"I can prove I'm not mad...."

From The Herald, 29 March

Sanity clause
SQUADRON-Leader Eric Foster, who died aged 102 at the weekend, escaped seven times from German prisoner-of-war camps, thereby inspiring Steve McQueen's character in The Great Escape, Virgil Hilts. Eric's most successful escape was from Stalag Luft III. Having studied medical textbooks in the Stalag's library, Eric earned repatriation by faking mental illness. Unfortunately, on returning to Britain, Eric was consigned to an asylum. He soon proved his insanity was a ruse, however, being given a War Office certificate confirming the fact. He used to tell folk who argued with him: "I can prove I'm not mad – can you?"

Christopher May's story

Christopher May from Sussex, England, has talked about his experience of undergoing psychosurgery for Gilles de la Tourette syndrome:

I JUST CAN'T STOP SWEARING
His Own Story By Christopher May

PEOPLE usually cross the road when they see me coming - or they look away and pretend I'm not there.

It's something I've become used to over the years, and my pride has long gone.

Involuntary swearing, screeching, squealing and howling very loudly are just some of the gestures I feel compelled to make, because I suffer from Tourette's syndrome.

It's a neurological disorder that was first reported back in 1825, and then named after a French neurologist Dr George Gilles de la Tourette.

An estimated 29,000 people suffer from it in the UK alone.

It's more common in males and it has no cure.

Tourette's is characterised by tics and these vary in severity - anything from head jerking to more vocal tics like mine.

I also suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, known as OCD and, as well as the tics, I have compulsions to do things like go in cupboards for a particular length of time, or perhaps stare at the same letter on a page when reading.

At one stage, I had an uncontrollable urge to lift up my eyelid and poke my finger into my eyelid and eventually I damaged my eyesight.

I've also forced my finger up my nose so far, it's ended up bleeding.

Tourette's is hereditary, and I believe I probably inherited it from my grandmother who was diagnosed as having St Vitus Dance, which is similar to Tourette's.

I have to take various drugs to help counteract it's worst effects, ranging from anti-depressants and anti-psychotic tranquillisers, to sleeping pills and a drug to prevent me having fits.

Throughout my childhood, no-one really understood what was wrong with me, and I was just labelled as a disruptive element at school.

My mum didn't know how to handle me, and I left home at the age of 17.

Surgery

It wasn't until I was 19 that my condition was properly diagnosed.

My aunt read an article about Tourette's and posted it to us, as she thought it sounded just like me.

I saw my GP and finally my unusual behaviour was formally recognised.

By now, my condition had worsened to the extent that I needed 24-hour care for over six months to stop me hurting myself as the OCD became stronger.

In 1987, at the age of 21, I was the first person in the UK to undergo brain surgery to try and alleviate the symptoms.

The operation, called a cingulotomy, was performed at the Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon.

The microsurgery involved destroying a piece of the frontal lobes of my brain.

After a further two months at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, I was pleased to discover the surgery had been successful in preventing the urge to poke my eyes at least.

Although the effects of the operation were minimal to begin with, my condition has improved slightly over the years.

I've been married twice, but both were short-lived.

My first marriage to my childhood sweetheart when I was 27, lasted just nine months, although she was very supportive for a while.

Support

The final straw came when she found me in the kitchen in a pool of blood after I had stabbed myself all over with a fork.

I married six months later on the rebound, but the condition led to the break-up of that marriage after six months.

I did hold down a couple of jobs for a short while when I first left school, including an office job with the Inland Revenue.

But my twitching and the strange noises I made caused concern amonst staff and eventually, they contacted my mother because they thought I'd perhaps had been sniffing glue.

It's now impossible for me to work because of the difficulties caused by my condition, and I have to rely on sickness benefit.

I live alone in a flat and spend a great deal of time at a day centre run by the Shoreham and District Mental Health Association.

Indian Head Massage is an alternative therapy that I've found particularly useful to access at the day centre too.

The staff there and my support workers have been fantastic, and are currently helping me to get some sound-proofing for my flat, because I know my constant involuntary screeching and swearing bothers my neighbours.

People don't always understand that it's something I can't control.

I was thrilled to secure a £1600 grant from The Scarman Trust, a charity that helps people bring about a change in their community.

I'm now looking forward to running a local support group helping other sufferers in whatever way I can.

I've learned to live with the unkind remarks and prejudices from those who've so little understanding of the illness.

I hope by telling my story it will increase awareness of this frustrating condition, which really does control my life.

As told to Suzanne Roberts

(From the Weekly News, March 30th 2004)

The interview, with photos, can be seen here and another article can be read here.

The interesting career of John Harding Price

Last week the Irish Sunday Times ran an article about psychiatrist John Harding Price who has been struck-off the Medical Registrar in the UK but is still able to practise in the Irish Republic.

A DISGRACED psychiatrist banned from working in Britain is now operating a part-time private practice from a Dublin hotel.
John Harding Price, 74, was struck off the medical register in Britain five years ago after three female patients made allegations of sexual misconduct against him. Unable to practise in Britain, he moved to Ireland and worked as a locum doctor in psychiatric hospitals in Clonmel and Kilkenny.....

John Harding Price worked as a locum in two Irish hospitals in 2000, applying for the first post as soon as he was suspended from the UK Medical Register pending a full investigation of the allegations against him. He was the only applicant, was able to produce two recent letters of reference from fellow-psychiatrists and was offered the post without an interview. In January 2001 the full investigation of the UK General Medical Council took place and Harding Price was duly struck off the UK Medical Register. (He was later to lose an appeal to the Privy Council) By this time, thanks to an alert secretary who had spotted an article about the psychiatrist in an English newspaper, the Irish Department of Health was aware of the situation and didn't offer him further employment. However he remains on the Irish Medical Register.
The Irish Independent published an article about Harding Price entitled "Consultant banned as 'risk to public' by UK council" (Oct 31 2001)

WHEN consultant psychiatrist John Harding Price was engaged by the South Eastern Health Board he brought with him a lengthy history of charges, allegations and admonishments over events dating back to 1972, most of which was unknown to the health board at the time.
It was only after his contract with the South Eastern Health Board ended last year that Britain's General Medical Council removed him from the register, deeming him to be "a risk to the public".
Dr Price has appealed this decision and he is awaiting the outcome of that appeal.
The 72-year-old doctor was also "admonished in the strongest terms" by Britain's General Medical Council in 1986 for "serious professional misconduct".
This followed a whole series of charges in 1986 which included persuading a patient with dementia to sign over share certificates, falsely billing NHS patients, and wrongly directing patients to his own, unregistered nursing home for profit. Some additional charges were rejected for "lack of evidence".
He was finally struck off with immediate effect by the doctors' ruling body last December 2000 for "inappropriate" and "improper" conduct and "serious professional misconduct", which included fondling the breasts of a 19-year-old female patient referred to him for treatment for persistent nightmares.
After being struck off, he immediately lodged an appeal, which was heard by the Privy Council in Downing Street earlier this month. Judgment was reserved and will be delivered in the next few weeks.
The GMC said it found "a serious deficiency in both (Harding Price's) communication skills and attitude towards patients" and considered him a "risk to the public".
The vulnerable young woman, one of several to complain, was told by Harding Price to strip to her underwear. He then cupped and fondled her breasts after undoing her bra, put his hand in her pants and slapped her bottom during the consultation in 1998.
The charges which eventually saw him struck off included an incident on August 22, 1998 when a "Ms X" attended his Lincoln medical and he removed her bra without consent; unnecessarily kept her undressed; removed her underwear without consent while pretending to examine her back.
On March 10, 1998 he caused distress to a "Mrs Y" by persisting in asking detailed and intimate questions about her sex life with her husband without offering any purpose or relevance.
He then wrote to her husband with details of the exchanges without her knowledge or permission.
On June 6, 1999, as duty doctor at Grimsby Primary Care Centre, he persistently quizzed a young woman who complained of severe headache, about her sex life and financial position.
In 1986 the General Medical Council formally admonished Harding Price. In 2000, the GMC wasted no time in immediately "erasing" him from its register.
Bernard Purcell, London Editor

I have been unable to find any information about Harding Price's behaviour in the 1970s, but two court cases reveal something of his financial misconduct in the 1980s.
One concerned a woman who had had a leucotomy. The court described her as having "suffered episodes of a mental illness which originated in her being a victim of wartime bombing in London." She was said to have been a patient of Dr John Harding Price for many years. In 1983 she gave him 73,000 pounds to invest in his nursing home business. The money was returned to her on the insistence of her solicitors, and Harding Price was suspended from his job as a consultant psychiatrist at the Lawns Hospital, Lincoln. (The court case was actually the women suing her solicitors. She appears to have remained loyal to Harding Price.)
The second case concerned two properties in Florida, which Harding Price bought from a patient for a knock-down price (about half their market value). The man later sued for the return of the houses and the High Court found in his favour, ruling that Harding Price had exploited the trust placed in him, and ordering him to return the houses. However the case took a long time to come to court - 9 years from writ to judgement plus a couple for the unsucessful appeal - and Harding Price took his case to the European Court, claiming his rights under Article 6.1 of the European Convention of Human Rights had been violated. (Article 6.1 states that "In the determination of his civil rights and obligations or of any criminal charge against him, everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time...) Harding Price won, but the Court awarded him only 1,000 euros (about 1,200 US dollars) in damages, instead of the more than half a million pounds, plus exemplary damages, he had asked for.

But it was Harding Price’s inappropriate interest in his patients’ sex lives and not his property dealings that finally led to him being struck of the Medical Register. Thirty years earlier, Harding Price had authored a textbook called “Psychiatric Investigations” in which he shows rather too much interest in patients’ sex lives in a not very nice way.

Harding Price remains the Press Officer at the Society of Clinical Psychiatrists, which was chaired by Michael Haslam until he was jailed for sex offences against patients.

Psychiatric Hospitals for Chinese Dissidents

The former Soviet Union was known to have dissidents declared "insane" as an excuse to lock them away and have them tortured. It's pretty easy to do since so many accepted psychiatric treatments are fairly brutal and designed to break the will. It was no surprise to read in today's New York Times that China does the same thing:

Dutch Doctors Say Dissident Did Not Belong in Chinese Asylum

BEIJING, March 16 — Dutch psychiatrists have determined that a prominent Chinese dissident who spent 13 years in a police-run psychiatric institution in Beijing did not have mental problems that would justify his incarceration, two human rights groups said today.

The psychiatrists spent two days testing the dissident, Wang Wanxing, in Germany, five months after China released him and sent him abroad. They said in a statement that their examination "did not reveal any form of mental disorder."

The report could add fuel to charges that the Chinese police use a network of psychiatric prisons to silence political dissidents, often without trial or right of appeal.

Mr. Wang, now 56, was confined to the psychiatric facility after he was detained in 1992 for unfurling a banner that criticized the Communist Party.
The authorities determined that he had "delusions of grandeur, litigation mania, and conspicuously enhanced pathological will," which Western human rights groups say are diagnoses officials have used to lock up troublesome dissidents who have not broken any laws.

After his release in 2005, Mr. Wang described widespread abuses in the mental asylum, known as the Beijing Ankang. He said he lived in cells with psychotically-disturbed inmates convicted of murder and was forced to swallow drugs to blunt his will. He also said that the facility use electrified acupuncture needles to punish patients while other inmates were made to watch.
...
Human Rights Watch says it has documented 3,000 cases of psychiatric punishment of political dissidents since the early 1980's. The group contends that the use of penal mental asylums to confine dissidents has increased in recent years, as the police have sought ways to punish followers of banned religious sects, political dissidents and persistent petitioners without channeling them through the court system.

link

Shocking Teens

This is from today's New York Newsday. I love how shock treatment has now evolved into an "aversion therapy":

Family suing over therapy
Freeport teen's mom alleges Mass. center used excessive shock treatment on her son, violating his civil rights

The family of a Freeport teenager is accusing the school district of violating his civil rights by sending him to a Massachusetts facility for troubled youths that uses electric shock therapy.

Antwone Nicholson, 17, and his mother, Evelyn, say he has suffered emotional and physical injuries as a result of being repeatedly shocked at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Mass., according to the notice of their intent to sue the school district filed last week.

...

An attorney for the Rotenberg Center said the facility tried other therapies on Mitchell, who is diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, before using shock therapy as "a last resort."

...

Between August 2004 and February, according to legal papers and Mollins, Nicholson was sometimes shocked as many as six times a day with a device that is strapped to students like a small backpack and delivers a 45-milliampere jolt.

Michael Flammia, the attorney for Rotenberg, said students who receive the aversion therapy get shocked an average of once a week for two seconds.

"I've had [the shock] and it feels like a bee sting," Flammia said. "It hurts, but it has no side effects."

link

Psychosurgery in China

The history of psychosurgery in China has followed that of its former communist ally, Russia (although without the very early attempts at operating on the brains of mental patients). Psychosurgery was used in China in the 1940s and early 1950s then, after a gap of about 30 years, taken up again in the 1980s and, more recently, used as a treatment to cure drug addicts.

In 2003, Guodong Gao and colleagues at the Tangdu Hospital in Xian published an article about their use of psychosurgery for drug addiction in the Journal of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery. They operated on 28 patients, all of whom had been addicted to drugs (mostly heroin, opium and opioids) for more than 3 years, had had more than 3 previous attempts at detoxification, and consented to surgery. The target of surgery was the nucleus accumbens (unlike in Russia where it is the cingulate gyrus). The average age of the patients was 31, and all but two were men.

The authors appear to be generally enthusiastic about the results of surgery, claiming a high rate of success and low incidence of side effects. However, the article is so confusingly written (or perhaps translated), the terminology so bizarre, the results presented in such a vague and contradictory way, that it is impossible to draw any useful conclusions from it.

The Dundee psychosurgery team's verdict on this article was: "There is insufficient clinical detail in this report to permit a rigorous analysis of the robustness of these reported positive outcomes".

In 2004 the Ministry of Health decided to ban the use of psychosurgery on addicts - possibly following the Russian example, or in response to public concern about the treatment. More than 500 addicts had already undergone surgery. It is not clear if the ban applies only to psychosurgery for addiction or to all psychosurgery in China.

The People's Daily Online, reports on the ban:

The Health Ministry also said the treatment was only allowed for scientific study but banned for clinical practice as it considers the surgery has not become a mature technology suitable for wide clinical application.
Drug addiction can have such a devastating impact on addicts and families that some are willing to pay any price to rid themselves of the evil, and that is why the surgery has gained so much popularity so quickly.
But people willing to undergo surgery cannot possibly have a complete idea about the potential risks, on which even experts have not reached a consensus.
There are other downsides. Already the surgery has been manipulated by people intending to make profit from it.
It is therefore the responsibility of the authorities to remind the public of the side- effects and possible dangers, in medical terms and in medical ethics terms.
Drug-users are living flesh and blood. They have their own rights and dignity that should be taken good care of. Drug abuse may be against our traditional values, but nobody should deny drug addicts the help they need to get over their addiction and the right to enjoy life. If they are deprived of such rights because of the method of their rehabilitation, the question is whether such rehabilitation is moral.
The Health Ministry has done a proper job in issuing the ban in time, which, despite its harsh words, has a great sense of humanity.

Read the whole article here