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INTRODUCTION

‘Say nothing.

Do less.

Respect your doctors.

Trust them.

Be grateful.

I was a chubby, breast-fed, post-war baby, my social behaviour shaped by the ways of the working classes in the fifties; formative- it stuck with me into my youthful sixties, until the day that the certainty of this insight struck me with an intense and very personal clarity: our Health Provision in the UK is utterly fucked, constantly pretending to be mending itself as it enters a phase of what I describe as institutional suicide. Should I survive my carers’ carelessness I will undoubtedly witness the death throes of bodies prepared to function unethically in plain sight- where the patient, year on year, has drifted down their self-interested list of priorities, where the patient as an individual has been rendered invisible and, in most cases, voiceless.

Never ask me to respect members of the medical profession that have been to any degree complicit in this burgeoning scandal.

Never ask me to trust them without just cause.

My gratitude to them is scant.

I am grateful that I have survived the dangers that they presented to my well being and, indeed, my life,  and I am grateful that, despite them, I remain well enough to seek redress through what I do best- writing about things that have impressed themselves upon my ravaged mind.

No monetary compensations are ever sufficient for the damage that they do.

Suing them is what they expect, what they budget for.

I generally don’t enjoy doing what is expected.

Do not imagine that Hospitals do not kill. They do and it is have been proven that they do.

Until they abandon their odious self-policing and subject themselves to a rigorous quarterly assessment of their performances by objective assessors- they will continue to kill patients through their intensive carelessness, and they will continue to damage people’s lives.

My experiences at the hands of so called health care professionals working under the constraints set them by civil servants has been a lifetime’s struggle. Enjoy reading the ghastliness of them do, and do look with much greater scrutiny and learn. Your life may depend on it.

The Liverpool Pathway care-system has been abandoned. It demanded a high degree of empathy and understanding; where it worked it worked in the hands of immensely capable doctors and nurses. Sadly, on the whole it failed because such capability is increasingly thin on the ground. Inevitably the system was justly accused of being murderous.

It was the right move to be rid of it. But we took our time to do this. In that time there is no question that people died needlessly, suffering greatly. The survivors of this system have shocking tales to tell.

Yet the stench of ineffability remains. Doctors going wrong is not something that we are supposed to discuss- that is frankly ridiculous. How dare they ever claim some form of dominion over the patients in their care? They dare because we have allowed them to behave that way. You are not a person, a woman or a man, you are not a patient or a client, you are made a problem of, rendered less than an animal, you are made subject to the unquestionable and all the in-place avenues of complaint are always managed by those brought you to the point of complaining. There are no democratic airs and graces in British medicine. The climate has always been deliberately fascistic- a system where patient power in any degree is considered anathema.

Their PR will say otherwise. PR has never been a friend to truth.

For all those interested in Mental Health do not forget that Freud and his works are substantially discredited. The work of his disciple Jung has somethings of merit but the whole practice is tainted. Psychiatry is cracked. If you have the will to do it excise Psychiatry from your lives- it is not much more than a neo-religious belief system that pushes powerful and poisonous prescription drugs and epic fail therapies. I was once in their thrall but that was yesterday.

If you are in the grip of these devotees, evangelists of drug and other therapies, be under no illusion whatsoever that their efficacy has never been empirically proven. They continue to exist because of habituation and faith. On this criteria alone Voodoo should be made an available therapy at all Mental Health Trusts in the UK.

Globally there are in excess of 108 various schools of psychology- they are as at odds with each other as all of the extant religions. The one thing, the only thing that they all agree on is that psychotherapy leads to more psychotherapy. None of what they offer can be described by any intelligence as a cure.

Before you take your mood states to the professionals for empathy and to be taught coping mechanisms, buyer and taxpayer, client, patient, user at the point of entry beware.

It is madness for people to buy a property in the UK unseen. You are investing money and a full survey is essential.

Take care when you invest your sanity and your life in the hands of Mental Health Trusts and practitioners. They are sleight of hand magicians with smoke and mirrors at their disposal.

Check it out. That would seem to be fair. If you are pregnant and have the choice of hospitals who, amongst you, would not choose the place with the lowest incidence of infant death? The facts are in the public domain now, when my son died at aged 2 days such information was not available.

A Military Hospital, thankfully there are fewer and fewer of them, is no place for a civilian to be treated. You will be treated as if you are a trained soldier- someone honed never to question authority, someone prevented from discussing risk. If you are a man you will be expected to have all of the emotional responses of a man in exactly the way that manliness is defined by the military. If you are not the wife of a soldier prepare to wear a cloak of invisibility. If you are a military nurse- particularly a woman, all of your innate drives to care will be conditioned to fit the system.

Whistleblowers are court-martialed.

Whistleblowing patients of the civilian NHS are always argued to be wired to embitterment and exaggeration.  They are summarily dismissed.

They are dismissed regardless of the compensation paid each year to those who have sued the NHS.

Compensation budgets always are the first slice of the cake to be cut by the administrators. Their  priority has become affording to pay for the vast numbers of mistakes that they know they are going to make. It is all subject to freedom of information laws now, as it should be.

Whistleblowing mental health patients are always besmirched by the labels ‘unreliable’ or ‘mad’.

Sod all that- the game is up. They know the game is up. They are clinging to their abject abuse of power by the quick of their stress bitten fingernails.

I am sacking my female psychiatrist by stealth. Meanwhile Joan Sherryman, I have no problem naming her, is helping me wean myself off of all of the drugs that she prescribed me. It has always been her whole responsibility- prescribing them and monitoring the effect that they have had on me. It remains her whole responsibility to continue to monitor me with great care as I adjust to freeing myself from the dependency that these poisons saddle you with. Is it reassuring for me to know for certain that she is a properly qualified doctor with a properly studied extension in psychiatry, that she is vastly experienced? It used to be, but I have her totally sussed, so my answer is this.

No. Not now, and with very good reason.

That she sleeps at night I have no doubt. How she can do this is a question I have often asked myself but never got an answer to.

At no time in my ten year relationship with The Chichester Mental Health Trust did they ask themselves seriously if the side-effects of the cocktail of drugs was significantly detrimental. There was no occasion when THEY questioned that the benefit I was deriving from them was negated by the suffering they delivered to my body chemistry.

The ten years is littered with my protesting that they examine this issue.

THEY never did.

I would like to ask the UK Minister for Health- the buck stops in that high office, how he can justify such a vast expenditure of taxpayers’ money on a system that is visibly cracked, with the evidence of malignant practice mounting.

Maybe this net-book of mine will hold an honest mirror to his political face. It is not a book of visions it is a window to a well-hidden landscape. I have seen the diseased wood for the trees. How could anyone in their right mind ‘enjoy’ what they will see reflected there?

Enjoying the read is quite a different matter. Writing it has been the best therapy.’

Morgan Minerson. 2013.

INTENSIVE CARELESSNESS is the companion biography to OUTING MY SHAMELESS VOICE which is also a free-to-read website book on Webnode.  

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CURTIS: It can’t have all been bad?

MORGAN: No. Irritating fact. There are sufficient irritating facts like that to make one pause for breath between the heaps of shit. Praise where praise is due. They did save my middle daughter’s life- or was that by accident. And they are generally great, terrific value, in the event of accidents and emergencies. That word ‘triage’ irks me. It has the stench of system about it. My nephew is a top paramedic- his job is priceless and deserving of our respect. They’re also generally good at mends, patching you up and chucking you back out. The rest- you might as well play pin the tail on the donkey.

CURTIS: They saved your daughter’s life?

MORGAN: She was there. I was there. They were there. Eight I believe she was, dying from an attack of asthma. They could give her no more medicine. The consultant said- “Either she will die in the next hour or she will pull through. Prepare yourselves. There is nothing more we can do for her.”

CURTIS: But she survived?

MORGAN: Yes. Had I not gotten her there so quickly she would have died. And they could only do so much- in that sense we were all helpless. A child should never have been put in that position- all the medics had been crap at giving her the appropriate preventative care. If this had been California we would have sued and with just cause.

CURTIS: It was good that she survived.

MORGAN: Well. I wasn’t about to have two kids die on me.

*

I have seen frail ladies abed in cots, shrivelled husks of human beings, swathed in smoke-white, looking for all the world like dried moths pinned to mattresses that trapped their sparse urine. Staying alive eyes sunk into their sockets following the shadows on the smoke-white ceiling as the sun-shifted. On their bed-heads the legend ‘Nil By Mouth’. Invisible to many but not me. Near-dead relatives never visited. No cards, fruit or flowers wasting on their bedside cabinets. The ward far more sanitary than can be guaranteed today.

I visited my mother’s dying father in such a proper spartan place, behind each bedhead there a tall window onto clipped grass and a cherry tree in winter dress. I was eleven, a small boy at the foot of his bed witnessing his dead end.

Fascinating that silence, the crisp and creaseless sheets, the gestures filling long gaps in the language of those who would remain, almost certainly never to see him or his like again.

My ma’s face tearless.

Nursing fish swimming through the gloom on soft soled shoes, their heads decorated with starched fins. Women breathing underwater, in the swim of caring where caring never was confused with making do.

The very mention of matron a galvanising utterance. It was all clockwork and glue and we believed it could never become unstuck or not keep time with the pulse of the nation’s desperation.

Pain-relief no longer gathered from the hedgerows but sorted from a locked cabinet. Behind the tin doors with a blood red cross emblazoned on them there would be medicine bottles filled with the tincture of marijuana, large phials of liquid heroin and cocaine, magic tablets, most of which were stocked by village doctors, some sold over the counter in the village stores.

Then, untipped cigarettes were advertised as promoting good health and well being- such claims all given immense credence by the medical profession. You are immediately ostracised if you light up now. Plain packaging is in the pipeline. Doctors habitually practice an intense bigotry towards the smoker and the drinker of alcohol- western society’s permitted recreational drug of choice, they vilify the overweight, the type two diabetic. It is because of more than just an increase in understanding, the weight of the current empirical evidence, it is very clearly a matter of fashion.

Quite hypocritically the NHS workforce is full of overweight, smoking near alcoholics- I can’t say that I blame them. It is very stressful interfacing with the NHS as a client. How stressful it must be working for them- knowing what only workers know and are forbidden to whistleblow?

The rate of suicides amongst medical professionals is tellingly high, alarmingly so. What is it that they know that they can no longer live with? A necessary question that should be driving all of us to distraction.

How easy it is, in spite of all the supposed checks and restrictions, for them to become addicted to some substance or other. About this, few will ever speak out. You really do need to ask yourself- how sick is your doctor, your nurse, your carer?

You should also remind yourself that, in spite of the charity and investment expended on it, there will never be a cure for cancer- it is not in the interests of the drug cartels for there ever to be a cure for cancer. Advances in cancer treatment are always applauded. The drug cartels applaud them. Advances mean the creation of new pharmaceuticals for the profit of these drug giants and all those who remain in thrall to them.

Africa is the prime continent where cheap cigarettes are cynically sold now- some with that old mantra of them being beneficial to health. It suits us to turn a blind eye to such malpractice. Africa remains a dark continent full of people who hold little significance for us. It is a bleak, black condemnation of supposedly civilised and caring ethics.

It will not wash off regardless of how properly you scrub up. Our hypocrisy has become cancerous and inoperable.

My grandfather visibly gritted his false teeth in preparation for death- a diminutive man, made smaller by the green-painted iron bed. His visitor’s outer clothing damp and smelling of damp- Black Mill, in the Glamorgan valleys of south Wales. The rain recent. Adults at his eyes and mouth, me stuck to his bed-end having visions.

I saw the lonely cherry tree break into blossom and I gasped.

Irascible people turned towards me and I covered my eyes- that vivid picture hovering in my inner dark,  etching itself on my mind for all time. Is that what human brains can do- see the progress of time with certainty? Why all this confusion then? Ah- only some can summon up the future like Blake.

I was eleven and I felt like Blake- haunted by his remaining echoes and the ache of singular difference. You could be no more narcissistic about this than any other gift or disability. I told no-one.

Strangeness would be ostracised by those who still believed in God and they all knee-jerked into prayer when they were confronted by anything odd.

You could not miss it.

Yet my ma heard voices, saw things, was as intuitive as any witch. She buried it.

For good or ill, I inherited it.