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Let’s try to get some other messages out there that challenge the old, tired, damaging narrative of diagnosis and disorder. Messages that offer hope and solidarity to people and messages that put the responsibility for the primary causal factors of emotional distress firmly back where it belongs.

Naysayers will no doubt be out in force, spreading unnecessary pessimism, about the risk of dependence from use of these agents – however, just because ‘speedballs’ originated in the underground drug scene does not mean that there is not significant therapeutic value to be found in novel combinations of medications.

It’s World Mental Health Day as we publish this. On this day, while we think of how it is good to talk and that 1 in 4 of us (at least) will experience mental health problems, let’s try to remember some other people too. Let us try to remember the people for whom we pay £200,000 a year to keep out of sight and out of mind. Let us consider whether life at all costs is worth forcing people to live in hell. Let us ponder whether our care can harm people.

Professor Sir Robin Murray recently noted that ‘sadly, a few psychologists appear to have been stranded in a Jurassic world where they spend their energies railing against a type of psychiatry which became extinct years ago.’ If true, this would obviously pose a problem for those critics of psychiatry.

Doctors must understand and explain that drugs change the brain, and other parts of the body, in ways that we do not fully understand, that are almost always harmful to some degree, and that may be irreversible.