‘If You Wake at Midnight’ by Andrew Marriott is a book that anybody who has interest in prescribed harm must read.
My career was as an NHS doctor in psychiatry. I came to understand that ‘Psychiatry doesn’t do’ iatrogenesis [side-effects of prescribed drugs]. Instead, by and large, psychiatry attributes side-effects of prescribed drugs to the misperceptions of the patient [i.e. as aberrant mental states]. This is surely stigma.
Andrew Marriott, in this carefully researched book on mefloquine [branded as Lariam] presents factual evidence of institutional blindness and deafness to suffering caused by this medication. It is harrowing to read the terrible consequence of this on individuals and families. The damage, all too often, being permanent.
How many more medical disasters will it take to learn how to avoid such harm? Particularly when trusted institutions: medical, military, and those in positions of power behave in the way that Andrew Marriott documents in this book. First Do No Harm [primum non nocere] has always been a fundamental principle in healthcare. So, why then are the regulators not doing their job? You will find yourself repeatedly asking this question in reading this book.
Gabriel García Márquez in his novel ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’ states “They didn’t hear the shouts of the whole town”. Andrew Marriott’s harrowing book is not a novel, but a factual indictment of crime by institutions that are supposed to protect us.
Dr Peter Scott-Gordon, 27 October 2024
What follows are some of the passages that I marked out from ‘If You Wake at Midnight’ by Andrew Marriott. This, of course, can only provide an idea of the book as a whole. However, I do hope that it might encourage you to read this book and to recommend it to others. At the foot of this post I share, in full, a review by Julian Lewis, Chair of the House of Commons Defence Committee, 2015-2019.
The following review, published in the Journal of the Royal United Services Institution [RUSI] is by Julian Lewis, Chair of the House of Commons Defence Committee, 2015-2019:
2 Replies to “‘If You Wake at Midnight’”