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The medicine of misery: A personal account

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Lynne Jones*
Affiliation:
Warneford Hospital, Headington, Oxford OX3 7JX
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We spent part of this morning's ward round making a priority list; which of the five patients in need of admission was most acute, which could wait. There are two elderly ladies, both living alone, both very depressed. Edith is no longer taking care of herself, picking at her skin to the point where nasty sores have formed, and pulling her eyebrows out in her distress. Jonathan should have been admitted last week, we delayed and he took an overdose of Ativan. Alan is an elderly man who gets recurrent depressions. They seem to resolve of their own accord without medication if only he can be admitted for two or three days. Eleanor is a young mother of 28 who has been depressed for three months. Now she is completely preoccupied with ideas of killing both herself and her children.

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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1988
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