This time, the victim was 47-year-old Dean Bray, a patient at a British National Health Service psychiatric unit in Southampton.
His cause of death was listed as “acute heart failure,” but was actually the neglect of nurses who failed to respond to his breathing difficulties for over 10 hours.
Mr. Bray died on December 29, 2021. Nearly three years later, an inquest jury reported: “There was a gross failure to escalate Dean’s deteriorating physical presentations ... based on inadequate monitoring of Dean’s physical health and a lack of recognition of Dean’s medical emergency.… But for the gross failures, Dean’s life probably could have been prolonged.”
“Gross failures”—that could be the final coroner’s report on the death of psychiatry itself.
It’s symptomatic of an industry desperately clutching for life support.
The multibillion-dollar torture-in-help’s-clothing industry has been unable to cover its bloody tracks this year, as investigation after investigation has uncovered egregious violations of patients’ rights—and trust. As never before, this year, psychiatry has been exposed as a swindle characterized by abuse, violence, rape, fatal neglect and a laxity in coming clean, borne of a mixture of fear and arrogance.
This year, in the United States alone, dozens of psychiatric institutions have been exposed as hotbeds of chaos, blood and death.
In Spain, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of mental health watchdog Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR), shutting down an attempt by the Spanish Society of Psychiatry to suppress CCHR’s documentation of psychiatry’s horrors. The court further ruled that CCHR’s materials “deal with a matter of undoubted general interest,” are “directly connected to the public debate in a democratic society,” and contribute to the “social debate on psychiatry.”
Aware that the public’s trust in their profession is virtually nil, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) recently sought to hook up with a field that still retains that trust: religion. In a manipulative and calculating move, the APA extended the claw of friendship to faith leaders, offering to partner with them for the “good” of their parishioners.
Whether religious leaders will fall for the con is anybody’s guess.
That it’s symptomatic of an industry desperately clutching for life support is a no-brainer.
And thus, the coroner’s postmortem on psychiatry itself:
- Gross failure to control its addiction to negligence, violence and rape perpetrated on the patients entrusted to its care.
- Gross failure to adequately inform potential victims of the percentage of patients treated who die—or who make it out with a pulse, but with crippled lives.
- Gross failure after nearly 200 years of not even attempting to develop something that could pass for a science of the mind, pursuing instead profit and havoc rather than bettered lives.
But just as Dean Bray’s coroner’s report came too long and too late after his demise, psychiatry’s autopsy comes far too late to save its myriad victims.
And whereas Mr. Bray’s death was listed as heart failure, psychiatry had no heart to begin with.
It just failed.
