly believe doctors can revert to ‘being doctors’ – as one friend on X commented the other day, they’re programmed to obey not to think. I do believe the power to change the system lies with patients and the few who have their backs – although it’s a long hard road.
H
Your description maps onto the experience of a friend whose parent was in hospital with friendly doctors offering – insisting – she take all kinds medicines to cover notional risks. It’s risk management got psychotic – the default is to manage this minimal risk because it is a risk but not management the much greater risks that lies in managing all the little risks.
Can patients change things? Well this parent normally well able to stand-up for himself in a patient setting of course instinctively wanted to be a good patient. He had his advocate with him, his son, who was a doctor who objected and left written records that he did not want his father given anything that was not agreed with him. Notwithstanding this, the system was programmed to attempt to give the father more but stymied by the fact the son in this case was being eminently sensible – and was a very respectable doctor – rather than the lunatic most of us might be perceived as being.
Is there any crack in the Cyborg program through which the light might get in
D
The annointment of the uninformed high priest(ess), our family physician, just to set them up to be the fall guys, is killing too many of us already. There is no need for antipsychotic chemistry in their practices, the very few people with psychosis need to see a psychiatrist, not an MD. People who lose their jobs, spouses, kids do not need pills. They need each other. When they don’t have each other, pills will not fix the problem, just punt it. And, when the inept prescribers have zero clue as to how to safely deprescribe anyone, we have a real problem, particularly when they poly-drug as well. Then all bets are off.