Part 1 of ANM’s Mental Health Awareness Week 2018 series looked at the ‘stress’ crisis in the context of political events. Part 2 takes a closer look at the touchy feely interface of modern mindfulness psychiatry, and see how the evidence for mindfulness over stigma stacks up against the duty of Government not to cause stress to citizens in the first place.
Dr Sally Baker, who was less than impressed with lead researcher Richard Byng’s manners and dishonesty, isn’t the only service user to raise questions about the ethics of Plymouth University’s Dr Richard Byng.
Another service-user, who was a victim of Richard Byng’s ‘attentions’, afterwards termed him a ”Shipman of mental health”, saying Byng had left him for dead.
This vulnerable witness, comes from the ‘service user’ group that Richard Byng is so keen to work with, and in fact he did work with Byng, until he realised he was being played, and started asking for credit for the work he was producing.
At this point strange things began happening to the now inconvenient service-user, and when he complained Byng’s friends suddenly cry that he is an ‘unreliable’ witness to his own life.
On the 20th anniversary of Harold Shipman’s arrest, we are still apparently as unwilling as ever to recognise that being a doctor doesn’t guarantee anything about you as a human being.
Former Greater Manchester Police detective Sally Reid said many people thought it was “obscene that we should be questioning anything to do with Shipman” and says that at one point they were “frogmarched off” a local property.
Meanwhile, Sally Baker reports, “Richard Byng was one of the ‘experts’ who was ‘consulted’ by the Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group.”
But let’s not knock mindfulness unduly. For example, I’m mindful of the fact that to describe somebody as a “Shipman of mental health” is extreme. I mean come on, he might be rude and dishonest, but willing to kill people?
The truth of abuse is that it’s often very hard to believe, until it happens to you (more on that in Part 3).
Richard Byng’s fluid boundaries allow him to both encourage someone to go back to a GP about on innovative drug, and then say they’re mentally ill for doing so.
We met Richard Byng, as part of a group known as “Steiner Critics”, due to our successful activism on bullying. Although we didn’t know them at all, Richard Byng and his wife approached me offering help while my mother was suddenly dying of cancer. In a phone call he told me that my mum’s obdurate GP would have to agree to her use of the off-label treatment LDN, (which has since become much more widely known to be effective in cancer) as well as being cheap and non-toxic, and that I should go back and insist.
Later he used that same conversation to infer that I was mentally ill. Of course, because nothing says you are mad and dangerous like looking after your kids and trying to save your mother’s life.
The terrifying fact is that Richard Byng’s interest in the ‘interface’ between doctors and the rest of society, extends to he and his wife, Melanie, actually stalking me and my mum, almost total strangers, to the hospital where she was about to die.
“One call from [Richard] to this team… Palliative Care” Melanie was writing to her cronies as me and my dying mum struggled to find someone to change her sheets…
It’s hard to describe the tortuous and oppressive sensation for both of us, as life ebbed away from her, that we were being watched and spied on.
Melanie Byng’s copious references to Richard Byng’s authority, over years, show how necessary it has been for her stated purpose of our destruction.
As a Mental Health research Professor, Richard Byng’s stalking and harassment of service users and random members of the public is of far greater public significance than his wife’s carefully organised hate-campaign.
In his co-authored book, Richard Byng discusses a “pragmatic” approach to assessment of potential psychiatric symptoms in individuals under stress.
A reaction to stress would still only be considered an ‘adjustment disorder’ if in excess of what would be normally expected, symptoms are believed to be driven by external stressors.
Is this the needed political admission that many ordinary life events simply are stressful and that stress is therefore an unavoidable part of life, not something to stigmatise and encapsulate into a mental disorder?
Byng says this about bereavement: “Bereavement ordinarily is not classified as a psychiatric disorder but when complicated or prolonged would be subsumed under either the adjustment disorder or the depressive illness categories depending on the symptom profile.”
Here is the fakery of the mental wellness industry writ large, because stranger Richard Byng who claims not to believe in mental health diagnoses, began to fake-diagnose me with a risk diagnosis, three weeks before my mum’s death.
In Plain Sight Again
So when Richard Byng says that GPs can support normal adaptation to stress to avoid unnecessary stigma, he is hiding in plain sight: creating a sense of trust that he can use to abuse.
In fact, this highly remunerated state actor, Richard Byng, is all about using that doctor/society interface to create as much stigma, and therefore stress, as possible.
Part 3 of ANM’s Mental Health Awareness Week 2018 look at stress will examine the wider implications of gaslighting doctors being promoted by the state, and how that relates back to the urgent necessity of politicising the wider “stress crisis”.
Dr Sally Baker, Mental Health Awareness Week 2018, Mental Health Foundation, Mindful Nation UK, Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group, Plymouth University, Sally Reid, Steiner Critics
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