Moral treatment: in Retreat?

Interesting workshop in York today, of the NHS England T4 providers of personality disorder services, plus a small number of hangers-on like me.

For our long-planned meeting of about 15, we were denied space at The Retreat, and were booked into to a Catholic Convent instead, but only informed about the change three days ago.

George Broke, a development director for Schoen, came to introduce himself to us and explain.

The Retreat has now largely been taken over by Schoen, which is a large German MH hospital group, about the size of Priory, with an ambitious/vigorous/aggressive business plan to expand into the UK, particularly for large specialist inpatient units.

The only Quaker-run bit that remains of The Retreat is community and outpatient services at The Tuke Centre (presumably without space for our meeting).

He was very positive about how most of the Retreat inpatient staff had been TUPE’d over to the new owners (not Tuke’d I’m afraid) and that the Kemp Unit and eating disorder unit (Acorn in a previous incarnation, and the first ever UK TC to be accredited, but no longer a TC) were both promising elements of their business development, although perhaps a bit more innovative than Schoen are used to.

But the new plans for the site are certainly back in line with the modern world: they are soon to add a substantially enlarged inpatient unit – including Kemp + ED – to be built to the southeast of the old hospital façade. Hopefully hidden enough to not impinge too much on the grade A listed piece of mental health heritage. We’ll see.

All rather sad, I think. Possibly the end of moral treatment as we know it…

Formerly known as 'The Retreat'

Seven reasons why psychiatric medication is wrong in therapeutic communities

I'm off to a formal meeting on Wednesday to discuss the prison policy on psychiatric medication in the democratic TCs. So here's some notes I have made to help me think it through...

1    'Medical' or 'psychiatric' treatment should not necessarily have to have to include, or even consider including, any pharmacological component. TCs are such a treatment: they arose from a different therapeutic philosophy in contexts where medication was not relevant or not invented. There is no evidence that their effectiveness has been enhanced by allowing psychotropic medication to be used for their members, except perhaps to increase staff sense of 'knowing better' and social control. TCs are a safe place in which the effects of no medication can be carefully monitored and responded to by psychotherapeutic means

2  Psychiatric drugs directly hamper TC treatment. All groups of psychiatric medication have effects on mental functions that hinder the therapeutic process, or block it: minor and major tranquillisers cause drowsiness and lack of full attention; drugs used for depression and other stimulants can give a false sense of elevated mood; lithium is often reported to leave people 'feeling like a zombie', and most people on it recognise the emotional blunting it causes.

3  Psychiatric drugs indirectly hamper TC treatment. The other way medication hampers TC treatment is that it takes away responsibility for how one is feeling, thinking and behaving - and allows swallowers to think that a pill can cure one's woes. Taking a pill is much easier than making a decision to pursue a more the more difficult option - which involves allowing oneself to trust the holding, containing and transforming effects of therapeutic belongingness. The symbolic meaning of medication also prevents the relational equality needed in a TC: the relationship between the prescriber and the swallower is necessarily unequal.

4  No psychiatric drugs are licensed for the specific treatment of 'Personality Disorder', for which therapeutic communities are a definitive treatment. The diagnosis of 'co-morbidity' usually covers this - but the co-morbid conditions are only symptoms (such as depression, anxiety, agitation, insomnia, voices) of the underlying condition. Medication can doubtless help symptoms, but that is all it does. Diagnosing co-morbid conditions can be seen as an exercise of professional power, which is not subject to the enquiry and scrutiny of other decisions made about members of a therapeutic community. 

5  Medication is less effective than advertised. The general trajectory of many psychiatric medications is enthusiastic optimism, followed by extensive routine use, followed by problems and questions - examples include barbiturates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines and most recently SSRIs. Advocates of new medications often include influential clinicians, guideline-issuing bodies, professional organisations as well as the pharmaceutical industry. The recent challenge of the 2017 NICE depression guideline by numerous experts and fourteen professional organisations opens the question of possible pharmaceutical bias - at the highest levels.

6  Long-term use of medication is harmful. Detailed work by Joanna Moncreiff in the UK and Peter Gotzsche in Denmark have made a strong cases against the way in which psychiatric drugs are currently used. Moncreiff argues that drugs do not specifically target any 'diseases', but have specific effects that may ameliorate symptoms; thee neuroleptics cause brain atrophy, tardive dyskinesia and poorer long-tern outcomes than no medication. Gotzsche goes further and presents evidence to show how psychiatric drugs kill half a million people every year in the USA and Europe.

7  There is a wider movement going on for a more relational and democratic type of psychiatric care. Therapeutic communities and their progeny have always had these core principles, but many other organisations and movements are now espousing similar values: Open Dialogue, Soteria Houses, Multifamily Therapy, Greencare, Hearing Voices Network - as well as numerous small service-user led groups and networks.

In the wider sweep of the history of psychiatry, I believe that many of our current medications will look as archaic as chaining people up and beating them, or putting them into a coma with insulin. But the same may be true of current psychotherapies. Not so sure about psychedelics, though - they seem to have been used fairly well for many centuries...

Measuring what matters: ReQoL

This is ReQoL day, in a grey and rainy Sheffield.

I'm not usually somebody who gets at all excited about psychometric 'instruments' (as their manufacturers rather grandly call them sometimes) - but ReQoL feels a bit special. In the same way that CORE did three decades ago - something that can really let us and our service users know how we're doing. And this one is based on a value set that comes from research showing what matters to service users themselves - not by clever academics in a university, or powerful doctors in the clinic, saying what should matter. And even more fun was meeting a mystery man on the way into the conference room, who knew me,  but wouldn't tell me who he was (though I recognised him, despite 20+ years since last meeting). When he stood up to speak - about the scientific process behind the new measure - I knew: it was Mike Barkham, one of the main developers of the CORE - and regular in the snooker room at the Raven Hall Hotel at the annual Society for Psychotherapy Research (UK) bashes in the 1990s.

The morning was quite energising, and felt like this was a good new measure that was designed around measuring something that really mattered – and could help us all coordinate across services, research, commissioning and policy.

But then the afternoon came along.

I found Tim Kendall very dispiriting – his vision extending no further than which bits to spend a little bit of extra money on, and a rather nihilistic mood agreeing it’s all bad and won’t get much better (in my working lifetime, at least!)

And as for the best thing Andrew Lansley did was to make the NHS even more hierarchical and driven top-down– I was close to passing out with despair.

It was probably worse because I found the afternoon ‘café’ workshop perhaps the dullest event I have ever been to – and annoying in confirming my fear that legions of clever people are running round feeding the machine – and getting quite excited about it.

But where are the service users in it all?

And where were they today? A: not there, because it was all about the experts doing clever and complicated things without them.

And as Tim said, their scores aren’t what really matters, because it’s the measures that show how well that machine is working that he is interested in.

Then he goes and says that an ‘official’ PD measure is being written – probably by people none of us have ever heard of, with a big grant that’s not connected to any of the other work that’s been done in the field over many years, or is currently going on.

And he was extremely lukewarm about ReQoL, which I thought was going to get his backing - as a sensible and robust outcome measure for us all to coordinate ourselves around (and, dare I say, more democratic and meaningful to service users than bureaucratic old warhorses like HoNOS). But no. Aargh.

So NHSE is even more of a disorganised and fragmented mess than I thought – as a personality disorder consultant colkleague, from the Cassel, exactly put her finger on in questioning him. It’s not harder hierarchical management it needs – it relationality at all levels (not performativity) and real service user co-production!

And as for the withering scepticism he expressed in his aside about ‘being human’ (or something like that) …my blood ran cold.

In the old days, like when he was chairing the Borderline NICE group, he used to wear a black polo-neck and tight black jeans – like a baddie out of a Bond film. But I find the new look, with suit and tie, and Robin Day glasses, much more sinister!

OD meets TC in Portugal

Lisbon on Sea