Spotlight on the Suicides: The Family Doctor

November, 7, 2019 | 13 Comments

Comments

  1. A snippet from From justice.gov.uk/courts procedures It’s worth reading the whole thing – there seem to be plenty of loopholes to crawl through
    It seems as though the transcript was given but not put online? It’s confusing if a case can be closed without goinf through legal procedures. Especially as this case is described as a model to used in other cases. The coroner is also someone who gives seminars to the Law Society so his judgement about this muddle being a model is ridiculous.
    (ii)
    25.19
    (1) Within 10 business days after the final hearing, the party who instructed the expert or, in the case of a single joint expert, the party who was responsible for instructing the expert, must inform the expert in writing about the court’s determination and the use made by the court of the expert’s evidence.

    (2) Unless the court directs otherwise, the party who instructed the expert or, in the case of the single joint expert, the party who was responsible for instructing the expert, must send to the expert a copy of the court’s final order, any transcript or written record of the court’s decision, and its reasons for reaching its decision, within 10 business days from the date when the party received the order and any such transcript or recording

  2. So sad that the obvious is not acknowledged.
    Also later the same day after reading this I read this
    https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/402858/more-young-new-zealanders-using-antidepressants
    It is sickening what is happening. Schools are now pushing mental health blah blah blah see a doctor blah blah blah get help blah blah blah. We all know the fate that awaits and its tragic. True story…..recently got talking to a parent of a high school student year 11. When she quietly told me her son was adhd my bullshit antennas suddenly came to life. I quietly asked how did this diagnosis come about. Wait for it…she told me some people came to her sons school to talk about mental health and symptoms etc. Her son came home and told her after listening to this he thought he might be adhd. So off to the psychiatrist they went and sure enough surprise surprise (not) he was diagnosed adhd. I then said he’s not taking drugs for this is he. His mother replied yes he’s been taking Ritalin for a year now!!
    Once again proof that if anyone thinks they have a mental diagnosis they will have no trouble finding a doctor to agree with them…no clinical assessment required.
    Watch this space nz’s Suicide rate will only continue to skyrocket due to this criminal ‘rotten barrel ‘ situation.

  3. Getting in to the, ‘Doctor’s’ head..
    It doesn’t disappoint..

    The Doctor’s head is a strange place; they make pronouncements which are clearly untrue, they talk about ‘medication’ as if they were an expert, when they clearly don’t know what they are talking about, they pick-and-mix without the least understanding of how they are bouncing around the recipient.

    You would think that Stephen would be luckier than most, his doctor having known him for some time. How Stephen was before taking the drugs and how he then became.
    But, apparently, not.

    I hardly think we need to spell out that most doctors are pretty oblivious about the true nature of these drugs. Switching the Lorazepam to Quetiapine, was pure madness.

    Why do doctors not understand, most of which is written here.

    They don’t listen to their patient, they make up extraordinary and unbelievable reasons for taking the actions they do, they become defensive, when charged, they don’t seem to understand people and they don’t seem to understand how collections of drugs, seemingly, chosen at random, can and do render the patient an insignificant body who is thrown in to extremes and who now inhabits, No Man’s Land.

    In so many ways I can relate to what Stephen went through.
    If my gp had called an ambulance, instead of telling me to drive myself to a mental hospital.
    If the mental hospital consultant who had prescribed Seroxat, had continued to give me the diazepam to take home with me, thus potentially, avoiding, an ambulance visit to a main-stream hospital..

    If.If.If..

    I advised my girlfriend not to take the Sertraline; her Doxycycline was poking out of her bag another time. I was given Doxycycline a while ago, and I said to the doctor, don’t ever give me that drug again. Oh, did you have a hard-time, he said. Brutal.

    Bearing in mind, Stephen is dead, I can completely understand why his doctor was nervous, and had a lawyer – not a nice thing to have on your conscience, if you have a conscience …

  4. Any evidence of ‘Informed Consent’ in the notes? Well m’lord we did explain it to him, verbally, and he understood all the potential for causing harm including suicidal thoughts. Seems the notes werent ‘doctored’ or ‘missing’ or ‘lost’ this time Were they computerised? which makes that possibility harder these days. Instead of getting around together to settle this horror and apologise and call for better training especially the need for access to expert knowledge about drugs – they especially the family doctor compound it by betraying Stephen O and his family. Forgive them they know not what they do? No way ,they knew sod all about drugs, practiced ‘beyond their competence’ and then looks like colluded together. Wonder what the blah blah from the General medical council would be after another few years on the merrygoround.
    I don’t think progress will be made unless people are named – but the family doctor will be used as the fall guy by the lot of them unless the others are named too.

  5. Drs don’t want people to die because of their mistakes. I worked in a hospital and to be honest I saw all the drs go above and beyond to help their patients. They worked long hard hours and you could see the anxiety and tension in them when they had a problematic patient to deal with. I knew from what I witnessed Drs really do have your best interests at heart, they really don’t want to harm you. What I didn’t expect to see though was when and if something did go wrong they would club together to conceal the mistake and make sure they weren’t blamed.

    When I say mistake I mean mistake because I don’t believe any Dr wants to deliberately hurt or harm you but on the small occasions it happens and unless it’s an outright neglect or deliberate harm they will cover it up in anyway they can to prevent any one person being blamed who was otherwise an excellent Dr who had saved many lives before.

    Drs do mean the best for us but it’s the system maybe that is turning Drs against us. It’s the system we need to confront. Drs should be able to without fear report suspected side effects without fear of persecution.

    Could this be were the problem lies.

    • Agreed. Most physicians do not want to do harm. There are many good physicians however, there are many physicians both good and bad, who do not listen to patients in part at times or in whole. There is this hubris if you will and honestly the more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know. It humbles me and I am grateful. Not listening to your patients is the ultimate tragedy in this young gentleman’s story and many stories. He gave them the diagnosis. They did not listen.

  6. Miranda Levy

    9 November 2019 • 6:00am

    ‘I lost a decade of my life to prescription drugs’

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/mind/lost-decade-life-prescription-drugs/

    Struggling to come off antidepressants and tranquillisers, and battling withdrawal effects, writer Miranda Levy, 51, thought she was very much alone – until she stumbled on a report officially acknowledging a pill-addiction crisis, and started to find other women with similar stories Prescription-pill addiction is one of the biggest health issues of the day.

    This was big news, especially the official acknowledgment of antidepressant withdrawal effects. Suddenly, they came blinking into the sunlight: the ‘middle-class’ prescription addicts who for years had been called attention-seeking by their GPs, with ‘medically unexplained symptoms’. Also vindicated were the sympathetic psychiatrists who’d been seen as outliers with a vendetta against pharmaceutical companies. 

    ‘Oh yes,’ says Healy. ‘Put it this way, if the factories that make these drugs blew up tomorrow, we’d have a serious problem.’

  7. Note to self and others: above is an experienced psychiatric doctor saying that he favours a year of daily intake of diazepam over SSRI.

    That says alot to me, in many ways.

    And I agree, if used with openness about withdrawal/dependence, benzodiazephines are better to get expected and foreseeable results with, and less likely to produce unwanted results. Caution of overdosing and self-medicating must be applied. Preferably with blood concentration tests each 6 months, if such exists.

    And despite benzos has caused many ‘addicts’ and ‘sufferers’ over the years, it also says that we just don’t know how someone will react to a SSRI.

    And like Stephen, highlighting how different one person reacts to two drugs in the same family of drugs.

    Off topic: my current doctor decietfully grinned at me when I said I had been healthy for 23 years prior to my first visit to psychiatry, -“…but what brought you there?”, he asked….!
    Ove2019

    • Yes Ove, and the said experienced psychiatrist prescribes Diazepam to support a patient when withdrawing from psychiatric drugs, which is extremely helpful. However, the primary care team, who have a written confirmation of this, still refuse to prescribe in such a way that would be supportive. In fact, it’s rather like drawing blood from a stone to get a prescription from them at all – the word Diazepam sends them into a frenzy!

      • Mary, the spiteful irony for me is that I expressed my own concern when I was first prescribed diazepam, I was terrified to take a pill that I had heard so much bad things about. (And my aunt was, and is, a victim of the 70’s prescription bonanza of them.) So here I was, scared to take a pill that I believed could get me to ‘doze off’ and making me an ‘addict’, and possibly ‘unpersonalize’ me. Meanwhile I eagerly took my 40mg of Seroxat each day, no questions asked, a ‘happy pill’ without a single word of bad rep, and my doctor had only briefly mentioned I couldn’t get addicted to it.

        I’m not saying benzo addiction is a laughing matter, but I’d take it over Seroxat addiction any day. And I’ve seen how horribly it affected my aunt, with tremors, stuttered speech,anxiety and inability to sleep and relax.

        Coming off Seroxat can give similar problems, but it can also throw you literally ‘off the rails completely’. Not even our expert doctor on this page can explain and describe the complete risks involved. Even though he is closer to the truth than all other so called experts.

  8. We”ll probably never know how many people have suffered the consequences of taking drugs which harmed them, Individuals wouldn’t necessarily make the link unless they are forewarned and medics either poo poo the possibility (look how many at the top of colleges even now do so) or don’t record the truth either too hide errors or ‘they know best’ ie better than what the person is telling them. Many amongst us have only had what we reported decades ago corroborated because others have documented their experiences on blogs such as this. OK the Yellow Card has been useless but there needs to be something where people can report adverse effects independently with confidence they will be recorded accurately . Now notes are computerised and coded they need to be checked to see whether people agree with what has be recorded – or not. Since everything is done to make life simpler for medics there needs to be a check box stating that individuals have given informed consent to taking drugs,( people are entitled to hold copies of notes and in foreward thinking practices can access online)

  9. In desperation, he rang his doctor in his hometown to ask if he should stop the drug —

    ‘His very words were: “It’s up to you”,’ says Tony.

    Tony struggled on until, in July 1997, ‘I suddenly stopped taking the drug and became violently ill.

    ‘My pulse was racing non-stop. I was terror-struck, suicidal and gripped by a fear that I was going to go completely insane.’

    He was admitted to a mental health unit in Hereford, where he stayed for a week. It was a time of ‘utter despair — I just lay there clinging to the bed because I thought that if I didn’t contain myself I might go berserk.’

    In the hospital, Tony was given ‘another pill’ — the beginning of an extraordinary journey through many of the drugs familiar to the almost one million people in England identified by the recent PHE report as having been on antidepressants for at least three years — including buspirone, mirtazapine, citalopram and Prozac.

    Thousands of patients call on Government to implement 24-hour helpline to tackle the crippling addiction of prescription pills

    Niki Jones, Stevie Lewis and Tony Preece each had a dependency on medication 
    They were left to battle their demons alone for many years without support
    Growing pressure on Govt to implement recommendations of a PHE report

    By Jonathan Gornall For The Daily Mail

    Published: 01:13, 12 November 2019 | Updated: 01:16, 12 November 2019

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7674619/Patients-call-Government-implement-helpline-tackle-addiction-prescription-pills.html

    Hell was where Stevie Lewis found herself after being prescribed the antidepressant paroxetine at the age of 41 by a GP in December 1996 after she complained of insomnia.
    She spent two decades battling to extract herself from the grip of the drug –

  10. Anne-Marie is right in saying that (most – my addition) doctors work hard to help their patients but doctors are on a hiding to nothing.
    1. Drug companies want to sell their products and often sale staff are pressured to sell; whether they know or invent claims the doctors hear what the are told. The doctor in this case believed what he tad been taught but there was no comeback against the manafacturer of the improper drug.
    2. The human body is extremely complex and we see experts slaving away for years just trying to understand one small facet. Despite many years of training no GP can be expected to understand everything about every possible malfunction of the body let alone know the medication needed.
    Two examples: returning from the tropics I spent five days in a hospital which had my records trying to find the cause of pains and failing. .Months later a Norwegian medical student without knowledge of my background saw and immediately realised I had got the same malaria symptoms. Second example: wife of a colleague had a normal birth but never recovered despite every effort of hospital staff. As he was by her side for her last hours a medical student asked if she had been tested for celiac disease; they had not and she recovered
    3. During and following the Covid 19 pandemic we hear of and the medical profession pushing “mental problems”. Being ECV I or illness.locked up at home for a year or so but mentally unstable? – no way, Jose**. I see all this public palaver as boosting an invasion of doctors’ surgeries of those who want medicine like those mentioned here “because it is their right” . With doctors’ relative innocence perhaps we are going to see an epidemic worse that the Covid19 problem.
    ** I think this may be a generational thing. At school during the Cold War some of us were given advanced rescue, fire fighting, radiation and first aid training. Never said, we knew that come the worst it would us to pull the trigger for someone with advanced radiation poisoning. I have had work colleagues badly affected by seeing the results of car crashes – they understood and didn’t need drug “help”. Life now is too sterilized – people just never see or understand death

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