Samizdat has just launched The Decapitation of Care on Amazon — in English (print and kindle) and La santé décapitée in French (kindle) with French print in a few days time and El Fin Del Cuidado; Una breve historia del auge y caída de la atención médica in Spanish both print and kindle very soon after.
The illustrations by Billiam James are a key element of this “Manifesto”. Basic Kindles only show these in Black and White. The Print copy, IPads and Kindle Fire show the illustrations in colour which adds a great deal to the effect.
Decapitation is a Healthcare Manifesto – the prelude to The Shipwreck of the Singular which will appear later this year.
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This is the first of hopefully about 6 books this year, Fiction, Non-Fiction and who knows what else.
The Decapitation of Care was first given as a Talk in Maastricht in March 2019 – Responsibility, Care and Neuroscience.
It was also dress-rehearsed and recorded in North Wales as The Shipwreck of the Singular.
These talks have an unusual perhaps unique feature – there are 4 decapitations in them. And launching Decapitation close to coincides with the anniversary of the decapitation of Charles 1, just over 350 years ago. The history of healthcare covered in these pages is a story of what has unfolded over the last 350 years.
The slides for the Maastricht and Shipwreck talk are Here. Everyone is welcome to borrow and use the slides and video without permission.
Next week’s post will feature A Pill for Neoliberalism, a talk given in Grenoble and Lyon in October 2019 which also covers the main themes of Decapitation.
This was translated into French by Ariane Denoyal, the translator of La santé décapitée, and Bruno Harlé. Bruno also subtitled this Neo-Medical video and an accompanying presentation on Study 329 in French.
The Maastricht talk gives more of the historical background to modern healthcare, including 3 decapitations not found in A Pill for Neoliberalism, which focuses more on the modern transformation of healthcare into health services.
Reviews
We invite you to read and review or comment on the English, French or Spanish versions of this Manifesto. If you are happy for it to happen, your review or comments will be published here.
Translations
Seeing the translation process at close quarters was fascinating and sobering. It’s impossible to “simply translate” something. Every act of translating creates a new text, as the new “author” finds ways to get the original text to resonate with its new readers. In so doing, in this case, rather than me, Ariane Denoyel for La santé décapitée and Abel Novoa for El Fin del Cuidado may end up providing le mot juste, the key word, that makes a difference in the real world.
As Samizdat rolls out we will want translators/co-authors for our various titles – ideally for all languages. If anything you find on the site from Decapitation onwards interests you, please get in touch.
Authors
As mentioned in earlier news features we are looking for authors who can work in a new way in the new health service space – a space that is rapidly occupying the place once reserved for religion and later for political economics. If you are working in the way we are interested in – we’ll know it when we see it but at the moment it’s difficult to put into words that work – there is every chance that mainstream publishers will not be keen to support your efforts.
This book – The Decapitation of Care – is just the right length for a wet afternoon when clearing the garden had been on the agenda! Wind and rain having put the whole idea as a ‘no go’, I decided to open the Amazon padded envelope – and made the mistake of handing the book to my husband for inspection. As he read, his comment was “It’s a very interesting read”. An hour later, I got hold of the book!
I, too, found it easy to read and understand, much of it, of course, taking me back to facts that we’ve regularly heard from David. The illustrations certainly added a new experience. They are well spaced throughout the book with great effect. I was glad to see the list (of Illustrations) at the back as I needed that for conformation of my understanding of one or two of them!
The illustrations, I feel, give the book an added dimension and bring it to life. The combination of David’s and Billiam’s talents work to perfection.
Let’s hope that this book sells well and that the important message withinit reaches corners that are yet to be enlightened about the perils of our modern day rush for a “pill for all ills”.
After rising steadily for the past several centuries, life expectancy in the Western world has stalled, and in the United States, is actually falling. This is big news — as big as global warming.
David Healy, a Professor of Psychiatry at Bangor University, traces this decline to the transition from health care to health services, which is based on guidelines which in turn are based on data manufactured and controlled by the drugmakers, and which are centered on treating risk factors rather than actual human beings. As a result, polypharmacy has become the norm, and the potential for adverse drug reactions has risen exponentially.
As a corrective, Dr. Healy offers a modest proposal: until the drugmakers make all of their data public, we all refrain from taking any drug introduced after 1990. Since almost none of these drugs have been shown to save lives, abstaining from them isn’t much of a sacrifice – and seems like a good first step towards restoring sanity to a profession which seems to have all but forgotten the maxim Primum Non Nocere.
Until something goes wrong healthwise many of us just sail through life without giving much thought to the issues David Healy reveals – but forewarned is forearmed. It is not just a polemic or an academic book for the few but a manifesto which all should be able to access in orwer to prevent the harms and deaths being caused by the interplay between politics, pharma and an uninformed public.
Students would find this and the forthcoming book a valuable addition to the history of health ‘care’ – those who read it in coming years will be able to judge how much the warnings have been heeded.
What hope is there for ‘unqualified’ authors who can see what is happening in health and mental health, and decide to write a book in basic language directed to the average person who probably would not read a book written by a professor or ‘intellectual’?
Firstly they have to self publish, because you could waste years trying to convince someone that you have something important to say; then self-edit as everyone will tell you “you can’t say that”; and thirdly no bookshop will stock your book or give you a book launch because you are too controversial.
I thought being brought up by parents who encouraged me to question everything and to have the courage to speak out was an advantage, but alas it really makes no difference without some traction in a corrupted system.
Best wishes to Samizdat, the time for real knowledge – even common sense – is now.