Positive Memory and a Broken Mind

I have to be active to retrieve positive memories.  My mind’s broken.  Left to it’s own devices it will tend to replay past trauma, old wars, resentments, failures.  It’s not surprising because those were by their nature times of threat and times that my mind had to focus most. In danger we are most alert. After danger passes my mind will tend to be scanning for future threats and reminding me of past dangers. I’ll also sometimes play scenarios again in search of whatever I might think I did that had I done differently would have resulted in a more positive outcome.
Meanwhile most of my life has been exceedingly positive. Every day I’m alive my life is 51% positive.  Yet trauma and failure have tendencies to blast aside the good days and the good experiences.
I had a Corolla. Amazing car. It was something I so enjoyed for it’s workmanship and maneuvering.  I loved the sound system. It was the days I played Steely Dan on the radio. Barbara Fromm was on CBC. Life was good. That little car had magnificent studded snow tires and for a year it carried me in summer and winter to and from my first country general practice.  It was a sweet car.  Yet a dangerous , horrible, incompetent, psychopathic driver hit that car passing in a lane, semi truck barreling towards us, I was doing the correct speed, the other fellow was speeding. The road conditions were black ice. He lost control of his car, hit the front end of mine causing me to barrel and burrow right into the ditch. The car flipped 360 degrees landing upright then rolling sideways 360 degrees and landing upright again.  The seat strap kept me in the car but because of the height of the car, made for Asian market I presumed, it didn’t keep me in my seat but allowed me to be crushed into the ceiling with my head tilted.  I had a cervical spine injury.  I gave the case to a friend to help him, a new lawyer, and he didn’t do so well, so that in the end, a year later, weeks of lost work and a life time of chronic pain and disability, I was severely punished by a psychopath speeding incompetent driver, a friend who was young like me, a tough insurance system. I got the replacement value of the brand new car and immediately bought a Ford Mustang which I truly loved.  But my life flashed before my eyes, It was a near death experience.  I was appalled at the price of the insurance and that in the end there was only punishment in the system for the victim. It changed my outlook on life and was a root cause in my changing my career, my marriage and might well have been an early root cause of the subsequent addiction year that really changed my life further a decade later.
So I don’t think of that car with the joy I can actively seek to remember.  With a little conscious probing I can remember the joy I had driving it. It would also be decades before I bought an Asian made car again.  I’m driving a Mini now, British,but with my head touching the ceiling. It’s got that same attention to detail the Toyota Corolla had. Marvelous workmanship.  But I could well have been driving it when the animal hit the front of my car and the criminal system didn’t castrate him there and then to insure his genetic strain was removed from the genome.
Being a civilized man I actually got out of my brutalized car which the insurance company subsequently insisted was just fine, no reason to be replaced,  never to be trustworthy in my mind again, a source of terror, a centre for ptsd images of life flashing before my eyes, but no , it drove so I should take it home as if nothing happened.  Assholes.  I’d love the ‘new car’ smell of that Corolla. I’d loved the faith I’d put in it. It was my first ‘new car’ as before that I’d only had second hand beaters.  So there was this insurance company insisting all was well and me remember every day for life that as I bounced off the ceiling of the car I thought that I knew no one who had survived a 360 forward turn and then when i rolled again over the ceiling my neck straining again, I thought I’ll never be the same because I don’t know people who survive such a crash.  It was a miracle. Everything about it was a miracle. But at the time I was surrounded by faithless friends who were caught up completely in their own life stories and were annoyed a bit by my ‘drama’.  “You crashed your car, what of it.” And some friend would then talk about a minor fender bender and the conversation would steer into a lot of oohing and aching about stuff people knew about , parking lot crashes and city bumps.  But even today I see that semi and feel that head over heels of the first smash on the roof the world coming round like a roller coaster and then the side ways rolling and the excruciating crunch of my body weight bent up against the ceiling, sustaining me because the strap didn’t hold me in the seat.
The other car was some young guys and girls , party animals in a big beater of an old boat , an Oldsmobile or something indestructible and it had just plowed me into the ditch and continued flat out across the prairie snow drifts.  Both cars would be a trial for tow trucks to get out. The deep snow cushioned the impact.
But when I see crashes on tv and watch the cars rolling, I rarely see something as intense as my own. It’s why I liked the Diesel XXX movies and Fast and Furious. The stunt men really owned their keep.  But I’m not a stunt driver. I was dressed in a suit and survived because the Toyota was such a strongly built car and the seat belt held me. If I was 2 inches shorter I’d not have crunched my neck.  But I survived.  I lived .
My mind is like that.  I was married a few times.  I sometimes have whisps of memories of those glorious days of love and roses, the ultimate romances, the extraorinary, love and lust, the close talks at dusk and dawn, the hours of fun together, the years of best friend relationships, the pride of having a partner so extraordinary in so many ways, beautiful, accomplished, brilliant, confident, successful, admired, and to have them with you, to be able to trust them, to do things together and be so intimate.  Years of that connection. The separation and divorces in my cases seemed to happen over the last year. The negative outweighed the positives. We part and then the courts and the lawyers and the government and friends and counselors and society just makes it all so much uglier.  And the loss is like an explosion dropped into the memory bank. It wipes out the whole amazing love story of two people who felt no other was the ‘one’, who felt they’d found their ‘soul mate’ and lived with love and carefree for years, amazingly, only to find that the indestructible thing of perfection wasn’t up to the task.
Now passively the wounds come back.  I can see the one judge who was as disgusting pig of a man studying my ex’s exposed cleavage and black lace hooker stockings that day of the divorce when her own lawyer looked more like a whore with her buttons undone and cleavage exposed.  I remember that and how later when I talked to other lawyers they told me she would have jockeyed for just that judge because he was such a perverted pig and a real disgusting womanizer in his personal life, a mommy’s boy, with a little dick and a need to win women and a history of consecutively finding against men in all divorce and custody cases because he’s such a loser.  Backstabbing psychopath.  That little weasel jumps right into my passive memory.  Especially learning about him from the lawyers and learning that there’s still a pedophile judge missing and me thinking it’s got to be him because he was such a type, but really, was he.  Yes, he was a 13 year old boy who had a big position and abused it and feared men and treated women as whores but.....and here’s the but...I’ve been divorced three times, 23 years of marriage, two decades of loving the enemy, providing and protecting for all that time and 90% of it was really good for ‘us’ but I left.  I walked out on two while she walked out on one. But the important thing was there three judges and only one was a smegma. The other two were saints. Amazing considerate gentlemen with genius and wisdom and love and care who ended the marriages with the least fan fare. True I was never one to ask for anything except my life back so I walked out without anything essentially, dividing the assets of one house and giving another away but the key is that I don’t dwell on these ‘gentlemen’.  They didn’t look at the women like they were meat and they didn’t talk to me like I was a fool. They were mensch.  They were Skookum men.
My mind passively drifts to the ugly little piece of stinky dog tourd. There is if I am ‘active’ about my memory these two great men who made a bad situation less bad. These two great men did their tough job with kindness and care.
I used to have a resentment against my mother for a thing she did when I was a teen. It wasn’t anything really but I was pimple faced and awkward and tended to be ‘sensitive’ in adolescence. I expect I’m the only such teen of that kind. I had attitude and Mom wasn’t always ‘tolerant’ and ‘enlightened’ about how she should talk to an asshole kid. So we had words and I held this resentment against her.  My mom is a saint. I can go on and on about the accomplishments of my parents which include not killing me but my mind used to go to that argument instead of to the times she held me as a child when I came to her afraid. I remember that now. The adolescent ‘bomb’ memory concealed the feeling of her taking me in her arms and holding me when I was hurt child. I can feel that today.  It was the work of therapy and doing a 12th step that brought home the insanity of the mind and how ‘selective bias’ worked in the brain.
My mind is broken.  I can fix it by remember that it’s going to lie to me about my life and the relationships I had and the people I knew.  I’m blessed and I have to actively remember the truth about my life.  The Toyota Corolla is an awesome car.  I’ve driven more than a half century on on kinds of roads with all kinds of other drivers around, in cars, trucks and on motorcycles.  I drive a lot. I’ve driven desserts and freeways, and across tundra and off road and on road.  So 99.9% of the time the other drivers are incredible. I’ve had a few accidents but statistically I drive about 10x as much as every one I know and I’ve driven in worse conditions and in different countries with a whole lot of my own and rental equipment.  So statistically, and in reality, other drivers are by and large amazing, and the very vast majority actually do have the intelligence to have figured out how to use the ‘turn’ signal for changing lanes.
But I have a broken mind and most people would know my descriptors of the one driver in the morning commute whose causing the traffic jam that day, one driver out of thousands.
Just saying.
I have to be ‘active’ and make my memory remember ‘truly’ and avoid the ‘emotional memory’ of ‘selective bias’ that suffers from such inaccuracy and causes me to have a skewed view of reality.  My life is blessed. I’m really thankful for all the people I’ve known and all the machines I’ve driven.
Thank you.

Death Cafes

I heard on the radio of a new old idea. People are getting together for coffee to discuss death. It might sound macabre at first but it’s philosophically ancient and uplifting. In Medieval days there was even the notion of a 'good death'.  This was before 'physician assisted suicide'.  A 'good death' was about the completion of a 'good life' . This was before the age of amorality.  Relative truth was not a thing of the day and death was considered an absolute.
So many people live today ‘lives of quiet desperation’.  So much depends on our perspective.  The first path of the Noble Truth 8 fold path of Buddhism is 'right view.'  There is a certainty about the relativity of perspective. But there is also the perspective  of the future too.  No one knows.  The pseudoscientists and materialists ever loud as children would have you believe as they do.  But death has no simple answer and each view has it’s own unique reward and loss.
I believe in death as a time of transition.  There is ‘afterlife’ for me just as there is ‘morning after’ when I go to sleep. So far I’ve not ‘died in my sleep.’  Not that I know of.  Not that I would know either. This is 'belief'.  This is an 'idea'.  Even the great Houdini apparently didn't 'escape death' as he said he would.
The epistemology of knowing is itself frought with constant hazard.  Naturally knowing death, a purely private and subjective matter distinct from the public and objective event is too.  I’ve held the dying and felt the end of the body with relative certainty.  The works of Psychiatrist Dr. Moody about Near Death Phenomena and later works quoted by Neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander in Proof of Heaven even challenge the notion of the ‘time’ of death.  As physicians we once used the idea of the death of the heart and loss of pulse and EKG reading, but with EEG advances Brain Death, where available,  has been used as ‘best time of death’ practice.
This is a long way from the days when one felt air around the nostrils and if it wasn’t moving declared a person dead.  Fakirs and yogis long ago developed methods of slowing breathing and heart to the point of ‘appearing’ dead with the subsequent apparent miracle of reanimation.  However even today there are those who have ‘revived’ after being declared ‘brain dead’ and that certainly challenges our ‘cutting edge’ perceptions of the simple ‘timing’ of death.  Science continues to expand our knowledge of the ‘event phenomena’.
What counts most is whether one believes death is a permanent or temporary end.  Is consciousness tied to the body and brain. Is there instead as Socrates believed a distinct body and soul separation, the joining of which occurs in this life whereas death releases the prisoner soul to rise or travel on.  Neuroscientist Dr. Mario de Beuregaard in his book Spiritual Brain does a superb job of debunking the prevailing myths of consumer society and the propaganda of "he who has the most toys wins".  He studied Carmelite Nuns meditating with PET Scans and showed the extreme ecstatic capacity inherent in the process which defies the reductionist egotism of the ultimately fearful.
Time is even a working principle but something which studied more in depth becomes the thing of Einstien and the perception of the "now'.
The Mathematician philosopher Pascal postulated a gamblers approach to belief in god which might well apply to belief in afterlife.  He said that if there was no god and one believed in God there was indeed no loss. However if there was a God and one believed in God there was a potential considerable win.  Not believing in an infinite possibility would by Pascals reasoning be an overwhelming loss.  "Pascal’s Wager" has gone down in history as one of the simplest approaches to positive thinking.
It’s challenged however by the Neitziean Superman complex who would do acts in life for which they’d not want potential consequence in afterlife. The very idea of a relationship between present life and after life is a posit itself.  The Superman who makes his own rules and lives without the restraint of the world might still be hampered by the ‘still small voice’ which somehow disturbs the sleep of the Caligula’s of the world.  Addicts and alcoholics who have done ‘monstrous’ things and tried to ‘numb’ themselves and overcome the ‘anxiety’ and ‘insomnia’ and ‘nightmares’ which accompany the obscene and offensive, don’t seem to find enough ‘sedation’ and seem haunted desperately desiring a subjective certain end to their own miserable existence. It’s not surprising that many world leaders even today involve themselves in philanthropy in later life not just for tax havens but rather to expiate guilt about earlier transgressions.  The Mob was notorious for it’s support of children’s hospitals.
Death being an end would appeal most to those most guilty whereas those most worthy might well have nothing to fear of an afterlife. Prevailing theories commonly might reflect the morality of an individual as much as unbiased observation.
Certainly world leaders and the elite might fear the afterlife and hoarding wealth this life seek immortality by any medical means.  The advances in stem cell research and body part transplants is not driven by the young as much as it is by the old and wealthy whose behaviour might in this life time be considered suspect.  They do not seem to wish to meet their maker quickly in the eyes of those who lack wealth or such choice.
Amazing Grace, the great testimony, written by a hardened slave dealer contains the memorable phrase, "I once was lost but now I”m found.'  The end of life 'conversion' is so common as to be a thing of movies and stories.
 The young have been given visions of glory and virgins with death to entice them to do the will of the old who cling to life fearing death.  Do they know more or by the way that they lived missed out on the life that sees some walk peacefully to their ends as if fulfilled. Thomas wrote the great poem for his father, "do not go gentle into that still night."  
How one lives superficially, fearfully or in depth, passionately, might well ‘fill’ one with respect to life that one is ‘ready’ for death whereas another might be ‘frantic’ and ‘lost’ at the prospect.  So many people live lives like ‘happy cabbages’ not ‘aware’ and seemingly distracted repeatedly say before death ‘if I’d only known”.
Jesus taught ‘be watchful’.  His parable of keeping the lamps lit speaks to the same message as the Buddha's which was to "be awake" .  Today's image of the 'zombie " is a contrast to the spiritual direction of the wisdom teachers.  Richard Rohr describes the wisdom fathers as generally teaching that this world is one of people asleep, sleep walker.   Dr. Scott Peck described it as a kindergarten for the soul.
What metaphor rules ones life, i.e. that life is a journey, a bowl of cherries, a place of suffering, a waiting for Godot, whatever,  defines the ultimate meaning one gives to death and may well create the nature of existence itself. The Secret and the Law of Attraction suggests that there comes a time where our very thoughts manifest our actual reality. This isn’t necessarily so or without discipline of mind but might well be an explanation for death.  Is one ever ‘ready’ for death.
Talking with a WWI vet who survived the trenches and countless opportunities for death, he told me once quite simply, " we all knew ’the bullet must have our name on it.'”  There’s the whole issue of ‘freewill versus fate’. The shallow 21st century opportunist speaks eloquently of genetics and ‘determinism’ but cranks out ‘selfies’ like the next one. The 'selfie' is the ultimate facile seeking of some form of timelessness or immortality.
The idea that ‘no praise, and no blame’ goes with fate is alien to this millennial culture which wants ‘all praise, and no blame’ no different from my OO7 culture which wanted a ‘license’ to kill because we all have ‘freedom’ to kill but don’t wish the ‘consequences’ that come with 'freedom'.  Death is a consequence.  Hence the success of the insurance agencies and all the silliness of individuals to sacrifice so many rights and freedoms for ‘safety’ as an ultimately illusory goal.
Life is temporal.
But is death different?  Again is it temporal or permanent?
I applaud the return of ‘death cafes’ . Can one truly celebrate life without discussion of death.  The whole cultural art forms of the zombie, vampire and the living dead suggest we cannot.  Might we not in kind embrace the angels if we shed some light on death rather than leave it to the nether regions.

RATE YOUR DOCTOR

Every year or two I look at ‘rate your doctor’ and consider retiring. There are such vehemently angry complaints that it’s hard to forget the obvious truisms:
1) You can’t please everyone.  I want to but I don’t need to.  I was actually ‘mr. popularity’ in school. To be ‘popular’ one has to be a ‘people pleaser’  and I can be a very good people pleaser.  However good doctors simply aren’t functioning on the same basis as ‘car salesman’ or ‘government beurocrats’.  Doctors who are no longer clinicians rarely admit to themselves their cowardice and how hard front line work is.  It’s the same with soldiering. Leading from the rear is very popular today. It wasn’t always so. When I was a family physician I was really loved and admired.  As a family physician one is there to ‘serve’ one’s patients and rarely is in conflict with the patient except ,as I found, the ‘psychiatric’ patients or the ‘criminals’.  In ‘physical medicine’ while a ‘diagnosis’ might be unwelcome, like ‘cancer’, it’s not ‘blamed on the doctor’.  By contrast as a psychiatrist I have been spat in the face when I advised a patient of my “diagnosis’ because ‘psychiatric diagnosis’ and especially ‘drug and alcohol abuse’ diagnosis carry stigma and ‘consequence’.
2) You chose psychiatry despite an extensive interview process in which those doctors before you explained that you as a psychiatrist you would be necessarily ‘unliked’ and even ‘vilified’ if you did your job well.  So why I am saddened today when I have such vicious and deceitful attacks on my character and my behaviour 30 years of practices and tens of thousands of patients later?  Probably because I’m increasingly told to treat the patient as a ‘customer’ and give them whatever they want even if it kills them.  Just make sure you ‘record’ what the authorities want to hear and ‘cover your ass’ like they do.
3) The College of Physicians and Surgeons across Canada have had to acknowledge that doctors working in the field of drug and alcohol addiction are the most complained against and those working with criminals are the second most complained against. Indeed there are class action suits against “Rate Your Doctor’ by psychiatrists because our ‘duty’ to society requires us to report people who are dangerous to themselves or others.  I am forever hated by a number of pedophiles I diagnosed in my practice and reported to the authorities or ‘forced’ them to self report.  I am forever despised by a number of people who felt they had the ‘right’ to kill their ex and I reported them to the authorities when they were not open to discussion of alternatives.  I am forever loathed by a number of people who I ‘locked’ up because they were acutely suicidal or extremely psychotic.  They lived and they got sane but they didn’t come back to see me because to them I was part of the ‘bad time’ and they thought I was ‘authoritarian’ and ‘over reacted’ and maybe felt they had the right to say they were going to ‘kill themselves’ and had a gun or planned to jump off a bridge that night.  I am forever hated by the men who I have told the RCMP I believed should not have the ‘right to own a gun’.  One has actually come to my office after learning this and threatened me.  I believe I made the right decision but I saw a very ‘reasonable sounding ‘ Rate Your Doctor ‘complaint’ the next day. I looked because he did say he would hurt me as I hurt him.  Some of the patients I consulted on  told me they were going to kill themselves then ran out of the office leaving me ‘with their bombshell’ and I phoned the police rather than having to live with the consequence if they had killed themselves.  Never as a family physician did I face any of this ‘level ‘ of responsibility or decision making.  As a general psychiatrist and psychotherapist I didn’t either.  But as a consultant psychiatrist working with patients with drug and alcohol problems and specializing in trauma and head injury (with their particularly interesting forms of psychosis and dissociation) I have had immense levels of difficulty that I can’t imagine how I would have handled years past when I only had 12 years of education and experience but a psychiatry specialist degree fresh on the wall.  I liked when I worked in the hospital or university or mental health team because we never had as much work as I do today and always got to sit in committees or consult each other and think about cases and work as ‘team’ so I was never so alone making a decision.
4) Forensic Psychiatry - I’ve worked with a whole lot of criminals, murderers , pedophiles, drug addicts, thieves, institutionalized criminals and not a few ‘jailhouse lawyers’.  Most of my colleagues simply never encounter these folk or avoid them out right. Naturally ‘anti social’ people account for the majority of complaints but rarely tell the truth about what happened including  a key component in their complaint  like ‘dr hay refused to give me valium’ or ‘dr hay refused to give me opiates or oxycontin’ or “dr hay refused to diagnose me add and give me speed," or ‘doctor hay refused to give me medical marijuana (he prescribed it to another guy I know)” or “doctor hay refused to say I was ‘disabled’ for life so I can collect disability for life.”  or ‘dr hay wouldn’t say I couldn’t work ever again because of my depression’ or ‘dr hay refused to take out of his report the part about my doing crack cocaine and heroin’ daily’, or ‘dr hay’s report told my insurance company that I was working two jobs and they cut me off my disability insurance because he fucked me over’ or ‘dr hay said I needed to join some group but he doesn’t understand that I have social phobia or agoraphobia’, “dr hay said I need to join a group if I have drug and alcohol problems and all I wanted to do was see him and talk about how everyone else puts me down’.  “Dr. Hay disagreed with my diagnosis that I read on Google that fits me.”  “Dr. Hay won’t order me an MRI because my lawyer says that would help my case.”  “Dr. Hay told my lawyer I had three previous brain injuries and I didn’t want my lawyer to know that.”  “Dr. Hay told my family physician that I had a half dozen complaints against doctors to human rights and the college and now my family physician won’t see me anymore’.  “Dr. Hay told my family physician that I’d never been in the military and that I hadn’t been wounded and that I was lying to get medications. I was getting oxycontin from this guy for a year but can’t now  because Dr. Hay fucked me over.”
5) Cherry picking - this is the way most doctors run a lucrative and successful practice.  If you avoid a) personality disorders especially ‘cluster b’ or ‘borderline”  b) impoverished c) divorcing people d) people with drug and alcohol history e) ptsd and anger issues f) people with pain disorder and major medical disabilities g) ethnic and aboriginal people with the increased complexity of problems h) LGBT patients with their long histories of discriminations and consequent sensitivities…etc…you can indeed have a very lucrative and successful psychiatric practice. Another way is to see the same people indefinitely at weekly intervals and mother them.  Never say anything that is ‘disagreeable’.  Indeed most ‘counsellors’ and most ‘psychologists’ dependent on the patient as ‘customer’ are very adept at this approach.  However as a psychiatrist I am by contrast ‘consulting to a family physician’ as opposed to just seeing the patient directly. Therefore every patient has another person in the room with them. Further I am held to the highest standard of ‘diagnostic’ and ‘treatment’ protocols which have must have a high association of reducing morbidity and mortality. I can’t do all the shit the homeopathic doctors do for the ‘worried well ‘ and ‘rich’ and ‘get away with it”.  By contrast ‘holistic healers’ are play acting in the real world of medicine without ‘accountability’ and yet have much of the benefits that have been long fought for by physicians.  No wonder we have ‘rug doctors’.  I am accountable to ‘science’ and ‘scientific evidence’ and can lose my license as well as my business as well as be sued and yes I can have complaints against me, if I don't. These complaints, not on ‘rate your doctor’ ,but in other forums routinely cost me $10,000 a piece in time and cost and loss of income. I would gladly avoid them but believe if I did that I would increasingly not be practicing medicine or psychiatry but rather practicing law, bureaucracy or some easier more lucrative thing like say, being a “ drug pusher for the multinationals’ .   If I’m in the ‘business’ of medicine I avoid these hazards routinely by ‘cherry picking’.  I ‘specialized in seeing ‘borderline personality disorders’ for many years as a psychotherapist and moved on to ptsd and then drug and alcohol addictions.  It’s common for me to see a person with a half dozen diagnosis and multiple failed treatments or to be seeing a patient with at least a half dozen other caregivers and often a lawyer or two involved in their care.  Summed up I have concluded that I have chosen over the years to work in the areas of ‘greatest need’.  When I worked as a fly in doctor in the north, the Northern Medicine Unit had advertised for the position I took for 2 years and I went to many Indian reserves that hadn’t seen a doctors in years.
6) Cherry picking - Psychoanalytically trained we all learned that the ‘best’ (safest and most grateful and most responsive) was a YAFFIE.  Young, Attractive, Anxious Financially well off, Fun, Intelligent and insightful and Expressive was the best patient. The psychologists and counsellors have like in every other field of endeavour taken this ‘cream’ of mental health work away from the doctors. It’s the same with obstetricians and midwives. The midwives do the ‘easy’ work and the obstetricians are left doing the tough work.  As doctors we are all now doing the heavy lifting and being paid less than those who are specifically living the life  of O’ Reilly because the minute anything becomes ‘tough’ they ‘refer it’ to the doctor or ‘worse’ , the ‘specialist’.  Being a ‘specialist’ is financially fucked today.  When I began I had a practice of loveable ’neurotics’  (they get under their skin”) and 20 years later I found my practice was mostly ‘personality disorders’ (they get under your skin).  Meanwhile my pay scale had decreased, my job satisfaction had reduced, my psychology colleagues were by contrast richer and everyone enjoyed referring their failures and difficult patients to me because psychiatrists and other specialists are the ‘last resort’.  We are lifes’ ‘garbage dump whereas the lucrative and really happy happy easy work and well paid work has been taken over by the ‘alternative health care’ and “allied health care professionals”.  They system is fucked and doctors are striking in England and working to rule in Ontario. And most of my colleagues at my age with my experience and training are trying find ways to avoid seeing difficult case rather than embracing them as they would if the system wasn’t fucked by the incredibly incompetent, inexperience, overpaid, lazy, entitled unaccountable administration.  
6) A week doesn’t go by that a referring gp asks me to see someone and confesses that as many as 50 other psychiatrists have refused to the see the patient. I turn down 10 consults a week.  Apparently I’ve got the lowest standards.  I routinely hear “ I’m sorry to ask you to see another one of my tough cases. I tried referring this to someone else but I called up 20 psychiatrists and they’ve all refused and I know you would but I feel it’s not fair to ask you again.’  I try to keep a few spots for ‘less complicated’ cases. I’m getting phone calls through the night and weekends and even when I’m out of the country, mostly because. “no one else will listen to me’.
7) I used to have two thirds of my patients as what I called the ‘ferraris  did ‘tune ups’ on while  a third of my practice could be described as ferrraris needing complete overhauls.  Somehow that became flipped and now I’m lucky if I’ve got a tenth of my practice who could be described as more ‘neurotic’ than otherwise. I’m really thankful when I see patients that have jobs.
8)More and more patients want me to ‘collude’ with their being off work or on insurance.  They are not looking for ‘therapy’ they are actually shopping for a ‘diagnosis’ which will suit their ‘work requirements ‘ and ‘insurance concerns’. A week or two doesn’t go by when someone objects to a diagnosis because it could ‘hurt’ them and we are in conflict.  As a result I increasingly am compromised. I record “situational alcohol abuse’ rather than ‘alcoholism’ because the patient threatens me in some overt or covert way.  I can’t know for sure but I’m worn down. I also get to read consults by my university colleagues and they’ve mostly sold out. They don’t even record the personality disorder, or the substance abuse or anything that the patient might be ‘offended’ by.  Meanwhile I’m condemned outright for being patient advocate and going to the supreme court in a pro bono fight for the right of doctors to be the advocate of the patient when the courts and the state want the doctor to work for them. I was with the psychiatrists against political abuse of psychiatry and have defended the most down and out patients repeatedly against the full weight of the ‘system’ and have been smeared by association.
Ian Magrew  summarized my patient as a ‘coke addict’ in the Vancouver Sun and was 180 degrees wrong in his reporting like half the reporting in the news today. Journalists today are so collectively considered ‘bought’ or ‘sold out’ or ‘biased’  or ‘corporate’ that the ‘comments’ on their articles are essentially the equivalent of  ‘rate your journalist’.  CBC closed down feed back because of the incompetence of journalists and how unpopular journalists are for their reporting of stories. They condemned the readers as ‘haters’ never considering that their journalism was the cause of such negative feedback which extends throughout the society.  Increasingly people have to turn to the internet to get the ‘facts’ because mainstream journalism is so ‘corporate’ and ‘biased’ or often just ‘outright wrong”. In the case in point,  I couldn’t even respond at the time to the highly offensive Vancouver Sun article because the case was still in court. So  paid scribblers like Ian Magrew can write the most outrageously erroneous material without fear of rebuttal because in most cases the lawyers advise those involved not to respond to Ian Magrew’s yellow journalism as it would negatively affect their on going cases.  Ian Magrew reduced my patient to ‘coke addict’ despite her being a decade clean and sober. But his stigmatizing the mentally ill and those who suffer from addiction killed her as much as journalists have killed countless with their condescending words and careless reporting.”Loose lips sink ships” They are not held accountable for their bias and irresponsibility and mostly don’t believe in truth which is possible for those who only work in ‘words’ . There was no stigma attached to general practice but there is a hell of a stigma attached to treating the mentally ill, especially those with drug and alcohol abuse and especially those with HIV or Hep C.  The head of the American Psychiatric Association says that Stigma of Mental Illness is shared by the psychiatrists much like no one wanted the “leper doctors’ to come to dinner.  It didn’t matter to Ian Magrew that the patient died or that eventually my lawyers defended me successfully. He had his ‘sensationalism’ and got paid his pieces of silver.   He never mentioned that all the cases he condemned me in were pro bono cases, that my assistance in the court cases was because the people I assisted had been financially ruined and marginalized and I had helped them because I believed they were being bullied and abused because they were mentally ill not because they were wrong. He’s a word smith and a review of his work shows he plays to the rich and to the judges.  He plays it safe and smart.  My friend Dugald Christie who started the Pro Bono Lawyer association said the failure of the courts today is that they no longer serve the lower classes or even the middle classes. I believe Dugald Christie would say the same of  Ian Magrew.The now dead woman had been bankrupted by the courts that have made Ian Magrew a very wealthy man.  That woman’s family  had mortgaged their house and been financially destroyed by the man that Ian Magrew championed.  That man who Ian Magrew chose to champion had in deed lost his license to practice.  The judge took the child from her mother who was ruined defending her and Ian Magrew summarized her as a ‘coke addict’ despite her long and arduous road to recovery. .  Ian Magrew himself hasn’t faced being drug tested.  He can dish it out but certainly can’t take it.  The only one involved in that court who had been drug tested was the poor mother who Ian Magrew continued to stigmatize as a  ‘coke addict’.  10 years clean and sober fighting for her child didn’t count to the sanctimonious Ian Magrew who would never dare to truly offend the courts because they, not their victims, are his bread and butter.  The stigma against the mentally ill and those who have suffered drug and alcohol abuse is very very real and the courts despite the 10 to 20% of judges and lawyers suffering from addiction has been slow to respond.  Journalists collectively have refused drug testing and newspapers, especially Vancouver Newspapers refuse to drug test their journalists en mass despite the rest of Canadians in ’safety sensitive’ industries being subjected to this only to be criticized by actively addicted marijuana, alcohol or heroin users who act out their drug induced aggression against those who have recovered from theirs. Countless research studies in psychiatry have shown that the  Media continues to be as outdated and ignorant as Ian Magrew for they continue to stigmatize and sensationalize the mentally ill the addicted and those who serve them.   If anything Ian Magrew’s writing shows its the continued ignorance of  journalists and the stigma against the mentally ill, the courts bias against the poor, and the terrible need for education and drug testing of journalists. When will a person be ‘good enough’ for Ian Magrew.  If there was a ‘rate your journalist’ I’d rate Ian Magrew as a outright unforgivable ’toadie’, a sensationalist yellow journalist, whose biases are blatant and whose writing is downright stupid.  Half the time reading him  because of his  tangentialism I want to ask what is that man smoking. He seems a terribly spiteful little shit as well so I would guess that few would care to challenge a man who has used words to beat up on the mental ill and those who have recovered from mental illness.  I miss the days when court reporter criticized the judges for their poor decisions and held the court to a higher standard rather than such obvious toadying and politically correct protecting the authorities with the kind of reporting that was celebrated in Pravda but should not be the staple of the Vancouver Sun.  Rather than Paul Simon singing where have you gone Joe DiMaggio we should all be singing ‘where have you gone court reporters’.  Ian Magrew is to court reporting what Kanye West is to music.  Court Toady.  Were there a College of Journalists to revoke his hack license, he’d be kicked out and depend on writing jingles for marijuana for his income.
9) I’m seeing an increasingly older population with worsening health so my patients have increasing health problems, a half dozen or more right now with major cancer illness, a half dozen or more with severe Crohn’s disease, a dozen or two with unstable diabetes, a dozen or more with severe endocrine disorders, many with heart disease, ex smokers with severe COLD, Hep C, HIV, dozens with major head trauma, I’ve only a half dozen or so conventional schizophrenics and I enjoy them as a ‘break’ from the world of ‘personality disorders’ I’m usually mired in.  Schizophrenia is easier for me to treat than schizoaffective disorder but I have a dozen or so schizoaffectives.  I enjoy the helping the transgendered patients and LGB patients because like my severe PTSD patients they’ve had a whole lot of persecutions.  The torture patients I treat are surprisingly the most grateful.  I’m treating dozens of muslims, christians, catholics, sikhs, hindus, pagans, and atheists, people of every colour. .  It’s complicated.  I am a Christian and I envy my Christian psychiatrist friend whose practice is 90% Christian and white.  I’ve done cross cultural psychiatry for decades but increasingly the ‘cherry picking’ is with a colleague who works with ‘predominantly LGBT” or “women only’  or mostly aboriginals’ and then they have the advantage they can ’skew’ their practice to the ’special needs’.  There was even one psychiatrist in Vancouver who following on the YAFFIE selection only treated ‘doctors’ and was greatly admired.  
9) I ask myself daily if I’m doing a good job. I use the old fashioned criteria that includes 30 years plus of ‘referrals’ and continued referrals from the family physicians I most admire in the city.  I also receive personal referrals from the heads of several university departments and treat people from all walks of life. I’ve treated multimillionaires, many olympic athletes, famous media people, professors, and countless street people. Most colleagues I know have practices with a very narrow focus  in comparison. The family physicians I most admire are as stupid as I am because  they go the extra mile for  patients.  I love them each individually because despite most often not knowing them personally I’ve heard some tidbit about them from the dozens of patients I’ve seen of theirs over the years. Just last week I heard of one of my favourite guys who refers to me making home visits to a patient who didn’t understand how rare that was.  Patients usually don’t realize what they’ve got till it’s gone. I’ve had dozens of patients come back to me and frankly tell me that the other psychiatrists only saw them for 10 minutes and only prescribed medications or didn’t tell them anything about themselves.
10) When I was a conventional psychoanalytic oriented psychiatrist no one knew anything about me and when I was doing strict psychopharmacology no one knew anything about me anymore than they did when I was a city gp. But when I was a country gp everyone knew everything about me, the same as when I was a country psychiatrist.  Further when I began to work in the area of personality disorder, ptsd and addiction I learned that ‘story telling ‘ was one of the most effective therapies whereas if I retained the ‘aloof’ parental position as opposed to the ‘uncle or aunt’ role in therapy I got nowhere. People ‘rejected’ outright what had been told to them ‘directly’ but couldn’t reject what was told to them indirectly. Years of extra advanced training in these forms of psychotherapy, structural, hypnosis, 12 step facilitation, and strategic all contributed to a very high success rate in getting people ‘back to work’ , off drugs and alcohol or healthy and moving on from therapy.  “i want to feel happy’ isn’t what the government is paying psychiatrists to do.  One pays out of ones own pocket for a ‘feel good’ counsellor but my job as a psychiatrists is as the ‘high paid help’ We are expected to judge our therapy on ‘morbidity and mortality’ and by outcome measures such as return to work, community involvement, stopping negative behaviour.
I will never forget when I shared how broken up I was by a patient suiciding at a local conference of psychiatry and one of my colleagues 30 years older at the time, stood up and said condescendingly “I”ve practiced psychiatry for 30 years and never had one patient committ suicide.”  I will forever love Dr. Brown who was Head of Riverview at the time and had the most experience in the city with the most difficult cases, standing up to my defence saying, “I know Dr. Hay is practicing psychiatry but I don’t what the hell you’ve been doing for 30 years.”  As anyone knows that if you are a soldier and hang out in Ottawa you will certainly not shoot anyone or be likely to get wounded. As every surgeon knows if you work in the front lines you will lose a patient or two. Indeed the more ‘risky’ the patients you treat the greater the risk of the patient dying. It’s become a problem in the US with Legal medicine that patients with severe problems not only can’t get insurance for them but can’t get doctors because the doctors can’t afford to take the risk that losing a patient would have on their insurance  coverage.  Canada is rapidly moving in this direction. One of the principal reasons for patients being unable to see doctors or have a doctor under the MSP public health care system is because doctors get paid the least and face the greatest risk seeing patients.  When I worked on salary with a government agency I saw 10 patients a week at most and had countless committee meetings instead.  We all congratulated ourselves too. In Private Practice I see 50 to 100 patients a week as a specialist where as private practice generalists see 200  to 300 patients a week.  A psychologist once told me that she had seen 10 patients with anorexia and considered herself the local ‘authority’.  At the time I ‘d seen some thousand or so patients with eating disorders but consider my colleague the ‘authority’ as he did an extra year of training beyond specialist level and has seen tens of thousands of patients with eating disorders.  It matters.  My gp colleague is delivering the children of the mothers he delivered and knows his patients for decades. I have several patients I’ve seen off and on over 30 years.  I’ve seen all the family of one patient over a 20 year stretch so have an amazing in depth and extended knowledge of this patient.  One visit with me every 5 to 10 years after that first year of therapy saves the health care system tens of thousands of dollars such a case. The horrendous lack of training and competence in health care administration is that there is literally millions of dollars of duplications of services.
Increasingly no one wants to do more than a ‘consult’. Consults get paid more than ongoing therapy but if one focuses on the loyal and happy ‘customer’ then one can indeed have an ‘easy’ practice whereas I’ve always had a combination of ‘consultation’ and therapy. Increasingly the patients who I don’t think would benefit from therapy are angry with me for refusing to accept them because frankly no one is willing to see this person weekly for an hour on the ‘government’ dime and these patients who are most wanting to be in therapy can’t afford counsellors or psychologists.  One of the essential keys to ‘rationing’ scarce resources and to ‘triaging patients’ is to decide if therapy would ‘alter’ the outcome of the patients case. Hence i have some patients I see for psychiatric psychotherapy because I believe I can improve their ‘morbidity’ or ‘mortality’.  I see a patient with heart disease for many years because he was told he would die and we both enjoy seeing him outlive the ‘predictions’.  I see some cancer patients because it improves their longevity.  I further have seen some students who were failing but now have gone on to getting masters and Ph’d’s.  I have enjoyed the ‘external’ criteria for success like using the ‘recovery ‘ and ‘days abstinent’ for assessment of my work.  I also encourage patients to leave my practice when they are well or have made as much progress as I believe they can at this time, while I leave the door open for return.  If I was in a private psychology practice I wouldn’t discourage a paying ‘customer’.  Psychoanalysis started as a year long therapy and because of the lucrative nature and the desire of the satisfied customer went on for 10 or more years. This is fine in a private paying system but in a public health care system I have accepted that I have a responsibility to the group as well as the individual.  One of my colleagues saw the same 40 people for 40 years roughly. If that was in the private pay system it would be good business.If I want to go to the same masseuse once a week for 40 years and pay out of pocket for this service it’s just fine.
However I did two years of community medicine and public health training in addition to psychiatry so I’ve been forever ruined because I think of the health care system and encourage ‘good’ patients who ‘love’ me to leave home without me.  In fact when I’m really looking forward to seeing a patient this is one of my counter transference criteria for raising the question of termination of therapy.  With psychopharmacology in contrast there is a diminishing need to see the patient and from initial assessment period of visits the frequency and length of time of visit can reduce to the standard every 6 month or year visit or transfer back to the general practice.  Mostly patients don’t want to transfer back to the general practitioner and most general practitioners want you to continue to manage the complex medication so the system gets bogged down and waitlists grow.  Also because everyone is trying to avoid upsetting patients because upset patient complain to the college and college complaints cost the practitioner thousand of dollars a lot of ‘dependent personality disorders’ and “hypochondriac’s are seen ad infinitum with no change in their health because they are ‘addicted to their therapist’ like a drug.  I get as many complaints from refusing to continue to see a patient as I do from seeing a patient. It’s like the horror i went through getting patients off benzodiazepines  The withdrawal process was as bad as the disease and the same occurs with ’termination of patients’ in therapy.  It’s so tough that junior doctors avoid it like the plague and everyone colludes to a very expensive tea time rather than doing the work of therapy which involve ‘learning to leave home’.  I am facing a complaint right now because a patient using alcohol and crystal meth wants to talk with me and wants me to diagnose him as being well and without a mental disorder. However I have explained to such patients without giving them a psychiatric diagnosis I can’t get paid. A week doesn’t go by that a patient doesn’t expect or ask me to do something for free but they’d never do this to a lawyer or a mechanic or any other business owner.  They get angry that I won’t do something and yet don’t understand that I do hundreds of hours of pro bono work and give thousands to charity and do all manner of volunteer service but in their eyes “you’re just a selfish uncaring bastard to not do this for me.” Every day my secretaries are asked to do unpaid services for patients who are incredibly entitled.  Often someone  sees the photocopy machine or fax machine and wants the secretary to work for them doing things wholly unrelated to their mental health issues. One patient used my secretary as their answering service having her forward their calls.  I’ve lost several staff because of patients threatening and bullying them.  Only other business owners in my practice understand the whole idea of ‘overhead’ and don’t assume the doctor is a ‘free service’.
I was in charge of the suicide ward at an asylum where the suicde rate was 5 -10 per year with 30 attempts per year. I reduced it to no deaths and less than 10 attempts only to see administration wanting then to cut back the resources because the ‘problem had been solved’.  Administration in psychiatry penalizes good work. The doctors who are most rewarded do not ‘cure’ but rather maintain the illness at a ‘manageable level’.  Hence in addiction right now the doctors most lauded are those introducing ‘safe injection sites’ which do not cause ‘abstinence’ but keep people sick but alive.  It’s probably not intentional but it’s fairly factual.  The Abortionists could make more  than the Obstetricians and I’ve been offered more money to prescribe marijuana than I was ever offered to get people off marijuana.
11) But increasingly I don’t want to justify myself. I’m looking forward to dying because most doctors I know don’t see themselves being able to ‘afford’ to retire.  Further none can find anyone to take over their practices so are even more hated for ‘abandoning’ their patients.  I dreamed of a ‘retirement’ or even ‘cherry picking’ a ‘safe practice’ by avoiding seeing any of those people who are ‘haters’ and ‘complainer’s and ‘liars’. My favourite Rate Your Doctor complaints are the active ‘crack addict’ who worked for me and hurt so many of my patients because she lied so much about her past and was promoted by a minister and some men who subsequently told me were her customers.  I fired her because she hurt a number of my patients but the damage this psychopath did to my patients and practice was amazing. In spite she also wrote a half dozen ‘rate your doctor’ complaints.  My other favourite is the old millionaire alcoholic I saw with a 40 ounce habit a day who wanted to see me for psychotherapy to talk about his ‘stress’ but became incensed that I diagnosed him as having ‘alcohol abuse’ in the first ‘assessment hour’.  As a psychiatrist I am required to make an assessment in 1-2 hours and was criticized by the licensing body when I had not made one in 5 sessions, apparently 3 sessions being some ‘unwritten maximum’ . Our
Royal College Examination requires that we have a diagnosis after 1-2 hours.  I have reviewed dozens of diagnosis from university departments and all of the psychiatrists there would not pass their Royal College exams today for their ‘missing diagnosis’ .  The diagnosis they most often ‘miss’ are ‘drug and alcohol abuse’ and ‘sexual diagnosis’ and anything deemed ‘political incorrect’.  They are “playing the game’ and are not doing their job of setting a high standard but cowardly doing ‘feel good’ psychiatry and avoiding at all costs anything that could be controversial such as a ‘axis II diagnosis’.   So ‘sins of omission’ are rewarded and ‘sins of commission’ condemned.
12) My windows were shot out.  Countless times I’ve had empty bottles smashed at my door step.  My cat was killed. My dog was murdered. My girlfriends car had empty beer bottles smashed on it. My family have been threatened and I have had my life threatened repeatedly.  Right now a man is emailing me telling me he is going to kill my dog.  Every one of these cases has involved a diagnosis of drug or alcohol abuse and in every occasion the person’s job was affected because they were told if they didn’t get ‘treatment’ then they would not have their job, so they have tried in every way possible to ‘kill the messenger’.  If only doctor hay  had not diagnosed them as ‘drug and alcohol abuse’ then all these bad consequences would not be occurring.  I have to date met with very mixed  support from my superiors but continued to do what I was taught and followed the laws and recommendations.  But a day doesn’t go by that I don’t think of retiring or just ‘cherry picking’ is the answer.  On really bad days, I think I’ll completely sell out and become a  court reporter.  I could go into administration and escape the front lines.  The trouble is I don’t think they want truth or experience. The key today is in constructivism and marketing. Propaganda, political correctness and platitudes.  There is physician assisted suicide.  Get in on the ground floor like with early abortions when the extreme cases were being used to sell another of today’s  most lucrative death industries.   Death sells.  Follow the money.  Get with the program.  Do no harm and patient advocacy are clearly ‘on the wrong side of history’.  It is 2016, to quote Trudeau.

Alternatively I could just not read "Rate Your Doctor" until they allow "Rate Your Judge".

Skepticism and Deception

The leading feminist speaker at the Harvard "Take Back the Night" rallies turned out to not be the raped, underpriviledged woman, living in poverty as she claimed. She was the daughter of extremly wealthy family and when investigated because of the increasing 'extraordinariness' of her claims, it turned out she'd never been raped.  She was one of those who had no difficulty with deception and was glad to have the adulation that she received for 'daring to speak her truth'.
My detective friend told me one day he'd been videotaping a school that had set up in Vancouver.   Advertising internationally, it was training men and women how to jump in front of cars with 'minimal injury' for maximum insurance claims.  My friend said, "Now you know why your car insurance payments are so high."
Sitting in an outside a Denman cafe with my Scotty dog Stuart tied to a tree a few yards away, we watched and listened as a woman told her 5 or 6 year old son to poke the dog. "Poke him," she said. "Get him to bite you".   I intervened saving my dog from this psychopathic predator.
A number of Rabbis were caught last year in a huge money laundering and theft crime in the Eastern USA.  Immediately there were cries of "anti-semiticism" .  The Rabbis were taken away handcuffed on the television. My friend said, "If Vancouver's pig farmer serial female murderer was Jewish, the same group would have cried anti semiticism".
"Whatever happened to perjury?" I asked the lawyer.  "The judges today seem to think it's their job to sort out one person's 'truth' from another person's. They say everyone lies in court."  I was shocked because I was brought up to believe that compulsive lying invalidated what came next.  Just like the story of the boy who screamed "the sky's falling".  Yet the legal system seems increasingly to run on the 'lie, lie, lie, deny, deny, deny' principle that also seems to permeate politics.
When doctors failed their medical exams at the University of Toronto, those students claimed discrimination and were passed . This caused a friend to say, "I don't want to ever have a University of Toronto doctor operating on me. He might know nothing about surgery and only how to cover up his mistakes legally or politically".
Working in the jails, everyone says they're innoscent.
The industry for "Victimship" and the reward for claiming that "somebody else's fault" has never had such potential value. This has been termed "secondary gain" at times to explain why a person might have an illness or sickness or even disability or claim such a thing when it wasn't apparent.
The problem with deception is that it ultimately leads to skepticism.  Today because of constant claims of 'victimship' by every group and individual, there's a consequent 'skepticism' in society. It's not that people are 'hard' or 'don't care' or 'don't want to help'.  It's just that they've been lied to maybe one too many times.
We've all heard the pan handler drug addict insist he needs money for 'food' but the fact is if we give him money we're fueling his addiction and paying for criminals in the neighbourhood.
There's a healthy skepticism.  It follows the deception of others and it's associated with a true desire to help those who are truly 'needy' or "truly discriminated against' not the liars, sociopaths, shirkers, or wolves in sheep's clothing.