Next week
Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps, an account of his first visit to Africa published in 1936, is to be reissued by Bodley Head in November. He has written a new introduction to the book which will be published in next week's Spectator. Order a copy from your newsagent now.
If you want to remember what life was like under the Tories — the governments of Macmillan and Home, that is — you only need to cross over to Ireland which just now is enjoying the boom that England had at the end of the 1950s. House prices are rocketing; the business and professional classes are gloating over their big cars, their yachts, paintings and vintage Burgundy. The government, with the enthusiastic support of the press and the middle class trendies, are knocking down old Dublin to make room for more car parks and motorways. Sociologists have sprung up like toadstools in a damp field.
The most frightening story from last week's Labour Party conference has not yet come out in print. The Secretary of the Department of Health and Social Services, David Ennals, had given a talk to a fringe meeting of Mind, a group concerned with mental health, when he was asked by somebody in the audience what he thought about ECT (Electro-convulsive Therapy), a controversial method of treating people, who are considered by health authorities to be mentally ill. In his reply, Mr Ennals said that one of his sons had three times been given ECT 'without written consent' by a consultant whom he described as 'arrogant and ignorant'. When a Sunday newspaper heard of this statement, Mr Ennals rang up the news editor and implored him not to publish this 'massive indiscretion'. The newspaper complied with this request. And quite right, you might be inclined to think. Why intrude into the private unhappiness of a public figure? The answer is that many thousands of people in this country are rightly alarmed at the way that doctors or psychiatrists in the National Health SerVice now have almost unrestricted powers to perform not only ECT but other equally cruel and possibly dangerous treatments on upset or neurotic people, with or without their consent. The power of psychiatric doctors and even nurses to administer treatment like this has actually increased since Ennals went to the DHSS. Members of the public who protest at such treatment handed out to friends or relatives are either dismissed as ignorant cranks or at worst suspected of being themselves in need of treatment. The fact that the cabinet minister responsible for the health service should himself have a complaint about the irresponsible power of psychiatrists, shows how great the danger is. Instead of attempting to suppress reports of his own experience, could not Mr Ennals open up a public investigation into the use of ECT and other cruel if modish methods of psychiatric 'cure'? At least he seems aware of the problem. His cabinet colleague, the medical doctor David Owen, has said that if his wife suffered from, say, post-natal depression, he would not hesitate to submit her to ECT. As James Fenton remarked in a radio talk on 'Dr Death': `If he'd do that to his lovely wife, just think what he would do to us'.
Richard West
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