ePetition - End the crisis in primary care

1. The root cause of the crisis is not shortage of money, but a toxic system where GPs and nurses don’t want to work, because they can only over-prescribe drugs which generally do more harm than good.
2. Before 1980, when antidepressants started to be mass-marketed, mental disorders (called ‘nervous breakdowns’) were rare (less than 1 in 1,000) Now, 1 in 10 adults are on antidepressant medication, numbering 30,000 in the city of Brighton and Hove, and 6 million in England.
3. This proves Robert Whitaker right, who published ‘Anatomy of an epidemic’ in 2010, saying that the root cause is the medication given to treat it.
4. The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme was launched in 2006 to ‘end the Prozac nation’ but antidepressant prescribing has since more than doubled from 30 to 65 million monthly prescriptions annually, mostly against NICE guidelines, which say that talking therapy should be the first choice of treatment.
5. Like street drugs, medication has harmful and addictive side effects, making patients go round in a revolving door, overwhelming primary care, and causing the crisis in A&E and GP surgeries, and burning out GPs (who now retire at an average age of 55) and nurses (for whom there are now more than 30,000 vacancies)
6. The solution is for the Council to mass commission the NICE recommended Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) 8 week course, so that GPs can prescribe them, instead of having to prescribe antidepressants, breaking their Hippocratic oath ‘do no harm’ and making them feel so guilty and ashamed that they burn out and have to take early retirement at an average age of 55.
7. The Better Care Fund (BCF) was enacted in 2013 to create Community Care Centres as mental A&Es to treat vulnerable patients, personified as Rachel, (65, depressed and in sheltered accommodation), and Dave, (40, alcoholic and homeless), for which the city has been allocated over £20 mpa since 2015, which is enough to treat 20,000 Rachels and Daves annually.
8. However, in answer to a public question at the HWB on 13.6.17, no Community Care Centres have yet been created, and no Rachel or Dave has yet been treated, which is a scandal. For further details see paper 9.118, and other papers on section 9 of http://www.reginaldkapp.org

This ePetition ran from 16/01/2018 to 05/03/2018 and has now finished.

5 people signed this ePetition.