Making Medicines Safer For All Of Us: David Healy (Transcript)

Here is the full text and summary of David Healy’s talk titled “Making Medicines Safer For All Of Us” at TEDxAberystwyth conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Two years ago, Jeremy Hunt, when he was the Minister for Health, said that children’s mental health services are the greatest failure in the NHS. Back then, and even more so now, there was a whole range of articles about university students committing suicide in unprecedented numbers.

Distressed teenagers in school had been given antidepressants because they couldn’t access children’s mental health services, and just this week there’s been a whole bunch of reports about a quarter of young women have mental health problems.

This isn’t just a UK issue. Anywhere from New Zealand to the United States, you’ll find the same articles and the same programmes. If you read the articles and watch the programmes, the old media usually say this is a new media issue, which sounds a little bit to me like new plus new equals five, and you have to remember that the old media hate the new media.

When I ask people, people like you, for instance, what they think is going on, the kind of thing that I hear the most often is, well, it’s a quick fix issue. We’ve become a quick fix culture, and that sounds good to me, except for the fact I’m not quite sure I haven’t been sure what a quick fix actually is, until President Trump, a little bit back, came up with an answer for me, which in response to one of the school’s shootings, he said, you know, what we need is a good guy with a gun in all those schools.