Take your clothes off. Titicut Follies, public hall, 1967
Patient: I need help. I just don’t know where I can get it.
Doctor: Well you’ll get it here, I guess. ibid.
After a week I secretly returned to England to this hospital and to a doctor telling me I am bipolar. Stephen Fry, The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, BBC 2006
4 million others in the UK have it. And many of the seriously ill end up killing themselves. ibid.
The poster-child of manic depression – I’m visiting my old friend Carrie Fisher … She’s on the edge of sanity. ibid.
There is no brain test that can diagnose polarity … There is no clear-cut test to show if someone is bipolar. ibid.
I’m sure it does help me to succeed. ibid.
… Waited for a lorry to come along and then walked in front of it … ibid. sufferer
Manic depression is an illness that’s always handed down in families. ibid.
Despite it being the greatest killer of all – psychiatric illnesses – many of those suffering from it if given the chance don’t want to get rid of it. ibid.
I would have killed myself if I didn’t have the option of disappearing. Stephen Fry, The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive II
Lithium: that’s the standard medication seven out of ten of those with manic depression are advised to take. ibid.
ECT – Electro Convulsive Therapy – is actually still used in the treatment of manic depression. ibid.
It’s a word we all use but have you ever stopped to wonder what exactly is a psychopath? … They all have something in common: they all have a severe personality disorder. It can’t be cured but it can be understood. Meet the Psychopaths I: Psycho Killers, Channel 5 2015
What makes a psychopath become a psycho-killer? ibid.
On 30th March 2013 a man’s body was discovered in a ditch near Newborough, Cambridgeshire. His name was Kevin Lee … Bizarrely, he was wearing a dress. ibid.
Joanna Dennehy was known to police for petty crime. But they’d never seen the true depths of her disturbed personality. Her killing spree shocked the nation … Joanna lived in one of Kevin Lee’s rented properties and worked in his property-letting business. ibid.
Kevin Lee was not her first victim, he was her third. ibid.
She placed one of the men’s body in a wheely-bin and decided to show it off to a fourteen-year-old girl she had befriended. ibid.
Dennehy was after more men; within an hour two were fighting for their lives. ibid.
She was arrested without a struggle. ibid.
She will never be released from prison. ibid.
Dennehy was the mother of two daughters, the first born when she was seventeen, the second six years later but she would still disappear for weeks and months and be in constant trouble. Dennehy was drinking heavily and began to cut herself. ibid.
Noel Razor Smith has fifty-eight criminal convictions including GBH and armed robbery: he has spent thirty years in prison … Now he is on a mission to look inside his own mind. ibid.
Not all criminal psychopaths are serial killers or even murderers. But most of them are at least very violent. ibid.
There is another type of psychopath all the more dangerous because their disorder is hidden, it’s invisible behind a mask of sanity. ibid.
Meet John Cannan, rapist and sexual predator and prime suspect in one of Britain’s most famous cold cases, the disappearance of Fulham estate agent Suzy Lamplugh. In 1987 29-year-old newly wed Shirley Banks disappeared from Bristol city centre … [He] had robbed a knitwear shop at knife-point. He tied up the shot assistant’s mother then raped the shop assistant after threatening to stab her baby if she resisted … Six months later Shirley Banks’ naked and decomposed body was found. ibid.
One person out of a hundred is a psychopath. ibid.
We meet high profile power players who between them have destroyed the lives of millions. We discover if they were monsters or true psychopaths. We reveal the damage psychopaths can do when they hold the levers of power. Meet the Pscyhopaths II, Power Psychopaths
Angela Levin had just glimpsed inside the terrifying world of one of Britain’s worst sex offenders, a man we now know has abused more than 450 victims. But was Savile simply a pervert or a psychopath? ibid.
Savile: the assaults took place in his flats and caravans, in dressing rooms and in hospitals … ibid.
There was a huge gap between Savile’s public persona and the private reality. ibid.
In November 1991 the body of tycoon Robert Maxwell was recovered from the Atlantic. He had fallen overboard from his own luxury yacht … Maxwell was a crook. He had stolen hundreds of millions of pounds from his employees’ pension fund … In the boardroom Maxwell displayed some strong psychopathic traits. ibid.
‘Enron has all the hallmarks of a classic psychopathic company.’ ibid. Professor Clive Boddy
How can we tell the strong leader from the psychopath? And what do we do about it? ibid.
Libya 1969: a young colonel leads a bloodless and popular coup to overthrow the king … Gaddafi appeared keen to share the wealth … but there were also early signs of psychopathic traits … Gaddafi had an extreme sense of self-importance … Gaddafi had become a devotee of botox and plastic surgery. ibid.
Few would doubt Hitler was a psychopath. ibid.
We discover how a psychopath can stay hidden for thirty years. Reveal why a few psychopathic traits can be a good thing. Go inside a top-security jail full of teenage psychopaths. And ask what should we do about all the psychopaths who walk amongst us? Meet Mick Philpott: Psychopath, Channel 5 2017
Derby May 2012: a man pours petrol through the letterbox of a semi-detached family home and lights a fire. Upstairs six children aged between five and thirteen were lying asleep – they did not survive. ibid.
His crime shocked the nation and so did Philpott’s fake emotion at a police press conference. It’s the chilling behaviour you expect from a psychopath. ibid.
Documentaries at the time show a man who refused to work who had fathered fifteen children with five woman and claimed £26,000 a year in benefits. ibid.
He was intimidating, controlling and abusive. ibid.
1978: he turned on his then girlfriend … he stabbed his girlfriend twenty-seven times before turning on her mother. ibid.
Lawyers unashamedly assume fake emotions as they put their case … Like [surgeons] slicing open strangers’ bodies day in day out … ibid.
Noel’s [Razor Smith] experiences offers hope that hardened criminal psychopaths can be made safe by therapeutic prisons. ibid.
For decades doctors thought psychopaths were incurable. Now experiments in the USA and Britain are suggesting that’s wrong. Science isn’t stopping there. ibid.
What if the way we understand the world is wrong. What if it’s not politicians and world events that shape our lives but business deals? Deals made in secret high up in the boardroom or over a drink in a car in the dead of night. Our every waking hour has been transformed by these deals, re-programming us to think and behave in a different way. This is the story of these deals. Who made them, why, and what do they mean for our future. Jacques Peretti, Billion Dollar Deals and How They Changed Your World I, BBC 2017
It was a business plan, a strategy, to make living itself an illness, and patients of every one of us. ibid.
Psychiatrists needed to demonstrate the effectiveness of their practice. But the range of new conditions SMIII offered and the check-list approach to diagnosing them also allowed pharmaceutics companies to create niches for the development of a whole host of new medications which were then relentlessly marketed. ibid.
Deal Two: ‘The higher you score, the more likely you’ll be prescribed an anti-depressant.’ ibid.
Depression rates are known to be higher in deprived areas. ibid.
Many of the pharmaceutical companies marketing ADHD drugs have at one time or another referred to the research of one child psychiatrist prominent in this field. ibid.
Broadmoor: a word that makes people shiver. Most think that Broadmoor is a prison: in fact it’s a high-secure psychiatric hospital and home to some of the country’s most dangerous and violent offenders. Broadmoor: Inside Britain’s Highest Security Mental Hospital, ITV 2016
Many won’t even admit to working here. ibid.
Many of the men here have been front-page news. ibid.
This is Cranfield – the intensive care ward. ibid.