Any member of a psychiatric crisis assessment team – a nurse or a social worker, not only a psychiatrist – has the power to admit a patient to hospital. More importantly, nobody else has that power. It’s happened: doctors have been put in our proper place. Our training and experience count for nothing. We are mere functionaries, mere mechanicals, here to do the socialist government’s bidding.

“You are patronising and dismissive”,

Yes, I suppose I might be. I hadn’t thought I was but maybe patronising and dismissive people don’t think they are. That’s the problem.

I am rich but, apart from owning a lovely house and some beautiful books and going regularly to the opera, I have no interest in doing the things rich people tend to do (as far as I can tell from the newspapers). Our Volvo Estate is six years old. Lunch is usually a sandwich. I don’t want holidays other than at our own cottage. I have no intention of retiring – ever – let alone of playing golf. I love the wife I’ve got and the life we share together and the work we do. That’s what I call riches.

The soup stall on Victoria station has closed down. That really is bad news. Maybe someone complained when my large pot of curry and lentil spilt over in the paper carrier bag, rotted it, and dropped onto the concourse in the crowed area in front of the departure boards.

“I’m looking into a way of getting a grant of £30 million from USA tax schemes to benefit your treatment centre”

“We have two six hundred bed hospitals in the Middle East that we should like you to run as treatment centres for addiction”

“Name your price”.

Thanks but no thanks. I’ll stay as I am.

When the bird flu pandemic hits us, quite likely some time in the next two or three years, there will be panic. The government tries to keep the lid on things, talking now of “50,000 extra deaths or many more” rather than heeding the specialist epidemiologists’ anticipation that the UK death toll could be 750,000 so that every one of us will know someone who dies of bird flu. The government policy is misguided. People need to be told the truth, without government spin.

The probabilities are that the virus will spread faster than the capacity to prepare specific vaccines, Tamiflu and other antiviral drugs will not be as effective as hoped, and health services will be overwhelmed. Panic buying and panic in general is inevitable – UNLESS we tell people the truth now so that we can all be properly prepared, as far as we can, in advance.

Helping people to heal themselves is a lovely thing. Doctors don’t do that. We are trained to intervene and prescribe, processes that are imposed upon patients rather than used in collaboration with them. Healing can only be done through doctors when we get out of the way. Of course we can intervene and prescribe – but that’s only technical.

At school I was never a prefect of any kind. I was a maverick, a reject. In the Army, doing National Service for two years in the Royal Signals before I thought of becoming a doctor, I became an officer, but I was too naïve and socially inept to be really a gentlemen in military terms. At university, as a result of changing subjects from music to medicine in my first year, I had to do my A level school leaving examinations all over again. I learnt biology and chemistry at the local training college in Cambridge whilst still being an undergraduate in the university. This put me one year out of phase with my contemporaries so I never really belonged anywhere until I caught up the extra year before going to medical school in London. My choice of The Middlesex Hospital was in order to join a school friend, with whom I had also been in the Army and it was also determined by the first rate theatre facilities enabling me to continue my stage activities in drama and music and even in opera. I followed this interest to such an extent that by the time I qualified as a doctor I didn’t really want to be one because I found the hospital to be an alien environment in the nature of the relationship between doctors and patients. On entering general practice in order to earn some money while trying to rekindle a career as a musician I found that I loved it – a very unpopular thing to acknowledge in those days. Today I work in fully private general practice and get used to being shunned by some NHS doctors who see the private sector as the enemy. I have a special interest in addiction, a subject ranked lower than venereology in the medical hierarchy. Throughout all my professional life I have been a maverick, a reject.

Until today when Bill Petrie, the clinical psychologist who is my supervisor, pointed out to me that it would be a terrible thing if the establishment ever did accept my ideas because I would then become part of it. That would be the death of my creativity.

Wow! After fifty years, half a centaury, my ghost – a longing to be recognised and to belong, has been laid to rest. I shall stay as I am and be supremely content, even proud, to be a maverick, a reject.

Cognitive behavioural therapy has been computerised and its administration in this way has received the blessing of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), giving me two good reasons for rejecting CBT. If a therapeutic process is capable of being computerised it is no longer an art. If NICE accept something it is on the basis of recommendation by a committee, the lowest common denominator of original thought.

To be told that I am a risk-taker three times in three sentences has to be heard. I can’t just shrug it off, particularly if the potential negative outcomes affect other people, as they inevitably would. However, I have found repeatedly in my professional work that other people are only too happy to shelter from life’s storms by letting me take the battering. On the other hand, if I want the power to control ideas on how things should be managed clinically and administratively, I have no choice but to take responsibility – and the risk and the knocks – that go with it.