It has been impossible to ignore the furore that has ignited over the publication of one of the most controversial books ever written about the vexed subject of Mental Health. The book 'Only One Life' has only been out for just over a week and already the tabloids, particularly the Daily Mail have been calling for the author's head.
Headlines such as 'Dr Drug Peddler', 'Is this Woman the Most Evil Dr since Harold Shipman?' and 'This Woman Wants You to Be a Junkie' have all appeared in the Mail over the past week. Melanie Phillips in the same paper called for the author to be arrested, and even the Independent, normally a repository for liberal views, has in an editorial, asked whether the doctor should be struck off!
We decided that rather than rush to judgement, we would ask the doctor to explain, in her own words, some of her ideas and methods and how she will survive what is going to be a momentous struggle to convince a sceptical Press, public and the world of Psychiatry, that her ideas are valid
We meet Dr Rachael Spiro in the bustling canteen at Leicester's De Montford University, where she has been senior Tutor in Psychiatry for the past 7 years. In spite of the infamy that has placed Dr Spiro in the limelight recently, she is greeted warmly by several students and members of staff and chats easily with the the dinner ladies as she orders toast and coffee. It is clear she is well regarded here and there is a sense of protectiveness over her which is just as well as Dr Spiro tells us that she has agreed to be interviewed on TV by Jeremy Paxman, a notoriously hard interrogator.
We begin by asking Dr Spiro about herself and how she came to write the book
.
I had the usual training but I did it in several places and it was interrupted by national service in the IDF, the Israeli army. It was in the army that I began to notice how people would self medicate to help them deal with the traumas of warfare. You take kids who have never even left home, give them some rudimentary training, give them a gun and send them into 'the badlands' They come back and they're high, manic even, they can,t sit down, they are talking nine-to-the-dozen. If one of them gets killed, his or her friends would laugh and cry at the same time, some of them would do a kind of dance. I remember one boy, about 20, started singing a song in Yiddish, he wouldn't stop! His commanding officer ordered him to stop but he jumped on a cupboard and carried on.Then I noticed that groups of them would go outside into the compound for half an hour and when they came back they were calm, no more singing, no more talking, no more dancing. It was strange, then I found out that when they went outside they smoked Hashish behind the toilet blocks. They bought it from some Arab kids nearby. From then on I became interested in the use of these drugs by the armed forces and also the use of alcohol. This was before much research had been done into PTSD.
What did you do when you left the army?
I was half way through med school in Haifa when I was called up, so I wanted to continue with that. The army would pay for it and I also had my army pension, but I travelled, around the world, two years was the plan. I ended up working in a hospital in the Far East. For legal reasons I can't say which hospital, or even the country, but lets say at the time it was the party capital of the world, and still is as far as I know.
This was 1991, The Acid House thing, I worked as a casualty nurse because my truncated medical training qualified me as a nurse in that country. We had a lot of drug casualties in, mostly Europeans; too much Ecstasy, people overheating in clubs and lots of Acid casualties, people who had bad experiences on Acid. We would get five or six every night. most of them would be given Valium and be fine in the morning, but I remember this one girl about 18, British I think, who came in in a terrible state; she was screaming and howling, banging her head with her hands, she grabbed my arms and begged me to 'make it stop, make it stop'. I was scared, for me and for her, I didn't know what to do but the orderlies carried her away and I didn't see her again until a week later when I happened to go to the psychiatric ward. She was transformed, smiling, chatting to the other patients, playing a board game and when I spoke to her she was planning the rest of her trip. The change was unbelievable. Normally people who have psychosis take weeks to recover to that level.
I spoke to the doctor who had treated the girl and asked him about her. He told me he had given her a massive dose of Diazepam and 12mg of Zopiclone but that it hadn't worked and she was still in psychotic state several hours later.It was then the doctor used his license to prescribe banned drugs and administered her a small dose of Chlezopeine, a made up name I think, which is actually almost pure heroin. The doctor said that the girl calmed down almost immediately, became talkative and excited for a while and then slept for 12 hours. After that she was able to receive visitors, but he decided to keep her in for observation because he was worried that she would go back to the party life before she had contacted her family in Britain.
What did you learn from this experience?
more later!
No comments:
Post a Comment