Kerrie Wooltorton is dead. But she isn’t going to go away. Her sad suicide, and the aiding and abetting of that suicide by her doctors, have opened a door to a cesspit of legal incompetence and medical Eichmannship.
For those who have been frying fish for the last few days, KW was a woman with both depression and emotionally unstable personality disorder who wanted to kill herself. That’s what she said, anyway.
Her method was self-poisoning by anti-freeze. She had several goes, all of which failed. At her last attempt, she got the dose right. She did not wish to die alone and in pain. So she presented to her local casualty, asking for pain relief and comfort, but no life-saving treatment. She said this verbally, and in her so-called “living will”:
14/09/2007 To whom this may concern
If I come into hospital regarding an overdose or any attempt of my life, I would like for NO life saving treatment to be given. I would appreciate it if you could continue to give medicines to help relieve my discomfort, painkillers, oxygen etc. I would hope these wishes would be carried out without loads of questioning.
Please be assured that I am 100% aware of the consequences of this and the probable outcome of drinking antifreeze, eg death in 95-99% of cases and if I survive then kidney failure, I understand and accept them and will take 100% responsibility for this decision.
I am aware that you may think that because I called the ambulance I therefore want treatment, THIS IS NOT THE CASE! I do however want to be comfortable as nobody wants to die alone and scared and without going into details there are loads of reasons I do not want to die at home which I realise you will not understand and I apologise for this.
Please understand that I definitely don’t want any form of ventilation, resuscitation or dialysis. These are my wishes please respect and carry them out.
Yours sincerely
Kerrie Wooltorton
This placed her doctors in a bit of a spot. On the one hand, the Suicide Act 1961 makes it an offence to aid and abet a suicide, while on the other hand the Mental Capacity Act 2005 requires a doctor to respect the will of a capacitous individual.
Good doctors know better than to let any bull, let alone a legal bull, toss them in the air. They know there will be sharp horns waiting for them when they land.
Good doctors belong to a profession with a long and noble moral tradition, and that tradition provides a moral compass that enables a doctor to steer with confidence through the foggiest of medico-legal minefields.
But this didn’t happen in Norwich.
Instead, it appears the doctors in Norwich waved their hands in the air and bleated “Help we don’t know what to do!”. They shirked their duty – which includes making decisions in difficult circumstances – and passed the buck. There is a name for this process: it is called the collusion of anonymity.
This is very sinister. For not only did these doctors pass the buck, they also in so doing agreed to subjugate their conscience to a third party.
Unfortunately, the third party was a bunch of legal contortionists and that collection of clowns known as the hospital managers, including, of course, the medical director.
These clowns and contortionists, at their remove from the bedside, came to the view that the MCA, and so KW’s living will, held sway. The doctors at the bedside were ordered to stand back, and allow KW to die. We do not know what care and comfort, if any, they did provide to this poor woman.
The Wooltorton family have decided to sue the hospital. That is a courageous – and right – thing to do.
The reason it is right as well as courageous is that the government have slid a toxic Act under the back door of our legal code – an Act which when misused, as it has been, and will continue to be, can be used to justify the most sinister of actions. It is an Act that provides a Licence to Kill. It has to go. The Wooltortons, by taking the case to the Courts, will throw light on the need to remove this dangerous law.
The doctors at the bedside, the ones who stood back, will no doubt adopt the Nazi defence of saying they were “just following orders”. This will not wash. Not only did they place themselves in the subservient position of asking for and then following orders when they had no need to do so, they also chose to follow bad orders. As Nuremberg and other Courts have shown, “just following orders” is no defence when evil is abroad.
Dr No is in no way a rabid pro-life nutter. He aims to strike a balanced view. At medical school, he was taught never to kill, but also never to strive officiously to keep alive, and that has always served him well in times of uncertainty. He knows his duty is to strive to cure sometimes, to relieve often, and to comfort always.
KW was a woman with a long history of mental health problems. She presented as an emergency. She may or may not have had capacity, but time was of the essence, and deciding capacity in such circumstances requires a fuller picture of the patient and her illness, and how it affected her ability to weigh the facts so as to decide, than the circumstances allowed. The right course was for the doctors to treat first, and ask the questions afterwards.
Dr No has written elsewhere of the importance of autonomy, and the right to self-determination, and what should happen when these principles clash with other important principles, such as the right to life, and the doctor’s duty to preserve life.
He accepts, as he does with abortion, that there are times when an action that appears to contradict a doctor’s duty might in fact be in an individual’s best interests. But he is sure these matters should be deliberated in the calm of a consulting room, not the maelstrom of a casualty department.
It is in such difficult circumstances as these that the doctor turns not to the law, but to the Hippocratic tradition that has guided doctors throughout the centuries. It is there, and not in the law, that he will find the oxygen of morality that will sustain him throughout even the most testing of moral choices.
Anon 5.20pm again
I didn’t mean to relate to unborn children, my statement was really posting the question who is more rational?
is it miss A
who has a very low depressed/personality disorder who has decided to end her life because she doesn’t like her existence and has written a document to say that she doesn’t want to be revived through her demise
or Mrs A
has just given birth to a healthy young girl but has a post partum haemorrhage and given a blood transfusion would live to look after her daughter, but declines this as she is a Jehovah’s Witness and dies, leaving a motherless child…
I have read Dr G’s posts, and this is an ethical dilemma, but Holey Fuck we are continually told to respect patient’s requests.
Where do we go now?
Or what about Patient C who has come into A and E with same document as patient A but she has been snatched into membership of an extreme “cult” and her brain has been “doctored?”
Or patient D who is depressed for nine months but who is as happy as Larry for three months year on year?
Or patient E who is depressed for one month a year only but perfectly happy for the other eleven?
The default position in the law is that all are deemed to have “capacity” till proven otherwise.
Trouble is it takes a bit of crystal ball gazing to define “capacity”, neither is it evidence based, so it is back to the doctor’s moral compass followed with justification in court if necessary.
It seems to me the law is, by its nature, an attempt to reduce complex situations to protocol. Patients are unique and devilishly complex and so many medical judgments including those surrounding suicide cannot be placed within the context of a protocol.
William Armstrong, The Norfolk coroner involved, stated in his conclusion regarding the KW case that “ it was not a moral judgment – it was a judgment based on the law.”
It may well be that we are now seeing morality and the law parting company. And that is the ultimate testing ground of medicine as a profession.
“It may well be that we are now seeing morality and the law parting company. And that is the ultimate testing ground of medicine as a profession.”
You have hit the nail on the head: this is the pre-condition necessary for creep of the most sinister kind to occur. Think Nazi Germany.
But there is also some hope – the Nuremberg trials. “Just following orders” – ie just following the law – is not a defence when, as I said before, evil is abroad.
One of the lessons from Nazi Germany was that old cliche “The Banality of Evil”. The devil does not wear horns and a red latex jumpsuit; he sits next to you and I, and looks like you and I do.
Your last paragraph is so true and is the reason why creep comes so quietly and so easily.
I have been trying to clarify, in my own mind, whether the Norwich doctors did or did not abet KW’s suicide.
The OED gives two current definitions for abet, v, one of which is:
“esp. in a bad sense: To encourage, instigate, countenance a crime or offence, or anything disapproved of”
Countenance seems relevant: its definition includes:
“to give countenance to; to look upon with sanction or favour; to favour, patronize, sanction, encourage, ‘back up’, bear out a thing (action, practice, opinion, etc.)”
An example I found of abetting which is particularly relevant because it describes an act of omission (failing to turn the alarm on):
“The manager of a jewelry store fails to turn on the store’s silent alarm on the night she knows her cousin plans to rob the store. Her conduct is that of abetting the Robbery. If, however, she merely forgot to turn on the alarm, she would not have abetted the crime.”
I do not think the Norwich doctors could argue that they did not countenance, or sanction, KW’s suicide. The fact that their act was an act of omission (they omitted to treat) does not alter the position. There were also aware that the suicide was happening (you can’t abet something you don’t know about – but, as we know, they knew only too well what was going on).
So: it seems to me that the Norwich doctors did abet KW’s suicide, certainly in a moral sense, but also quite possibly a legal sense – the MCA 2005 notwithstanding.
“countenance a crime or offence”
Robbery is a crime.
On the other hand you could argue that since suicide per se is not a unlawful, then it is not unlawful to countenance it. So, if “countenance” means “looking upon” it would have quite different legal implications from “countenance” meaning “encourage.”
It’s all a play on words.
A mess, really.
The wording of legal documents should not be murky like this.
But abetting a suicide is a crime…so if the Nor-docs abetted a suicide, even though suicide is not a crime, abetting a suicide is a crime (Suicide Act 1961).
They certainly countenanced (gave face to) KW’s decision to kill herself.
I agree much of this is word play, but it is word play about very important matters.
According to her, ‘KW was a woman with both depression and emotionally unstable personality disorder’.
What does that mean? Depression is not a legitimate medical illness in the same way that, for example, diabetes is. As the Jungian lay analyst John Layard put it, ‘depression is withheld knowledge.’ Layard had been so depressed he shot himself in the head with a pistol and survived so he knew what he was talking about.
‘Emotionally unstable personality disorder’ sounds like a variation on ‘histrionic personality disorder’ or ‘hysteria’ or any of the other stigmatising, pathologising labels inflicted, particularly on women, by unscrupulous ‘psychiatrists’ who do not then need to enquire further into the causes of the malaise or whether there is any trauma in the background. ‘Borderline personality disorder’ is another case in point. As Judith Lewis Herman points out in ‘Trauma and Recovery’, that diagnosis is nothing more than a sophisticated insult.
In this tragic case, it sounds as if the woman was doubly let down by her psychaitrist and the cowardice and stupidity of the doctors who aided and abetted her suicide. It is absurd that the law put them in this position and incredibly incompetent and irresponsible of the doctors concerned not to have tried to save her.
I write as a survivor (so far) of multiple attempts to remove myself from a life which had been made completely unbearable by the behaviour of other people. I have very little respect for a large part of the medical profession and ‘psychiatrists’ in particular. Most of the ones I have met have been wholly unsuitable for the job, lacking in empathy and imagination, frequently dishonest and abusive and often thoroughly immoral. Some time ago I sent a copy of about 300 documents and medical records on CD to Professor Keith Hawton, now director of adolescent suicide research at Oxford, congratulating him on correctly recognising my condition just after my seventeenth birthday: one good turn deserves another and I advised him that in my experience the best way of preventing adolescent suicide is to keep them away from ‘psychiatists’ – especially ones like Khoosal.
My first encounter with a ‘psychiatrist’ was with ‘Dr’ Deenesh Khoosal on 17th November 1982 in the Warneford ‘Hospital, Oxford. I was an inmate at Radley College and had known I was female rather than male from the age of seven. I knew there was treatment (of a kind) available under the NHS and asked Khoosal for a referral to a specialist because I was ‘frightened over what to do’. I explained to him that I intended to wait until I was 21 for surgery and that I would want to live as a woman for a year first – the standard procedure in such circumstances.
On that day, it was agreed with Derek Mangers and the Radley chaplain, David Coulton, that the ‘expectation’ was for ‘expert counselling’. I made a statement to CID about this twenty five years later which I have now published on my blog. The statement was later completely corroborated by internal notes from the Warneford which I will be publishing and distributing to interested parties and uninterested parties such as the GMC.
The notes support my impression that Khoosal is a sociopath who we need not to have practicing as a doctor in this country. There can be no GMC imposed statute of limitations on a case like this. Dr No mentions the Nuremberg trials in the post above. We need to have such trials for the medical profession and psychaitists in particular. We shaould never forget that prototypes of the gas chambers of Auschwitz were used on German citizens who the Nazi psychiatists deemed unworthy of life. My own condition was deemed by the Nazis to be ‘Jewish medicine’ and it is generally accepted that the books being burnt in the news reels of the burning of the books was the library of Magnus Hirchfield and his Institute of Sexual Research.
As I point out in my utube video ‘Kate Middleton on Human Rights Abuses’, Nazi Germany was not a good place to be a gay Jew and Britain has not been a good place to be me. As I have recently explained to my latest GP Dr Gallagher (I had to leave Dr Ord Hume after she harassed and bullied me after I went to the police, there is a fairly consistent pattern of GPs ( with notable exceptions) being helpful and kind in the absence of knowledge and ‘psychaitrists’ being downright abusive.
Between 17th November 1982 and 3rd December Khoosal treated me so badly that on 6th December , I made my first attempt at suicide in my study. Bullying and sexual assault leads to post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide.
The following day, I was ‘assessed’ by Dr Anthony Storr who met me with a barrage of hostile questioning. In 1985, I told a Dr McDonald that I had the impression that Storr had made up his mind before meeting me and was not interested in hearing my side of the story. I was right. He was sent a diary I had written in my study (retrieved from the Warneford in 2008) in which I described the abuse by Khoosal as ‘mental torture’ but chose not to read it. Storr then called me ‘histrionic’. A sexual assault at 13 was minor compared to a doctor comitting a criminal offence against me.
I fought against decades of depression after that and was subjected a lot more horrific abuse by ‘doctors’. I am nor depressed any more becuse the truth is coming to light and on September 5th this year Baroness Rita Pal rode in on her white charger and wrote an article on NHS exposed about the case. Such people help to restore confidence that there are doctors who actually show an interest in people.
The paradgim of thought that depression is an ‘illness’ which can be treated with drugs and which is incurable signs the death warrants of people such as the above. I will have more to say on this topic.
http://katemiddleton-lsu.blogspot.com/
Kate – thanks for your long comment. We owe a debt to you for holding up a mirror to what we as doctors do.
Two things I want to say for now:
(1) I think most (but not all) of us are on the same hymn sheet over the direction in which medicine is going. My posts frequently make reference to Nazification and creep (as of course do many other medical blogs), and I really do believe that this is happening, right here, right now. It is why this blog is called Bad Medicine; and it is why Burke is up there on the strapline, for it is true that “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”. By speaking up we are taking the first step away from doing nothing.
(2) Depression and personality disorders. I agree with a lot of the scorn you have for the profession on these matters – I have seen many patients who have been horribly damaged by the so-called caring professions – but not all of it. In brief, in my book there are two states we call depression. One we might call existential depression, and it is not an illness, it is a state. The other is an illness, in the sense that it has strictly defined diagnostic criteria, and recognised treatments, including placebos, which may or may not work to varying degrees – the jury is still out on this. Be that as it may, Dr No suspects that “happy pills” – mainly the SSRIs – are wildly over-prescribed. It doesn’t help that there are those who go around bleating that depression is under-diagnosed and under-treated.
Personality disorders are indeed often used as a bin in to which unmanageable patients can be tossed. There is a real question as to whether they are legitimate medical conditions that doctors should be involved in, or whether they are a way of labelling deviants who don’t fit in. What is not in doubt is the fact that patients with personality disorder (if they are indeed patients) who do end up in the NHS get a really lousy deal.
On a technical note (and accepting for the moment they are valid terms), emotionally unstable personality disorder and borderline personality disorder are pretty much the same thing (they just come from different diagnostic systems). Histrionic personality disorder is a separate “label”, as is “hysteria”, although we tend not to use that word in a diagnostic way so much these days.
As I have threatened to do so before, I continue to say that one of these days I will do a post on personality disorders – and it will probably include something on Dr Grumble’s “silly girls”. I am resigned to the fact there will be a lot of screeching when I do.
Lastly, I just want to mention that your diagnosis of Khoosal as a sociopath is in fact to give him a diagnosis that is a personality disorder (antisocial personality disorder)! If they are the “stigmatising, pathologising labels” that you call them, then you should not be using them either.
Thank you Dr No for your kind and respectful reply to my earlier comment.
Let me just say in passing that when I told my colleagues in the social [house in Radley parlance] the actual nature of my problem in 1982 (I had been suspected of, and persecuted for being gay, which I was not) it was suggested ‘maybe you could be a Bond girl?’ as Caroline Cossey had recently been exposed after her part in ‘For your eyes only’. I decided it would be worth any amount of suffering to be able to be my true self.
It was worth it.
A few months before that, I had announced in a career interview that I intended to join the SBS…Canoeing, parachuting and killing people, sir! Jolly good fun!’. On 17th November, Derek Mangers at the Warneford was told that I had been ‘teased’ because of my ‘rather feminine appearance and behaviour’!
On the subject of Nazification, after the Khoosal incident, I was subjected to behaviour modification treatment in 1983 without consent and paid for by the Foreign Office. When that did not work and I was very distressed and suicidal in 1984, in Geneva while my father was working at the UN, he was given a choice of letting me be a girl or ‘staving it off until my ideas changed hopefully’ by Dr Rowntree, seniour medical adviser to the Foreign Office. Dr Cramer of the University of Geneva wrote in a very sinister note on March 26th 1984 that I was ‘under investigation’ for ‘psychological problems’.
They attempted to accomplish this ‘staving off’ by crashing me between ‘doctors’ with diffent attitudes to break and traumatise me like a spy. I went out to dinner in 2006 with Alf Torrents, now Major Torrents and a former military attache in Moscow, who informed me that we were ‘planning a tour of Lake Geneva by sailing dinghy in winter and were just getting the kit together when I suddenly and inexplicably fell apart. Alf was training for the paras at the time and that anecdote amused me. A few years ago, my next door neighbour suggested that I am ‘just like Lara Croft!’ I watched the film and was most flattered!
I know this sounds like the product of a vivid imagination – tortured by a ‘doctor’ who sounds like a Nazi in 1984 and paid for by the Foreign Office but it is the truth and the papers are in hands of several lawyers as well as internationally distributed and emailable. Ironically, at the time, I was listening to Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by the Dead Kennedys which includes such cheerful numbers as ‘looking forward to death’ and most appropriately ‘California Uber Alles’ which Jello Biafra has said is a song about fascism in disguise.
One of the reasons I decided to go public was is the way that doctors in areas of medicine concerned with sex have been acting in ways that are totally unethical and illegal. The above treatment is, of course, forbidden under the Nuremberg code and if Rowntree is alive today I would certainly like to tell him how I tried to hang myself as a direct effect of his disrespect for my autonomy behaviour. I am sure he would enjoy that. It must be be such fun being a doctor and torture eighteen years olds by deception without regard for the consequences.
Professor Szasz has recently written an article about Professor McCloskey, the econonomist, and her incarceration by ignorant psychiatrists in the last few years using just the same word as you – ‘scorn’. However, I feel more that this. Where doctors commit criminal offences, they should be prosecuted with the full force of the law.
You may have heard of the case of David Reimer. He was a normal boy who was one of a pair of twins born two weeks before me in 1965. He was the victim of a medical accident and had his penis burnt off. Professor John Money of John Hopkins attempted to turn him into a girl surgically and by brainwashing. The experiment failed though it became famous in the sixties as the ‘Joan/John’ case which supposedly proved that you learn to be a boy or a girl by nurture.
He continued to conceal the fact that the experiment was a failure for years, using the case as an index case to do the same thing to lots of other children. William Reiner, an endocrinologist, has carried out follow-up studies of boys with various intersex conditions who had been surgically assigned as girls without consent has reached the conclusion that the most important sex organ is not the genitals but the brain and it is up to the children to tell the clinicians who and what they are and the doctors to learn.
In 2007, during Dr Reid’s GMC court-martial, I had lunch with him and he described Reimer’s treatment by Money as ‘cruel’. I told hime that I had discovered that attempts had been made to brainwash me into being a boy and he conceded that that was cruel too. Reid saved my life twice. However, in an email he wrote that Money’s career had been affected by the case. Reimer blew his head off with a shot gun in 2004. His brother also committed suicide and the mother attempted it. A lack of insight and proportion on Russell’s part? What is the difference between Mengele and Money?
More fascism. I have just got my notes fom Charing Cross and found references such as ‘she is one of the more attractive’ ones and to me being ‘v feminine’. I had the impression on the day Reid referred me for surgery in 1989 that I was being judged entirely on my appearance and I was right. On the previous appointment he has put in the notes that I was ‘androgrous’ – I was wearing jeans and all psychiatrists know women don’t wear jeans. I have just checked and see he described me as a ‘would- be male to female transsexual’ and note that I was proceeding caustiously. Maybe a good idea when going in for treatment which has the potential to completely destroy one’s life if you get it wrong?
On the day I got referred I turned up with my hair up and the works as far as make-up is concerned and Russell loosened his tie and said, yes..yes.
I asked when I could have surgery and he said ‘any time you like my dear ..’. I see in that letter he has described me as attractively feminine’. I also see that the clinical psychologist Dr Jabuni thought it was most important that ‘heterosexual men find ‘her’ very attractive’. Maybe my blonde hair and blue eyes got me fast tracked. Das is goot Yah! Das is goot Yah! as they say in German porn films. I was eminently f…able and therefore referrable under the NHS. I find this absolutely disgraceful and comparable to gas chamber selection procedures. There are many anecdotal accounts of people being treated so badly at Charing Cross that they have gone home and committed suicide.
I felt very bitter indeed about this. In 1991 I was described as in ‘a highly emotional state’ by Jeremy Christie Brown who had been hired by my parents to make my life a complete misery by trying to undermine and bully me. In 1996, I was described as ‘very distressed’ and both my GP Dr Mairs and I referred to traumas that needed to be dealt with.
I was then subjected to three years of ‘psycho/dynamic psycho/the/rapy’ without consent after asking to talk to a clinical psychologist. I told Dr Deborah Hutchinson that I was suffering from ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’. I had been told this by a solicitor friend, Gabrielle Shepard. Hutchinson denied this, sneering at me that she thought I was ‘depressed’ because I thought I was an unacceptable person’. She wrote a description of me in the notes ‘snarling in a most unfeminine manner’ and writes comments such as ‘she said I had hurt her and moved on to feel sadder’…’She was able to use an intertrtations (her spelling) but replied that she had not come expecting any offers of help’. The description she has written is one of someone with a vastly overworked stress system.
She then subjected me, without consent, to three years of torture which was designed to extract a confession that I am not female. A false confession was written in the notes by Jean Christie whilst a completely different story appears in the letter to the GP. There is no mention of the sexual assault I was referred to discuss because it was repeatedly denied. That was in 1979. I had a call from rape crisis about it two weeks ago.
Fortunately Gay the solictor was around and encouraged me to finally do A levels in English and I took a First in 2002, not without having a breakdown induced by writing an account of the assault when I was thirteen and realising it wasn’t my fault and being set up by the department after a confrontation with Professor Herman Rapport over my right to exist. I pointed out to him that you can call anti-semitism a ‘view’, but it does not make it a valid academic opinion. In the formal complaints hearing which I was coerced into taking forward, I asked him where he was getting his ideas from. He said he had talked to the doctors and I replied that I was not in the least surprised. As Jock Mullard at Radley said when I told him about this, ‘that chap sounds like a Nazi’.
In 2004, James Bellringer, the Charing Cross surgeon who is known for his post operative complications and known as ‘Speedy Gonzalez’ around the wards admitted to me that he has no understanding of what people go through and added that ‘some of them are men in dresses who ask the nurses for tips on how to be girls’. It is obvious that any surgeon who operates on people in that situation is likely to be condemning the ‘man in a dress’ to life of misery and social rejection. Lynne Jones MP has been aware of this since just after it happened and chose to do nothing. He ought to be investigated.
Articles such as that below appearing in the student BMJ are the reason I avoid doctors. It is a sure sign of a bigot when they claim to be broadminded. The reference to ‘fisting’ makes me want to hit him:
http://archive.student.bmj.com/search/pdf/04/05/sbmj193.pdf
In 2007, I told Russell Reid that my experience was closest to that which Jan Morris describes. Russell commented I was not at all like her because she did it when she was much older and had been married. I responded, in despair, that Morris was born in the 1920s. Morris went through it in the 60s and was therefore a pioneer. Reid infomed me that Morris was given a hard time at Charing Cross.
Jan Morris: the Times reporter who climbed Everest with Hilary. Christchurch, Lancing, Oxford and a brilliant writer given a hard time by some idiot of a ‘psychiatrist’. How ridiculous. Her book ‘Condundrum’ was the main source of guidance to me and the reason why Reid branded me a ‘would-be transsexual’. He is a would-be psychiatist and a kind man who saved my life twice but had no insight into anything to do with me. I am very grateful to him but it is very frustrating having one’s life controlled by people with no insight into the practicalites of effectively socially transitioning in a violent town .
After I had successfully become myself in Falmouth in the 80s Donna Burnett, a breast cancer specialist said to me over a coffee in her kitchen that she and her husband Dr Phil Burnett were amazed I had not been killed. There was a lot of violence however. I have have never recovered.
I never had an ambition to be a ‘transsexual’ and Reid once said to me, ‘the trouble with you is you are too bloody ladylike for your own good’. And..’the trouble with you is you are too sensitive and you remember everything people say. You have to me tough to be a transsexual’. It gets wearing being told what’s wrong with you by people who have no real idea what they are doing, however well-meaning. At least Russell is well-meaning. But maybe there is a connection between being ‘ladylike’ and ‘sensitive’ and the heterosexual boyfriends?
One of the matters that came up at his GMC trial was that one of the patients used against him, ‘patient b’ aka ‘Paula Rowe’ (or ‘Paul Rowe’ if she is making up stories for the Grauniad) had had a second opinion from Peter Redgrove, winner of the Queen’s Gold medal for poetry and co-author of The Wise Wound: The meanings and myths of menstruation with his wife Penelope Shuttle.
Russell asked anxiously, ‘Was he qualified?’
I said that Redgrove was a genius in my estimation.
When I saw him in November 1988, he said, ‘I think you will go through hell and then you will be a wise woman and you will be able to do the same work I do; on the principle of the wounded healing the wounded’.
The Wise Wound is excellent on the subject of ‘silly girls’ and unfortunate medical encounters. Freud wrote, if you want to understand women turn to the poets. In the Wise Wound they write: why not turn to the women?
On the topic of personality disorders, I suppose it is rather hypocritical and perhaps illogical to diagnose Khoosal as a sociopath whilst at the same time pouring scorn on the idea of personality ‘disorders’. However such behaviour is certainly antisocial, criminal and deserves to be stigmatised.
Whether it is pathological or not is a very interesting question and one worthy of examination. We have large numbers of people in society at the moment (and probably always have) many of them in positions of power who behave like him. Are they responsible for their behaviour or not? Certainly the anti-social behaviour needs to be understood and recognised in order to deal with it. What makes a Barton, Shipman or Khoosal behave as they do? how do we recognise them? And how do we stop them harming other people? How do they get weeded out at medical school?
Or my parents who also behave in the same way. I have just retrieved a letter from twenty years ago in which my mother writes to Dr Reid ‘we do not regard our letters as ‘selfish’ ‘aggressive’ or ‘threatening”…before going on to make a series of threats….. and ‘diagnosing’ me as emotionally unstable. There was no connection between having compulsively dishonest letters written behind my back in my mid twenties and emotional distress, of course.
I had not realised that borderline and emotionally unstable personality are basically the same. So called bordeline is a response to trauma. People can be helped. If the suicide lady was told that she had a personality disorder by a professional then he/she contributed to her death. That would be depressing in itself.
On the Khoosal topic, it is amusingly ironic to note that he is quoted in an article entitled ‘Doctor, am I crazy’ in The Gruaniad in which the author writes:
‘The world of psychotherapy, like the world of mental illness, is a maelstrom of meaningless words, contradictory messages and intimidating voices – quite literally, psychobabble – which is hard to navigate even with expert help. …..Some people are put off by the stereotype of the twisted Freudian ‘shrink’ lying you down on a couch and asking about your sexual fantasies.’
I have evidence showing he is far worse than the above. Here is the whole thing:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2000/jan/30/newyou.life13
Hack again?!
The problem is that such notes can be written just by anyone who wants to kill a person in that sophisticated way. So if doctors become that submissive it will relay the charge upon them, legally.
The suicide of Kerrie Wooltorton was quite a shock to the world. We should not give much publicity to these sorts of incidents.
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Incidents like these tempts youngster of this generation to use such drugs and do stupid things.