For A Thursday If This Is All There Is

Then I'm sorely disappointed.

Today the Minister for Care Services, Phil Hope, has announced plans to cut the prescription of anti-psychotic drugs to patients with dementia. On the face of it this sounds like a good thing with the government striving hard to improve the care of dementia patients. You may even have the false impression that my grandmother has dementia and is being over prescribed anti-psychotics. That would make it appear that the Labour minister is taking a brave stand to protect my grandmother from the Croydon Network.

Unfortunately none of this is true. The first thing you have to understand is that anti-psychotics, like all other drugs, are expensive. Therefore limiting a doctors right to prescribe them will save the NHS rather a lot of money. Secondly my grandmother doesn't haven't dementia and despite a good clinical case for doing so isn't being prescribed anti-psychotics. The drugs she was being over prescribed in order to falsify a dementia diagnosis were a painkiller and a treatment for stomach ulcers althoguh we've stopped that nonsense now. Therefore if the minister was seriously trying to protect my grandmother he would simply issue a statement calling for the law of the land to be allowed to run its course.

Aside from the desperate need to save money the real motivation for the government to call for a cut in the use of anti-pyschotics is that I, for reasons I won't go into, use anti-psychotics. As with psychosis and dementia the effects of anti-psychotics are not well understood however the Brits believe that their use is what is allowing me to resist the Brits program of psychological harassment. Therefore they intend to attempt to restrict my use of these drugs in order to make me more compliant. In the process they also hope that I will give them information on mental health issues because, at present, they don't even have usable data on what drugs I'm taking.

In short they want me to provide them with a service but they don't want to pay for that service.