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I have been a busy Family Doctor in the suburbs of Perth, Western Australia, since 1963. My work is stressful, but it gives me great satisfaction, pleasure and motivation.
Problems I came across as a Family Doctor, but for many years had difficulty understanding and treating included Worry Stress Anxiety, Depression Chronic Pessimism, Sleep Disorders, Low Self Esteem, Low Self Confidence, Relationship Problems and Marriage Breakdowns; also Giftedness Brilliance High Success and Delinquent Children and Failure, all in one family; Bright Kids failing at school, Poor Focussing and Concentration, ADD ADHD Dexamphetamine and Ritalin; Irritability Anger Road Rage Domestic Violence Hypomania and Manic Depressive (Bipolar) Disorder; Mental Shock Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Dissociation Split Personality, "Nervous Breakdowns" Self Harm and Suicide; and Addictions to Alcohol, Tobacco, Benzodiazepines, Marijuana, Speed, Ice, Heroin, Cocaine and Ecstasy.
I set out to understand those problems because they seemed to cause my patients severe suffering and risk of tragedy much more often than physical ill health disorders did.
So now if one of my patients is troubled by any of those problems, in 15 to 25 minutes they can answer the questions in The Beck Mini DISCOMFORTS/DYSFUNCTIONS Checklist; they can do this at one of the Internet terminals at my Family NeuroHealth Centre in office hours or they can do it at home, at work, at school, at an Internet Café or wherever there is an Internet terminal available to them, at whatever time suits them. In fact any troubled person anywhere in the World can do this Checklist at any Internet terminal, at any time of the day or the night, on any day of the year. It costs them nothing and they can then immediately download a printed Report and Information Sheets which explain what all of their main Mental/Social Health Problems are and what the usual Causes and best Treatments are for their particular Mental/Social Problems.
Click here to do The Beck Mini Discomforts/Dysfunctions (DD) Checklist or go to www.TheBeckDDChecklist.com
I have gained great satisfaction, pleasure and motivation from making so much progress in developing Tools, a System and a Team that can so quickly, conveniently and economically help to Diagnose and Treat people with problems which are so important, but which are often poorly treated. It is a daily joy to see people discovering what their problems are that have been spoiling or ruining their life for years, and then making rapid progress in overcoming those problems and getting a better life. After all I have been through working in this field, I am as tough as a workman’s worn steel capped boot, but the changes from a nightmare life to a much more normal and happy life that I now often see in my patients, still sometimes brings tears to my eyes.
Mental Health and Addiction patients often miss appointments, take a lot of time, and mostly have to be bulk billed at discount rates; staff and technology costs have been high, and our Counselling and EEG Biofeedback treatments were not Medicare Rebatable. So while gaining Knowledge and Experience and developing the Tools/System/Team my practice ran at a loss for several years, and this cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I first felt I was really getting down to the true origins of Mental Disorders when I started to work with addiction patients in 1997, and then in 1999 did an intensive workshop on EEG Biofeedback.
The EEG Biofeedback workshop was in Brisbane and was led by a Californian with a PhD in Physics. His son suffered from severe ADD and epilepsy, his wife was a Neurobiologist, and they had spent many years working with doctors to find better solutions for ADD, epilepsy and similar problems. An EEG is to a brain what an ECG (Electrocardiograph) is to a heart – a recording of that brain’s electrical flows that helps us to know how that brain is functioning or malfunctioning.
Through this work and study I came to more deeply understand Brain Chemistry and Brain Electricity. For the first time I fully realised the extent to which our Brain is Central in the Life of each one of us. Our brain is a part of us that we can’t see, or hear, or touch or feel. It is a blind spot so we often tend to overlook it’s importance. But the quality of our life is not related just to what possessions we have or don’t have, or to our education, or our situation, even though all of these things are important.
The quality of our life is also hugely affected by the production and flows of chemicals and electricity in our brain. It is through those flows of chemicals and electricity that our brain controls our feelings and thoughts, our actions and our whole functioning and performance. One person, with excellent circumstances and education and everything they could want in the way of possessions, may be chronically uncomfortable, dysfunctional and unhappy. Another person may have difficult circumstances, a very ordinary education, a lack of many important “things” in life, but be happy, functional and much more able to do all the things they need to do in life, because their Brain production of Serotonin, Noradrenalin and Dopamine and Slow and Fast Electrical Brainwaves, are all normal. They sleep well, are not often anxious or depressed, can focus and concentrate well, have good energy and motivation, can communicate and get on well with other people, are rarely irritable, aggressive or hypo, and often smile or laugh.
Your brain is made up of millions of tiny cells and each tiny cell produces tiny flows of both Chemicals and Electricity. These tiny flows of many different chemicals and of electricity of different frequencies (speeds), join up to produce larger, complex and very sophisticated flows of chemicals and electricity within your brain, which also flow to every part of your body. Your Brain largely controls Your Life through these flows of Chemicals and Electricity and if these flows are not normal your life won’t be normal – you will suffer from Discomforts and Dysfunctions which may be mild, moderate or severe and can spoil, ruin or cut your life short. Disturbed flows of Brain Chemicals and Brain Electricity can cause Insomnia, Anxiety, Depression, Hypomania, Bipolar Disorder, ADD, ADHD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Schizophrenia, craving for cannabis, speed, ice or opiates, the need to get drunk every day, to smoke 40 cigarettes a day, or to binge on chocolate.
Disturbed Production and Flows of Brain Chemicals and Brain Electricity are to a great extent what causes all of Those Problems that in the past I had difficulty understanding and treating. The faulty Chemical and Electrical Production and Flows are either Inherited from your Mother and/or Father with your genes at your Conception, or are the result of Shocks and Stresses in your life that have disturbed or damaged your brain’s functioning. Brain Chemistry Production and Flow disturbances are also aggravated by our two great modern lifestyle changes which are a diet high in manufactured foods and drinks that contain many Unnatural Artificial Colouring, Flavouring and Preservative Chemicals to which the human brain has not yet had time to adapt; and seriously reduced exercise due to modern physically inactive work, transport and recreation, following the development of trains, electricity, telephones, cars, television, computers, the internet and the growth of white collar work.
Finally the penny had dropped - "The problem is The Brain! They have got Disturbed Production and Flows of Their Brain’s Chemicals and Electricity!"
Those Problems that I hadn’t been able to understand or effectively treat should really be called NeuroPsychoSocial Disorders, not just PsychoSocial Disorders, because Brain (Neuro) faults are fundamental to all of Those Problems.
Our next great learning experience came when we opened “The Chemical Health Centre” in May 2001 and treated 736 new addiction patients at that Centre in the Calendar year of 2002. Those 736 very troubled people each had 3 or 4 or 5 or even 6 NeuroPsychoSocial Disorders, as well as their addictions, in every possible combination. Twenty or thirty percent of them had been in prison, some for more than half of their lifetime; lying and deception was a daily form of communication and coping for many of them; many were as cunning as an outhouse rat; one girl wanted her leg X rayed and we found the bullet that was still embedded in it from a drug dispute. Yet for many of those people my team and I were able to do a great deal, relieving their pain, helping them to understand and work on correcting their Disorders, to function more adequately, and to improve their health and quality of life. We were on a very steep learning curve and quickly learnt a great deal more about the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of those types of problems.
The addicts thought their problem was drugs, but we discovered that their real problems were their underlying Inherited and Post Traumatic NeuroPsychoSocial Illnesses and Injuries, (either inherited, or from family breakdowns, physical, mental and sexual abuse mostly by mothers’ boyfriends, too many changes of homes and schools, motor vehicle accidents, homelessness etc etc), very often aggravated by Nutritional Deficiencies and Unnatural Artificial Chemicals in their awful junk food Diets, by lack of Exercise, and by very poor living conditions (the electricity had been cut off, no hot water, sometimes sleeping out on the streets etc etc). The drugs were always secondary to the NeuroPsychoSocial Disorders. All of these people had been sick or injured long before they got onto street drugs and became addicted. As our understanding of their problems grew our System of Comprehensive Diagnosis and our Quadruple Therapy Program became more and more effective and efficient.
Our Comprehensive Diagnostic System consisted of Checklists which systematically asked questions about every part of their NeuroPsychoSocial life. At first we used pen and paper checklists, then we computerized the checklists, and now they are computerised and internet enabled and can be done anywhere, at any time. Our Quadruple Therapy consisted of (1) Providing Information about relevant Disorders through consultations and simple clear printed Handout Sheets, (2) Counselling to deal with troubling Issues, disturbing Memories and Dreams, unhelpful Beliefs, Ideas and Mental Habits, and to give Support, Encouragement and Hope (3) Medications, Dietary, Exercise and Lifestyle Advice and Nutritional Supplements, to correct disturbed Brain Chemistry and (4) EEG Biofeedback to correct disturbed Brain Electricity.
Over the 5 years of the life of The Chemical Health Centre, from 2001 to 2006, we continued to learn more and more. (The Chemical Health Centre then had to be closed down because of The Health Department’s withdrawal of my right to prescribe Buprenorphine and Methadone in response to my criticism of their methods and poor results). We were able to evolve better and better methods for Diagnosing and Treating people with multiple NeuroPsychoSocial and Substance Abuse Problems. We tried many things but only persisted with those that really worked, worked quickly, and gave lasting benefits.
We found that often young, healthy, cheerful, keen, motivated, newly graduated Bachelor Degree Healthcare workers were not only less costly to employ, but in some ways achieved better results with many of the patients than the more highly qualified, more experienced Healthcarers did. Some of the more qualified more experienced workers were intellectualised by too much theory and many of the lower socioeconomic patients had difficulty relating to them. Also some of the more experienced workers had become discouraged by the battle weariness and failures of trying to solve very complex problems with only one approach – usually either psychotherapy or medications alone – rather than with a Multidisciplinary Team and a Holistic Approach that really succeeded in changing sick people, and that shared the responsibility and stress across a whole team.
In 2004 we took our next great stride forward with the realization that only 2 things are really important in “Mental (NeuroPsychoSocial) Health”,
1) whether you are Comfortable enough within yourself to live a normal life
2) and whether you are Functional enough to be able to do the things you need to do to live a normal life.
If you have too many Discomforts – are chronically worried, depressed, hypo or sleep deficient, suffering panic attacks or having nightmares, feeling paranoid or hearing voices that aren’t there; or if you are very Dysfunctional – can’t focus, can’t concentrate, can’t get things done, can’t relax or go to sleep or enjoy things, can’t communicate, can’t get on with other people – then your life may be so joyless, painful and difficult that it becomes distorted and you may be at risk. To get short term relief or solve difficult problems, you may start to do desperate things such as take drugs, tell lies, borrow money at high interest, or steal things, and this may cause serious problems in the longer term. These things may then take you down hill to a non-life of Stress, Unemployment, Poverty, Substance Abuse and problems with the law. The treatment of Mental (NeuroPsychoSocial) Health Disorders is, to put it simply, relieving Discomforts/Pain and overcoming Dysfunctions, in affordable, non-addictive, sustainable ways.
I have been to many lectures for Family Doctors on Mental Health and often by the end of the lecture the Family Doctors’ eyes are glazed over and their facial expressions betray their confusion and despair of ever understanding or remembering all that theory, jargon and mind boggling random detail. At one grand presentation a few years ago, six different top of the range Experts from Mental Health Departments, one after the other, lectured hundreds of G.P’s. As I listened to the Experts and observed my fellow Family Doctors in the audience I came to two overwhelming impressions/conclusions.
The first of these impressions/conclusions was that those Experts, with the methods they were advocating and the resources available to them, were never ever going to be able to solve the great majority of the Mental Health and Drug and Alcohol Problems that I had seen in the real world of the streets of our City and Suburbs. The second impression/conclusion was that those Experts, with their time intensive, labour intensive old fashioned methods, were also never ever going to be able to teach/train those Family Doctors to be able to solve the Mental Health and Drug and Alcohol Problems within the time constraints and with the resources available in General Practice. So who was going to solve the Mental Health and Drug and Alcohol Abuse Problems???
It looked to me as though those problems were never going to be solved. But I found that unthinkable. Those problems caused so much of the worst of human suffering and degradation that I had seen, and they cost families, communities and the state so much, that something had to be done by someone or some group that really would solve those problems. Maybe those problems couldn’t have been solved in the slums of London in Charles Dickens’ time, but this was the 21st Century, with much better and almost universal education, with much greater psychosocial and medical knowledge, with much better pharmaceuticals, laboratory tests, means of communication, transport and housing, with nearly 20 times as much wealth per person as there was 200 years ago, and with better forms of organizational management and social security.
Since then, partly due to the motivation I received from those two overwhelming impressions/conclusions at that lecture, we have made a great deal more progress.
Firstly we have been focussing on developing further the very simple Discomforts/Dysfunctions view of Mental Ill Health to enable almost anyone to clarify and define problems in this field. We simply ask “In what ways are you suffering so much that you and your life are disintegrating (that is, what are your INTOLERABLE DISCOMFORTS), and what can’t you do that you have to be able to do to have a life (that is, what are your INTOLERABLE DYSFUNCTIONS)?”
We are now asking those questions in such a way that we and the patients not only get a clear picture of what their Discomforts and Dysfunctions are, but the patients also learn about the nature of Mental Illnesses, and start to see what the solutions to their problems are.
Secondly, we are using Modern Technology to increase our outreach and our efficiency, so that we can get much much more done. Through Websites, Internet enabled Computerised Checklists, Downloaded Information Printouts and E Books we are now able to help English Speaking people anywhere in the world to very quickly, conveniently, at a fraction of the usual cost and without having to wait for or get to appointments, to clarify what their Discomforts and Dysfunctions are, and to learn what the usual Causes and best Treatments are for those Discomforts and Dysfunctions.
We now know that E Mental Health is the way ahead for a substantial proportion of those members of the population who are NeuroPsychoSocially troubled, and for their Healthcarers. E Mental Health is so much more convenient, user friendly and affordable and allows people to go at their own pace. It allows people to take much more initiative in and responsibility for their own progress and wellbeing, and in many cases this dramatically improves the progress. Much of the avoiding of responsibility and game playing that sometimes goes on in Mental Health Clinics is eliminated. Less face to face contact with very sick, injured and sometimes poisonous people reduces the wear and tear on Healthcarers and the blunting of their cutting edge. With E Mental Health the personal problems that Healthcarers sometimes have, and the frustrating bottlenecks, obstructions and negative burnt out workers that the Health System sometimes has, cause less problems for sick and injured people. Computers don’t try to take over your life like some Healthcarers do. Many Healthcarers have found that people are more frank and honest in answering computer generated questions than they are with Doctors and Psychs. Over and over again at the Family Neuro Health Centre we have found that people give more complete answers to computer generated checklist questions that then have previously given to a counsellor or to me.
Using these methods we are starting to make inroads into old problems such as Anxiety/Depression/Insomnia leading to Alcohol, Benzodiazepine or Heroin Addiction, and into more modern problems such as the ADD/ADHD/ “Speed”/“Ice” epidemic. Anyone who speaks English and who can use the Internet, including many who can’t afford consultation services, or who find consultations too difficult to get to during working hours, can now get much of what they need from our Websites, Checklists, Info Printouts and E Books. They can do this at any time, free of charge or at a fraction of the costs of traditional Mental Health Care.
In terms of our progress and level of effectiveness with E Mental health, so far we may have only got as far as Thomas Edison had got in 1900 with making Movie Cameras, or as far as Henry Ford had got by 1930 with making cars, or as far as the television industry had got in 1956. We know we have much further to go but what we have already done is very effective and we are confident that in a few years we and others will take E Mental Health as far as Movie Cameras, Motor Cars and Television have now been taken in 2008.
Also that E Mental Health is going to be a major factor in solving what appears to be the last great frontier of Human Health that remains unconquered. E Mental Health will help to break the present vicious cycle of NeuroPsychoSocial and Substance Abuse problems being passed from generation to generation, ruining the lives of innocent little children before they even have a chance to really get started on their journey. There is nothing more tragic, more unjust or more strategically important to overcome than the present problem of innocent children being critically NeuroPsychoSocially damaged before they are able to take control of and responsibility for their lives. Using present methods we will never have the personnel to do much more than scratch the surface of this problem. With E NeuroPsychoSocial Health we will succeed.
If you are personally troubled or if you are concerned about someone else who is troubled, make a good start towards understanding what is going on by regularly answering the questions (answer for yourself or give the answers you think the person you are concerned about would give) in The Beck Mini Discomforts/Dysfunctions (DD) Checklist at www.TheBeckDDChecklist.com
All advances in Medicine face opposition and The Western Australian Health Department didn’t like my expressed dissatisfaction with their very poor success rates, or my protests at and suggested changes to their very counterproductive user hostile control of Buprenorphine and Methadone, which were the mainstay of the treatment of Heroin Addiction at the time (now superceded by MicroNaltrexonePlus and NaltrexoLitePlus). They caused many of my patients great suffering by withdrawing my right to prescribe Buprenorphine 18 months after I opened the Chemical Health Centre, on the basis of unsubstantiated untrue allegations about my prescribing of this medication. They probably thought that would close me down as although I was allowed to continue to prescribe Methadone they knew I thought Methadone was barbaric treatment for most heroin and opiate addicts.
Despite their promises they didn’t have enough doctors to take over the care of my patients when they later stopped me from prescribing Methadone, also on unsubstantiated untrue charges about my prescribing of this medication. Many of my patients were paralysed by withdrawal cramps, pains, sweats, diarrhea and vomiting and lack of energy and couldn’t get out of bed for weeks as they withdrew cold turkey from Methadone, because they couldn’t find another doctor to continue their treatment. Many had no alternative but to go back onto heroin and other street opiates. Methadone was discovered in Germany in 1938 and the Nazis used Methadone withdrawal as a form of torture.
For several years the W.A Health Department also tried to get rid of me by making repeated unjustifiable and in some cases stupid complaints about me to the Western Australian Medical Board. These complaints never resulted in any findings against me, and achieved nothing other than wasting everybody’s time, resulting in further neglect of seriously sick and injured patients. The only conclusion I can draw from what I have seen of the activities of those in charge of the Drug and Alcohol section of the Western Australian Health Department, is that their concern is zilch for the welfare of severely sick and injured people in Perth who have sunk to self medication of their pain and suffering with street drugs.
It is not important to them for the Perth drug and alcohol problem to be really fixed and anyone who is serious about getting to the bottom of the problem and working effectively to fix it is very unwelcome. That would show up the Health Department’s ineffectiveness and lead to the implosion of their unproductive cozy little Drug and Alcohol empire. The Chemical Health Centre’s Local Member of Parliament, Geoff Gallop, was no help either, although he did at least meet with us. Eric Ripper, the Local Member for the adjoining seat of Belmont, which is one of Perth’s five highest drug crime districts, and the Minister for Health, Jim McGinty who is The Local Member for Fremantle, another of those five highest drug crime districts, evaded all of the attempts we made to meet with them. The Drugs and Poisons section of the W.A. Health Department is mainly about window dressing and keeping their jobs going.
The W.A Health Department’s callous indifference to the awful suffering of very NeuroPsychoSocially sick and injured people, who, because of a lack of accessible affordable effective clinics had turned to self medication with street drugs, and it’s dishonesty and bullying tactics, has had a very positive outcome. I became even more determined to find or develop new and much better solutions for addiction problems, solutions that wouldn’t require Health Department permission, control, participation or resources of any sort. To really solve the drug problem we needed to cut the Health Department right out of the loop. We had to eliminate their interference, their counterproductive rules and regulations and delays, and their priority of perpetuating their role and their organization, even if this resulted in sick and injured people not getting the treatment they needed to get better.
The result is that we have now developed a complete range of medications that are highly effective for all of the different types of addiction. These Detoxification and Maintenance medications are not dangerous – they are not S8’s and do not contain addictive or potentially fatal pharmaceuticals such as Methadone. They are more effective and much safer than Methadone and Buprenorphine and cost much less. They allow patients to go to work without being hindered by being tied to daily visits to a pharmacy as is the case with Methadone and Buprenorphine. Some are effective for addictions to Opiates and Alcohol while others are effective for Speed, Ice, Benzodiazepines, Cannabis, Cocaine or Ecstasy dependence or abuse. However for a permanent cure the underlying NeuroPsychoSocial Disorders must always be comprehensively diagnosed and successfully treated.
I wish you Good luck in discovering and fixing your Discomforts, Dysfunctions and Substance Abuse Problems, if you have any.
Yours Sincerely
Dr Neil Beck
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