Alison

The medical model has many strengths especially if you have the likes
of a broken leg. It obviously becomes problematic when you look for
biological solutions to masculinity, a broken heart or poverty and
despair in communities fuelling alcohol abuse etc.

Healy unpacks well how this psychotropic train crash has happened. I
don't think you can just use capitalism to explain why medicine has
been humbled and failed to stop their capture by corrupt drug company
practice or why psychology and western culture has been seduced by the
psychological therapies. Individualism and narcissism aren't the same
thing. We have collectively become obsessed with ourselves and our
inner workings. We have collectively failed to make the connection
between the social and the personal. There is something deeper and
more cultural going on? With regard specifically to medicine LeLanu in
'the rise and fall of modern medicine' is interesting on all this.
Margaret McCarthy's 'the patient paradox-why sexed up medicine is bad
for your health' is also in my terms very good. The regulators and the
body politic and much of psychology has been asleep on the job despite
the likes of Craig trying to wake us up.

If I am stressed and various parts of me are falling to pieces my GP
doesn't usually try to explain my difficulties in terms of capitalism!
He usually tells me how much pressure he is under! Coproduction
perhaps.

There is interesting psychology involved in the drugs scandal. As a
doctor you are told the ssri is effective, you give it to your
distressed/despairing/oppressed patient and due in part to the placebo
effect over half of them say they feel they have benefited form it.
The person taking it notices the drugs impact on their consciousness
and associates their improvement with the changes and the pill. Ergo
if its working you had better stay on it.

The marketing success of the drug companies in exploiting this mirage
and hiding the short and long term adverse side effects has been
extraordinary. A capitalist master class but also a huge scandal which
has not yet really broken. Its a bit like Levenson. The corruption of
the press was there for all to see but you had to wait for the time to
be right for it to be heard and exposed in all its gory detail. It may
be the huge money that led psychiatry away from social psychiatry and
into this disaster but I suspect it was also a desire to explain
things in their own legitimate bodies of knowledge the body. Psynapses
etc!

The 'plan' such as it is, its still being written up, is to relook at
what was of use and merit in social role valorisation and see what
could be reframed and rescued for this age of yet more marketisation
and austerity. I was never a fully paid up SRVist but I used to teach
it and have found it an incredibly helpful frame of reference to
understand and help prevent some pretty complex and destructive
processes that get acted out in services and communities and which
blight many peoples lives. Coproduction and community are going to be
central themes. I guess I am most interested in people who are doing
it, not just talking about it and how they can be kept afloat and
linked up. It is going to be a book and linked to it there will be
some events to stir the pot and try to build momentum and
conversation.

The points about us and them, survivors and peers are for me crucial
and my part of the book is probably going to be about all this. The
contest for legitimacy between people who use services like medicine
and psychology and those providing them is a real battle zone and we
need better models of coproduction and distributed power. This
involves redefining expertise and patient/client hood? Not least by
letting in the expertise of experience. Peer recovery inside the
current health system is problematic as it gets smothered but will I
suspect go from strength to strength outside it. Its the power of
these voices that I see as crucial in confronting the pharmacological
and psychological mess we are in. Somehow we continue to
stifle/silence them.Paradoxically some aspects of the dire Health Bill
might help here.

If you want to build community you need positive interactions
solidarity and shared purpose? Ideological purity doesn't cut it for
me.

Hope this makes some sense. I have posted too much and am going to
keep my head down for while!

Richard Pemberton

ps The local Whitaker event is going to be done jointly with Brighton
University, the local Clin Psych Division and a number of
advocacy/third sector groups.

___________________________________
There is a twitter feed: http://twitter.com/CommPsychUK (to post contact Grant [log in to unmask]
To unsubscribe or to change your details on this COMMUNITYPSYCHUK list, visit the website:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=COMMUNITYPSYCHUK