What distinguishes a doctor from a scientist or a textbook is their figuration in culture, their supposed ability to incorporate something more artful than scientific into the treatment, and their manner at the bedside. It’s for that reason we can say that the doctor presented as ‘Dr Death’ is indeed monstrous – but monstrous in the most doctorly way. Monstrous inasmuch as what is doctor in him has grown malignant.

By now there is enough criticism of the mental health business out there that it seems to me most engaged readers have been informed about the problems: psychiatry makes a false equivalence of the brain and the person, psychiatry pathologises some of the normal problems of human life, psychiatrists enforce highly constrained norms of thought and behaviour, and psychiatrists don’t value patients’ autonomy. There is still however a lot of confusion about the status of the things that psychiatrists treat. These are by no means illnesses, and the medications doctors use to treat them are by no reasonable measure effective.