Comments on: Patrick McGorry’s ‘Ultra High Risk of Psychosis’ training DVD fails the common sense test

By: Linda

Linda — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 05:21:57 +0000

Martin if you are still listening, can you get some details about the three year old screening? What constitutes “at risk” for them. My GP said she is very well able to identify autism signs without it but would not elaborate more on what will be assessed.

By: Linda

Linda — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 05:16:47 +0000

I fear for the children of Australia!
If this is the sort of screening used on a young man, is the screening of three year olds also of such poor quality?
For example if a three year old is agitated or moody or excited or shy will they be labelled at risk? Also my GP told me that if such a screening indicated risk the parent has to be told. This could lead to a detrimental effect on the parent child relationship. The parent could become hypersensitive to their childs behaviour or feeling that their child is limited. Hypersensitivity could see this parent racing to the doctor for intervention over situations that simply need love and support. Some parents may feel ill will toward their child or in the worse case scenario become aggressive or distant. Some parents may attempt to “fix” the child with dubious rules and regulations. Some parents will sigh in relief as they abdicate all of the responsibility of guiding their child emotionally and spiritually, in my opinion this is already rampant with young children having computers and TVs in their rooms and therefore little family communication.
The attempt to make the screening of three year olds linked to Family tax benefit (i.e. loss of benefit if the child is not screened) failed but the proponents will I believe keep on pushing for some form of compulsion.
Also disturbing is that when I first heard about this mental health screening of three year olds I visited a lot of parenting forums online. My thought was that there would be outrage, after all this would be the place to find concerned, proactive parents right? What I actually found was majority support of the screening.

By: Pete82

Pete82 — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 14:00:46 +0000

Yes its very worrying that someone like nick can be Labled with a mental health disorder and put on psychotic medication. Who is the all high and mighty one playing god here making up the selection criteria. Funny I should say that, the church has been loosing its influence of late, where is god in all this. Maybe the DSM is the new bible and psychiatrists are the new disciples.

By: christine alavi

christine alavi — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 23:32:34 +0000

The interviewer is just not listening to him. Nick seems to be an straightforward young man who has identified what his issues are. There is no indication that he will be supported to address his sadness and anxiety at work. This diagnosis is scary, and psycjiatric labels are very sticky

By: Belinda

Belinda — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 06:24:16 +0000

I could not agree more. As a human who has accessed services I can say that people can and do open up to people on the first session, about what is important to them. It is about whether you are open to listening to what the individual has to say to you. It becomes very obvious to the person seeking help very early on whether the so called professional actually wants to listen and whether they care about you as a person, or whether they are only interested in professional power play and trying to convince you that you have a defective brain disease. Yet all you here from professionals is that our so called brain diseases mean that we have no idea of the fact that we need help and that we refuse treatment. I have personally met people who are very very very acutely unwell and ALL of them wanted help. I have never met and I do not believe I ever will meet a person who is unwell emotionally who does not want help. On the other hand I can unfortunately count on one hand the numbers of people who were happy with the help they were currently recieving, or even remotly happy with the so called professionals who were supposed to be working with them. But rather than look internally and say, why is it that these people are not opening up to me, why do they seek help and then not come back again, is there something I can do differently, or should I be referring them to someone else, they simply blame the client and some fictional disese. As you have made so clear what is important is not what shcool of therapy they come from but the humanness of the person offering the support.

By: John Hoggett

John Hoggett — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 20:46:57 +0000

I find some of the comments by psychiatrists on here quite disturbing. They are clinging to the systems of their profession, using psychiatric diagnosis, dodgy explanations of so called schzo-affective disorder and so called schizophrenia and forms of clinical interviewing whereas the non professionals seem quite human, using everyday explanations and ideas like, the young man needs a careers counsellor.

All the research that I know of says that what people who are in distress need is a trusting relationship with someone who cares for them who then encourages them to deal with their problems. In counselling and therapy it has been found that the quality of the relationship, as assessed by the client, is more important than the school of therapy the professional espouses.

The professional language on some of the posts is, in my opinion, a power play to claim that the professional knows something that the rest of us do not, but to my mind the non-professionals seem more caring and understanding.

I would like to see a video where someone asks the young man if he would like a coffee and a bit of a chat. That might be much more educational than this rather disturbing interview

By: Belinda

Belinda — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 15:17:10 +0000

The difference appears to be if you can make a living out of listening to voices then it is all OK.

The last time I went to a church, the priest stood up the front and said “God was talking to me last night”. If I said the same thing to a psychatirst I would be locked up and forcibly medicated, but they accept it as normal when a priest or the like says it.

I personally know of a young person who got caught up in early psychosis programs in Victorai, not through Orygen, but standard mental health services, on the basis that their mother had been killed in a car accident and they went to see a clairvoient about it. They believed that someone else had spoken to there mother. They were put on forced treatment orders on that alone. Mind you they did not go and put a forced treatment order on the person who made a living out of talking to the dead. That was and is reserved for those who pay them for it.

EVERYONE has had the experience of hearing something and not being able to explain where the noise came from. While this is very different from those that do really hear voices, it is a start of it. The simple fact is that psychosis, as they define it is normal to some levels, just like depression is normal at some levels. They just define when it is and when it is not a brain disease. With depression that is 14 days. I guess that means I can feel sad for 13 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds and it is perfectly normal. But as soon as I experience one more second of sadness I suddenly have a life long brain disease, and need mind numbing medication, that causes horrible side effects (including suicide) for it!!

By: Belinda

Belinda — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 15:07:50 +0000

Thankyou for such an honest account and true representation of what is really going on. It is the first time any psychiatrist has said so honestly that Psychaitry is pre-scientific. And if they wanted to really help people they would look at what is really going on, rather than trying to label something as some fictional brain disease. And you are exactly right with what happens with Medications. The side effects of medications become proof that they have a brain disease. That doctors, who are supposed to be some of the most highly educated people in the country can believe in it is beyond me. I will give credit to the rest of the population, they just don’t know what is going on. Doctors and especially psychiatrists should know better.

By: Concerned

Concerned — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 14:35:23 +0000

I had another thought – Psychiatrists like this really negate the possibility of religion – God and spirits and all that – no matter the faith. This has existed for tens of thousands of years prior to psychiatric theories that negate all of this and make it into a psychiatric illness. They cannot explain something, so they just make up theories.

Imagine the religious people of ages past being assessed as psychotic because they talked with God and heard God talking in their heads. Moses, Ambraham – all of them.

Really! Jesus would be locked up in an involuntary psychiatric ward if he appeared in 2012 saying what is written in the Bible. So would Mohammad and what about Buddha – he would have been locked up and drugged for sitting under the tree for days on end, not eating. Labelled with some convoluted multi-worded label.

What about the people who do really hear people talking in their heads – psychics, clarivoyants and people who receive messages from dead people giving clues about the whereabouts of clues that help them advise the police to track down the killers. Many movies about this and stories.

Many people believe that there are spirits that exist – when a person dies they can feel and hear the presence still and the deceased person’s spirit communicates to them. How do we know they are not wrong? How can we judge and label them as mentally ill when there is no science to back it up.?

And some people experience their conscience “talking” to them. And guilty people definitely find more “voices” in their head in relation to their guilt that disappears when they come clean and stop keeping secrets.

Anyway just a thought.

By: Auday

Auday — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 14:06:45 +0000

I thought the video is OKish as a learning material for medical students about interview skills and psychopathology as a learning material. I don’t think the clip should be used beyond this purpose. To conclude that this man’s mental state and experiences are indicative of UHR for psychosis, is an evidence “baseless” statement, and should be treated with caution. This is a completely manufactured and scripted scenario and interview. Indeed, the script is not even properly written as a real life one, as Nick, moved from simple answers of “No”, to then telling the doctor everything in his life! I wish my patients are half this forthcoming with their replies.