What does consent mean in practice?

A ‘lived experience’ perspective

This blog follows some of the issues raised in the author’s recently published memoir ‘Unshackled Mind; a doctor’s story of trauma, liberation & healing’. 

Apparently, I consented to ECT. Apparently, I consented to psychosurgery, when I had part of my brain ablated in 2001; the operation was called a ‘bilateral anterior cingulotomy’. When I came to challenge this, I was told that my consent was valid because I should have known exactly what was going on as a qualified doctor. As a result, I have no legal comeback to any of these procedures.

But I disagree. After all, I had been sold a bunch of lies. I had been told repeatedly over several years, that I was suffering from a brain disorder – variously described as a chemical imbalance or ‘something structural’ which had apparently caused me to have ‘treatment resistant depression’. I was influenced by the hierarchy, the consultants and professors who knew better than me…….after all, I was just a junior doctor, a mother with children. I was just a woman and I had not completed years of postgraduate training or researched all the papers – how was I to know?

On each and every occasion that I agreed to any sort of ‘treatment’, I was told that it would make me better more quickly, and more often than not, was necessary to save my life. I wanted to get better, of course I did. And throughout these years as a psychiatric patient, I was prescribed a cocktail of drugs which I took religiously at first. Why? Because they told me they were vital and if I stopped them, I would get worse.

I was in such a state of internal agitation and yet my world didn’t feel real, a strange inability to show emotion, a horrible feeling of being locked in by the numbness and so sedated that even reading, and every physical movement felt effortful. I now believe it was the effects of these drugs that led to this state of tortured misery, and all the while my thoughts were caught up in petrifying, paralysing cycles of negativity. I was terrified, utterly terrified that what I was experiencing could get worse than the torture I was already experiencing. So of course I couldn’t stop the drugs.

There came a time when I tried to rebel. Tired of the treatments, tired of living in the nightmare, I resisted admission to hospital, but I was in the psychiatrists’ thrall, they controlled me and then I had no choice – I was sectioned, detained – legally I had to be injected with depots, I had to take the drugs. I was watched to make sure that I swallowed the mixture of pills and capsules. But to be honest, I wouldn’t have resisted taking the drugs, because I was so frightened by the psychiatrists’ narrative – that I would go further downhill if I stopped them. The terror was so real. I find it hard to explain just how scared I felt.

If this wasn’t bad enough, I was being bullied -some of the nursing staff kept telling me that the reason I didn’t get better was because I ‘didn’t want to get better’………..They said, I wanted to be in hospital. Why would I want to be held captive, away from my family, with others who were also in various states of agitation and distress? None of it made sense.

It felt like I was back at boarding school, and once I was legally captive within their hospitals, it felt as though I was on trial.  I had to prove to them that I wanted to get better and I had to do everything that was suggested and advised by my expert psychiatrists. I was doing my best to be a compliant patient, but life was hell. Life was a nightmare and whatever I agreed to, just made everything worse, but they insisted it was my broken brain that was the problem. These psychiatrists never, ever questioned their part in it, their treatments, their drugs, their attitudes……….No, my failure to recover was all down to me – my faulty brain, my weakness, my vulnerability.

To ensure that I ‘freely consented’ to the psychosurgery – which they called  NSMD (Neurosurgery for Mental Disorder), a fancy name to try and distance it from the old-fashioned lobotomies – I had to be interviewed by an independent ‘committee’. A committee who read my notes and talked to the hospital staff before they talked to me. The psychiatrist in charge primed me before I saw them– it was made very clear, that if I did not ‘freely consent’ then I could not have this surgical intervention which was my LAST chance of gaining a partial recovery. It was the ‘LAST resort treatment’ and I was told that if I continued the drug regime and had CBT after the surgery, I might – just might, get to live at home again. By then I was permanently sectioned and had been in hospital for over a year. At the same time, the committee were told that if I did not have this surgery, I would very likely die.

My consent was so freely given that I couldn’t even remember what had been done to me after the surgery.

Yet it had already been shown that I was in such a state prior to the surgery, that when my cognitive function was formerly tested, the result was that my performance was in the bottom 10% of what was expected.  Not to mention that my memory was shot to pieces by the ECT, some of which was given to me without my consent, under a section of the mental health act. Moreover, through the sedation and other effects on my brain function caused by the cocktail of drugs……….I was certainly not in my right mind that is for sure!

So, of course the psychiatrists had my life under their control. They made decisions, I merely said I understood and signed my name. They deny coercion, but how can that be the case, when I had been lied to? There was no truth in any of their assertions. I did not have any brain disease. I was being poisoned by their drugs, my brain was regularly being damaged by maintenance ECT and the night before the operation, a junior doctor came to ask me to sign the consent form. The following day I had two pea sized portions of my brain deliberately destroyed all because I thought they were telling me the truth. No, not all because of that – I also agreed because I was so utterly miserable that I thought I owed it to my family to be seen to have tried everything – they never asked me about that. I had decided that after the surgery, I would find a way to take my life. I was determined that this time I would succeed.

I know I’m lucky to have survived it all. I’m lucky because after all these assaults on my brain, things could be a lot worse. I’m amazed at the human body’s resilience. It’s perfectly possible that I may yet, have more physical problems as a direct consequence of what they did to me. I know that now’s the time to be grateful for the life I have, and I must make the best of the unknown time I have left.

But what they did to me, has had profound repercussions – not only was my life ruined but by extension, it ruined the lives of my family too. They didn’t consent to what happened to me. None of us did. And none of this was necessary.

If only I could turn the clock back. If only I had followed my gut instinct and said ‘NO’ to the first antidepressant, and the second……None of this would have happened. I would never have become agitated, sleepless, desperate, suicidal. I would never have been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, given ECT and ended up on the cocktail of drugs which rapidly then became a continuous pattern only differing in where I would end up and what drugs I would be prescribed. But, at that time, there was no discussion about the harms of psychiatric drugs – and today in 2025, antidepressants are still being labelled as ‘safe and effective’.

What a disaster. But they are not sorry. They are not willing to listen to my side of the story. They still think they know best as they repeat their errors using human beings with lives and families as their victims and their guinea pigs. These arrogant, dangerous fools whose interests lie in further propagating their falsehoods, trying to convince the world of their wisdom. I believe they will be found out, and I hope it’s sooner rather than later as more and more of us speak out. We, the survivors, who despite them, summon up our courage to speak from the heart as we mourn the many for whom it is too late. Some died by suicide, and we are told that it was a result of their ‘illness’, others are recorded as deaths by ‘misadventure’, still others suffer the catastrophic metabolic effects of the drugs, and their premature deaths are said to be ‘natural’– what a joke. They died as a result of toxic manipulation of their normal brain chemistry by drugs, prescribed by doctors. This is not natural, nor is it suicide, surely this is state sanctioned murder.

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Mad in the UK hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.