Featured

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.

A collection of non-medical, non-pathologising resources to help us all survive the crisis. A list of blogs, videos, articles and helpful resources related to the coronavirus and the COVID-19 pandemic.

An interview with Professor John Read who joins us to discuss the UK licensing of esketamine nasal spray (Spravato) for so-called ‘Treatment Resistant Depression’. John led a group of 12 academics and professionals who wrote to the UK regulator expressing concerns.

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.

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.