Fundamental flaws in the NHS psychiatric system | Letters

Readers respond to a review of the book Fragile Minds by Bella Jackson and share their own insightsI am disappointed to read such a scathing review of Bella Jackson’s book Fragile Minds (A furious assault on NHS psychiatry, 30 June). It is a difficult read, and yet I thought that Jackson wrote about her experiences with compassion for both patients and staff unwittingly caught up in erratic and overstretched services.I am a doctor, with experience as a psychiatric patient and as a senior “staff grade” doctor on an acute psychiatric ward. My memoir, Unshackled Mind: A Doctor’s Story of Trauma, Liberation and Healing, confirms Jackson’s claims that abuses do happen in these places. More subtly, there is a continued reliance on the disease-centred model of biomedical psychiatry without sufficient attention paid to the circumstances and adversities suffered by patients before they ever came in contact with psychiatry. As a result, my own early trauma was unaddressed for more than 20 years, while I was subjected to increasingly damaging interventions, including electroconvulsive therapy and even a cingulotomy. It is only since leaving psychiatry that I have been able to recover. Continue reading...