Another doctor who had psychosurgery

Cathy Wield is not the first doctor to have undergone psychosurgery in Britain in recent years. Justine Carr-Brion wrote about her experience in the British Medical Journal in 1995.

"Problems of mental health in the medical profession seem to be a fashionable topic in the BMJ. I am another sufferer, but what worries me most is not my treatment when ill, but the discriminatory label about being a "psychiatric patient" and the effects that this has when I am dealing with non-psychiatric staff.

I have had recurrent attacks of severe depression since 1990. These have usually consisted of rapid descent to a suicidal state, though the physical and mental retardation made attempts to kill myself difficult. I had been on all the antidepressant drugs available in various combinations. My final attempt led to a cardiac arrest, but unfortunately I was in a hospital and I was resuscitated. I am afraid the staff got no praise from me. At this point I was referred for psychosurgery. (No, I did not know it still existed either.) I was on a neurology ward, the operation was performed, and I had no problems.

This, however, gave me one of my first insights as to what a "psychiatric" label meant. The sister was talking to one of the consultant neurologists during his ward round, when she started complaining about having psychiatric patients on a medical ward, and the fact that they did not have the facilities to care for us. What facilities she envisaged I do not know, as we all suffered from affective disorders and were among the quietest patients on the ward, and being a neurology ward it was overflowing with therapists of all types. Treating us as normal human beings undergoing an operation obviously never occurred to her. She obviously also thought that all psychiatric patients were deaf. I felt a strong temptation to leap up and challenge her views, but felt that this might be unwise and might reinforce her prejudices.

I had been well since the operation until the start of 1995, my last suicide attempt having been in the summer of 1993. I returned to work on 3 January to be told that I was no longer wanted."

Justine Carr-Brion goes on to describe how she was detained under the Mental Health Act, and then needed a further admission to hospital.

Read the article here.