Leyla Sanai has narrated this article for you to listen to.
When the actress Celia Imrie was 14, she was admitted to an NHS hospital where she was given medication intended for delusional, hallucinating, agitated schizophrenics. Though not diabetic, she was regularly injected with insulin, which lowered her blood sugar so that she became shaky, anxious, ravenously hungry and so confused she couldn’t recognise her own family. Yet she was one of the luckier ones. Other patients were given enough insulin to induce a coma caused by dangerously low glucose levels, and some even died.
Why was Imrie subjected to this? Because she was anorexic and had been placed in the care of a notorious psychiatrist who believed in aggressive physical therapy. William Sargant had failed to make it in his chosen specialty of hospital medicine because he had published research that was subsequently found to be nonsense. As a young doctor, he had insisted that a form of anaemia caused by inadequate B12 absorption could be cured by taking large amounts of iron. Anaemia can be caused by lack of iron, B12 or folate, but if you are deficient in one mineral or vitamin, receiving a different one will not help.
So Sargant had to abandon his dreams of being a great consultant physician, and pivoted to psychiatry instead. This is, of course, a hugely important specialty since anything that can be done to alleviate the suffering caused by mental illness is welcome. But Sargant was too macho for talking therapies, which he believed took too long and didn’t work anyway. Instead, he embraced all sorts of crazy physical interventions, most of which had terrible side effects.
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