Stephen Fry talks to Tony Jones of ABC Lateline about his many interests, passions, convictions and roles.
He discusses his vice-presidency of the auspicious conservation group Flora and Fauna International, a responsibility Sir David Attenborough convinced him to assume. He expresses his love for “indifferent nature” and evolution and ponders his interest in saving the planet, in view of the fact that as a gay man he isn’t prone to leave genes behind. He offers his views on gay marriage, the “teenage years” of the gay rights movement and the human yearning to love and to be loved.
This brings up Molly Lewis’ open letter to Stephen Fry in which she sings her offer to act as a surrogate mother to pass on his genes. He touches on his friendship with and the mortality of Christopher Hitchens, whose academic genius and brilliantly expressed atheism has contributed to his rising stature over the past decade.
…one of the things that was most perhaps galling, if I can put it like that, for him is that his life seems to be on the verge of being snatched away from him at a time when he has most achieved.
An atheist himself Fry offers his more gentle appraisal of religion in general yet reserves no particular escape clause for the folly of theistic belief and theology. In view of the real world struggle for life in nature this seems to strike him as incomprehensible. Although fond of the art religion has inspired, he agrees with Jones that, “…there’s no proof contained in this of the existence of God”;
And no, I don’t believe in God. To me there is no difference between someone who believes in Allah or Yahweh, or God, the Christian God, or Christ, than someone who believes in Pan and Hephaestus and Zeus and the gods of the Greek myth.
They’re wonderful constructs and they allow for marvellous art because they tell great stories of the human collective unconscious at a time before we had science to articulate an expression and an explanation of the world.
We can’t disprove the existence of God anymore than we can disprove Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot:
On the other hand, it is absurd to believe that it exists. And it’s more than absurd to predicate a whole system of moral codes on the basis of that unprovable thing. It is actually wicked to do so.
So, yes, you can never disprove God. Of course you can’t. And you can’t disprove the teapot, but to all intents and purposes, if there is a god, it is clear that he’s capricious, wilful, mean, treacherous, a liar, unkind, prepared to see suffering of the most shameful kind.
Whilst life is “beautiful” it is also “unbelievably cruel. It’s only about passing on the genes”:
And so, you have to dispense with any sort of Victorian idea of this benign, loving god, this brown-eyed Jesus, this Holman Hunt knocking at the door…
…by all means say that there is a god, but don’t tell me he loves me. I mean, that’s just silly.
There’s no shortage of the charm, wit and warmth we’ve come to associate with this admirable, adorable and wonderful chap. May he delight us all for many years to come.
The creator of Sybil more than likely suppressed a remembrance of how it began once they got into the thick of it. Once it became a financial success there was no turning back. In the final analysis Sybil is a phony multiple personality case at best.
Further more, this tendency to go over the top and not know where to stop with multiple personalities will continue to persist until we cease to be proud of those things we should be ashamed of.
Robert W. RieberHistory of Psychiatry, X (1999), 003-011
False memories and suggestibility. Extreme examples aside, I wonder at times if they aren’t related to confirmation bias and the rationalisation of cognitive dissonance.
Without intent we’re all suggestible at a certain level and almost certainly carry a few false or rather, completely erroneous memories – no matter how small. Certain illusionists and entertainers have strong links to skeptic groups and are at pains to forewarn of our brains’ suggestibility to stimuli. Psychology. Science. With knowledge and copious practice the better performers can perform “magic” 18 inches in front of us. Or more to the point inside our heads, using our own “software”.
Then there’s polarised views of the self and how it relates to the world. Why is it that some of us immediately know rubbish (and really bad rubbish at that) whilst other Conscious Living or Mind Body Spirit types wear their gullibility like a para-glider’s sail? Those of us that speak of the Conscious Lying or Mind Body Wallet expo’s don’t have anatomically different brains to those that believe. In fact what ever you make of psychics Myrtle Harvey and Ros Booth over at Dave The Happy Singer‘s blog is likely down to experience and environment.
To stop myself launching into studies on brain activity, neuropsychology and neuroscience I’d better mention Sybil. “Sybil” was the title of the 1973 book by magazine editor Flora Rheta Schreiber written about Shirley Mason. Shirley supposedly had 16 different distinct personalities. The dramatic story of how she got this way and how the narcosynthesis (drug induced hypnosis) loving, Sodium Pentathol (“truth serum”) injecting and self obsessed Dr. Cornelia Wilbur “helped” her is the theme of the book. The sensational aspect in treatment was that Mason was tortured hideously by her mother, was encouraged to believe so and hate accordingly.
However as you’re probably now realising, by the time Wilbur hooked up with Schreiber to write the book, what was actually documented in the treatment notes and on tape and what made it into print are two entirely different stories. The former fact, the latter fiction and omission of fact. Regarding the diagnosis itself a fascinating deconstruction [below] written by Robert W. Rieber, Ph.D in 1998 makes it clear that Wilbur was “planting the truth as she wanted it to be”. He writes:
I have been able to tell the story of how it is possible to manufacture a multiple personality. [….] As to the question of whether or not the Sybil case was an out and out fraud, that of course depends upon your personal definition of that term. No matter what you wish to call it, it was a conscious misrepresentation of the facts. The fine line between self-deception and deception of others is an important issue here. Unquestionably, Schreiber and Wilbur wanted to make Sybil a multiple personality case no matter what.
The New York Times write about a “confession” from Mason 15 years before the book was published:
… 1958, Mason walked into Wilbur’s office carrying a typed letter that ran to four pages. It began with Mason admitting that she was “none of the things I have pretended to be. “I am not going to tell you there isn’t anything wrong,” the letter continued. “But it is not what I have led you to believe. . . . I do not have any multiple personalities. . . . I do not even have a ‘double.’ . . . I am all of them. I have been essentially lying.”
We now know that sodium pentathol induces false memories and fantasies whilst under the influence. Wilbur would patently suggest scenarios to Mason whilst drugged then prompt her to “recall” the memory later. Wilbur also prescribed large doses of drugs that proved less than ideal. Secobarbital (Seconal) which is now only used for 10 days to two weeks due to dependence and Daprisal which proved so addictive as to be removed from the market and was associated with amphetamine induced psychosis. According to the NYT this transcript is stored amongst Schreiber’s papers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York City:
“What about Mama?” the psychiatrist asks her patient. “What’s Mama been doing to you, dear? . . . I know she gave you the enemas. And I know she filled your bladder up with cold water, and I know she used the flashlight on you, and I know she stuck the washcloth in your mouth, cotton in your nose so you couldn’t breathe. . . . What else did she do to you? It’s all right to talk about it now. . . . ”
“My mommy,” the patient says.
“Yes.”
“My mommy said that I was a bad little girl, and . . . she slapped me . . . with her knuckles. . . .”
“Mommy isn’t going to ever hurt you again,” the psychiatrist says at the close of the session. “Do you want to know something, Sweetie? I’m stronger than Mother.”
According to her baby book at the age of 7 Mason had a tonsillectomy in the home office of a doctor. She was brought there without being told why and told to put on a white treatment shirt and forced onto a table. Whilst struggling she was held down and the town pharmacist held a cloth soaked in ether over her nose. Mason felt like she was suffocating before she passed out. A flashlight was used to examine her throat and sliver bottles were nearby. Mason did tell Wilbur about the actual event years later. But under pentathol and during a time of Freudian psychology, Wilbur concluded this forceful treatment was not just rape but sexual torture.
Shirley Mason was indeed very unwell suffering from anorexia, anxiety, feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness. She also reported unusual memory blackouts, at times coming to in places, suburbs or towns she had no memory of travelling to. Dr. Wilbur assumed these were fugue states during which a patient may lose touch with the self for hours or days and continue to act reasonably normally but as if someone else. Or rather the state would be forgotten and preceding events with it, giving the tempting illusion that one had “been” someone else.
The problem here was that Wilbur went looking for a fractured personality disorder. It was all downhill from there and introducing narcosynthesis in consonance with Wilbur’s urging was clinically disastrous. Mason had fantasies about being a doctor – perhaps a psychiatrist. More so, she had fantasies about Wilbur and developed a strong crush. The only child of Seventh Day Adventists Mason felt like Wilbur understood her like no other. Obsessed, in need, doped up and subject to drug induced hypnosis she latched onto the tether of Wilbur’s highly suggestible treatment.
There were signs earlier that Cornelia Wilbur, unashamedly fascinated with multiple personalities, was practicing very poor medicine. Shirley Mason visited Herbert Spiegel when Wilbur was absent. Speigel was an eminent hypnotherapist and psychiatrist. In the 1990’s he informed reporters of his concerns at the time that Mason would ask if she should “shift to the other personalities” as Dr. Wilbur liked her to do. Spiegel had clearly diagnosed Mason with hysteria. Which in truth was almost certainly the correct diagnosis for that era.
Wilbur spent her career with hysterical patients, often jabbing them full of sodium pentathol and using suggestion to manage symptoms. It is unlikely she did not know of Mason’s proper diagnosis. Rieber (below) points out the prospects of a book on MPD outweighed Spiegel’s attempts to reason with Wilbur and Schreiber. Robert Rieber breaks the tape recordings into ten distinct sections from Wilbur’s “diagnosis” to inventing the “crimes” of her mother to sustaining Mason’s hatred toward her mother to projection of guilt on Wilbur’s part. It’s a great read.
Alarm bells also rang in skeptical quarters. Prior to the book’s publication less than 80 cases world wide of “something resembling MPD” were documented. Following this, several thousand diagnoses followed in areas where the book was being read and in the demographics reading the book.
The hard work has been done by investigative journalist Debbie Nathan, author of Sybil Exposed, who who is interviewed in the video below. She has trawled through the documents kept in Schreiber’s papers to put together the truth. It wasn’t until it was discovered in 1998 that Mason was deceased, that her identity was revealed.
One must wonder. What ever became in the meantime of this very ill woman treated by an ambitious and unethical doctor, who failed completely to care for her patient?
One can be forgiven for wondering exactly how pharmacist members of The Pharmacy Guild of Australia, will keep a straight face when giving advice about medication.
Not that they don’t have the training to do so. Far from it. Which is what makes the money spinning deal to push Blackmores’ “companion products” to certain medications particularly galling. By it’s very nature this “Coke and fries” (to use Blackmores term) deal is predicated on pharmacists pre-empting doctors and making on the run diagnoses. Diagnoses that they aren’t equipped to make and that may also prove deleterious.
The scam works like this. Blackmores have identified key prescription medicines and isolated potential “nutritional consequences”. They’ve proposed a “companion product” to the prescription with scant regard to the fact that no standing recommendations exist. More so, research into this approach to supplements is both ambiguous and has revealed negative effects.
The four areas you should be terrified about are:
Proton pump inhibitors and magnesium deficiency with muscle cramps, vertigo, hyper-irritability, excitability and the inevitable poor concentration. But if you can remember where you’re going for long enough you can limp to the chemist, stagger from wall to wall and unleash your hyper-rage upon stock to ensure a swift diagnosis.
Antibiotic treatment, upset GI microflora and the need for probiotics helped along by icky stories of bloating, farting and diarrhoea. Fear not you gaseous, smelly, splattering assault upon polite society, for they have just the probiotic for you.
Anti-hypertensives and zinc deficiency along with poor immunity, poor appetite, impaired sense of taste and smell. Topped off with poor skin health (delayed wound healing), GI tract issues with the inevitable diarrhoea which compounds zinc deficiency. Can’t eat, can’t heal, can’t taste, can’t smell and you’re stuck in the toilet. There’s a plus in there somewhere but no doubt you need a zinc supplement.
Statins (cholesterol lowering drugs) and myalgia plus (get this) “muscle soreness”. Along with cramping, weakness and fatigue, you clearly need Coenzyme Q 10 and vitamin D3. What a pity you’re already too shattered to get out of bed.
Of course dealing with the nutritional consequences, may have… er, consequences. For example Blackmores go on to tell consumers, CoQ10 may:
• Have hypotensive effects in patients with hypertension and may have additive effects on antihypertensive medications
• Interfere with some types of chemotherapeutic agents. Use with caution
• Decrease the anticoagulant effect of warfarin
• Decrease blood glucose levels in people on hypoglycaemic therapy
Vitamin D3 may theoretically cause hypercalcaemia if taken with thiazide diuretics. Caution is advised in those with hyperparathyroidism, malignancies that increase serum calcium levels or other risk factors for hypercalcaemia. Zinc may decrease absorption and blood levels of tetracycline and quinolone antibiotics unless doses are separated by at least 2 hours.
Magnesium may decrease the absorption and efficacy of tetracycline and quinolone antibiotics, bisphosphonates and chlorpromazine unless doses are separated by at least 2 hours. If using [Blackmores’ probiotic] with antibiotics to which [Blackmores’ probiotic] is sensitive, separate doses by at least two hours.
This is enough to make you pause and think about chatting at length with your doctor. There’s a few other useless spooky observations that the (s)CAM industry simply rock at pulling off. Such as vitamin D deficiency being widespread and associated with poor CV health. Magnesium contributes to healthy teeth, bones, muscle/nerve function, electrolyte balance and normal energy metabolism. Myalgia is one of the most common reported adverse effect of statin use.
Many patients – particularly older ones – may already have poor nutrient intake… 1/3 of Aussies over 18 don’t get the RDI of magnesium. My favourite is the veiled suggestion GP’s aren’t capable of doing their job: “…the TGA have advised prescribers to be alert to hypomagnesaemia in people taking PPIs”. To which I can easily imagine Professor Farnsworth from Futurama saying, “Why yes… which is exactly why cowboy’s like you should stay the hell away from grown up science”.
With the help of Dr. Ken Harvey, who we know here from the SensaSlim saga, we can pin down the extent of frivolity being advanced by this joint venture. The statin claims are particularly bold, given side effects. Also, noting Wyman et al;
Some small clinical trials seem to show that coenzyme Q10 supplements can be used to lower blood pressure and to treat or prevent myalgia caused by hydroxymethylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase inhibitors (statins). However, larger trials are needed to determine if they are truly effective for these purposes.
There is some evidence that prophylactic probiotics reduce the incidence of antibiotic-associated diarrhoea but the appropriate combination of agents has not been established, so probiotics cannot be recommended for routine use. In immune-compromised patients, occasional cases of probiotic-associated bacteraemia have occurred
Regarding zinc and magnesium supplementation there is no standing recommendation for use with anti-hypertensive therapy and PPI use respectively. As Farnsworth just reminded us, being on the lookout for symptoms is for trained health professionals. Blackmores’ hijacking of professional guidelines is just another trick for selling for the sake of it.
Consumers Health Forum of Australia chief Carol Bennett claims in Fairfax that the entire caper is unethical and urges consumers to demand evidence and report pharmacists who lean on fears. Geraldine Moses, who is a drug safety researcher reminds us of the folic acid related seizures epileptics sustained after taking a supplement to combat the reduction in folate specific to epilepsy medication.
PHARMACISTS have been accused of putting money ahead of patients’ interests after striking a controversial deal to market dietary supplements with prescription medicines.
The Pharmacy Guild of Australia, which represents 94 per cent of Australia’s 5200 pharmacies, has agreed to start recommending a range of Blackmores products to patients when they pick up prescriptions for anti-biotics, blood pressure drugs, cholesterol medicine and proton pump inhibitors.
Last week, Blackmores chief executive Christine Holgate told Pharmacy News the deal meant they could provide ”the Coke and fries” with prescription drugs while providing pharmacies with ”a new and important revenue stream”.
Her comments prompted sharp criticism from doctors and consumer advocates who said it risked turning pharmacies into McDonald’s-like businesses that push products onto patients who do not need them. Under the deal, when a prescription is filled, a prompt in the pharmacist’s computer system will remind them to discuss a particular Blackmores product that has been designed to offset possible side-effects of their prescription drug.
[……]
Australian Medical Association president Steve Hambleton said the move was outrageous and smacked of commercial interest rather than clinical need.
He said he did not know of any solid evidence backing the combination of dietary supplements with the prescriptions included in the deal. ”I think the evidence for Coke and fries is about the same as the evidence for these products,” he said. Dr Hambleton said the recommendations had the potential to confuse patients, who should trust their doctors to prescribe them what they need without any conflicts of interest.
Geraldine Moses, a drug safety researcher and pharmacist based at Brisbane’s Mater Hospital, said she was concerned about the deal because of good evidence that the more drugs a person took, the more likely they were to have adverse reactions and interactions. She said while Blackmores may have evidence showing that prescription drugs reduce particular nutrient levels and that their supplements increase those nutrient levels, it was incorrect to presume that replenishing those levels was the right thing to do.
Outrageous, unethical and potentially dangerous according to experts. This is undoubtedly a grab for money targetting a demographic that is unable to afford trumped up scams with potential risks. Given the appalling performance of the alternative product industry in the recent Auditor General’s Report and concerns raised about regulation of same in the TGA Transparency Review in July, the Pharmacy Guild should be ashamed of itself.
I wish Professor Farnsworth could get a piece of them.
To be held in Melbourne, Australia from 13-15 April, you may want to head on over to the site if you’re keen to attend. According to Religion Editor, Barney Zwartz – who I’ll wager will be attending – in The Age yesterday in ‘Four Horsemen’ draw godless crew;
TICKETS are selling fast to what organisers say will be the most significant atheist gathering in history next April, when the ”four horsemen of the apocalypse” share a stage for the first time.
The four horsemen are the world’s most famous atheists – scientist Richard Dawkins, philosophers Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris and journalist Christopher Hitchens – who will speak at the second Global Atheist Convention at the Melbourne Convention Centre.
”I don’t think this convention will ever be repeated. You will never get these speakers together again,” said organiser David Nicholls, president of the Australian Atheist Foundation, yesterday.
He said tickets were marching out the door, despite being on sale for only three weeks and not being advertised yet.
Of course it goes without saying that some pretty awesome, very talented and hard working individuals are striving hard behind the scenes to pull together an incredible international event. One Melbourne can be proud of. Sure, the term atheist applies but far from being anti-theistic in tone I’ve little doubt this event will be an intellectual feast.
The last convention which I also attended, drew bemusing criticism on the misguided assumption it was strictly a gathering of non believers. A product of internet debate and backlash toward the rise of the “new atheists” this cynicism was sorely misplaced. To be sure there are some very annoying atheists amongst the masses (no pun intended) who wear the title fundamentalist with aplomb. But assuming such an array of minds can be labelled as one is quite misguided.
Celebration of reason is an apt title. Yes, the godless do celebrate life. Far from any ritual or cross to bear, the burdensome weight setting us apart is that of genetic superiority and profound modesty to the point of deep humility (See what I did there). Seriously though. Non theists come in all intellectual shapes and sizes with the vast majority having a functional world view not unlike that of the majority of theists. Debating differences at times renders this hard to see.
Here’s looking forward to an event that will, given the huge array of speakers, prove to be a most stimulating weekend indeed.
A Celebration of Reason – 2012 Global Atheist Convention
A nice video montage of various clips relating to the pros (cough) and cons of homeopathy.
If homeopathically labelled it might read Facts 40C, Baloney 15C. This means that factual material has been vastly more diluted than complete baloney. Which means there’s more impact from fact in this video than hokery pokery. That in itself makes no sense – so we’re off to a good start.
The surprisingly honest episode of Today Tonight featuring Richard Saunders of Australian Skeptics is interspersed with other material. Paul Offit explains the uselessness of Oscillococcinum, James Randi pops in with a refreshing use of the words “health scam”. Simon Singh appears on the BBC and Aussie TV and we meet Mark Wild, a British filmmaker whose decision to use a homeoprophylactic for malaria almost killed him.
Don’t miss the hilarious Charlene Werner casually redefining Einstein’s equation whilst lecturing in homeopathy. And we thank “quantum healer” Joshua Bloom just for using the word “quantum”. Kudos to the guy from Futurama.
Losing In The Lucky Country 