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Doc Martin GP Dr Martin Brunet | GP and GP Trainer near Guildford UK | Videos on mental health topics

24/10/2026

There is a lot to trauma informed care, but the one statement that sums it up for me is the shift from asking ‘What is wrong with you?’ To ‘What has happened to you?’ The willingness to listen to someone’s story with unconditional positive regard and to work with them to find understanding and meaning is so important. There is a place for diagnosis, of course, but diagnosis without understanding is rarely valuable and can do a great deal of harm.

The first step to being trauma-informed is a willingness to recognise its importance; then you can start the journey of really learning about trauma - a journey that will be ongoing and only deepen with experience.

What has been your experience of either asking for help for trauma, or giving trauma-informed care? What has helped? What hasn’t been helpful? How would you sum up what it means for care to be trauma informed? I’d love to hear your thoughts as I continue my own journey learning about this important area in

15/10/2026

I can’t think of any diagnosis in medicine I like less than Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder ☹️🥺

I think I could write a whole book about what is wrong with it! For starters, the whole idea that doctors can describe your personality as ‘disordered’ is appalling to me. Our personality is surely how we see ourselves and our whole being, it is is very personal and so to tell someone their personality is disordered is an attack on their whole person. And then we describe this personality as ‘emotionally unstable’ which has all the vibe of putting a child on the naughty step; it blames the person for being the problem, often reinforcing their belief that they are the problem and retraumatises them.

I say retraumatises because many of the people who end up with an EUPD label have already experienced trauma, often in what we are now calling complex PTSD - still not a perfect term but it is a whole lot better than EUPD.

Everything about the EUPD label is stigmatising, and unfortunately the experience of someone with this label is to feel the impact of that stigma when they come into contact with healthcare professionals. All too often people with EUPD on their medical record feel the attitude of healthcare professionals change once they see the diagnosis. They no longer feel that they are seen as a person in distress, now they are someone being emotionally unstable due to their defective personality. A related term is Borderline Personality Disorder - how did anyone think it would be a good idea to tell someone that their personality was borderline? What does it even mean??!

I’m sure there will be some people who feel that being given a diagnosis of EUPD or BPD has helped them to understand the issues they struggle with and to get access to helpful therapy, and I don’t mean to belittle their experience. Even here, however, surely we could have helped with understanding and treatment without having to use these terms?

What do you think? Have you been given a diagnosis of EUPD or BPD? Did it help or harm you? Do you work in healthcare, do you think these labels help or harm your patients? Will we ever shred them?

It is a real shame that the news has focused on the quality of ADHD and autism diagnosis this morning when there is GOLD...
09/10/2026

It is a real shame that the news has focused on the quality of ADHD and autism diagnosis this morning when there is GOLD DUST like this in Peter Fonagy’s report! We do need to get assessments right for ADHD and ASD but it is this statement that could bring a sea change to the whole of mental health if we too it seriously! I really do want to question the impact of DSM in mental health!

08/10/2026

Today, 8th October, is World mental health day, and the theme for this year is lived experience and the importance of hearing real voices. It is such an important theme and resonates with this compelling quote from ‘s fabulous book Be More Human, which describes how public services often behave with ‘an awful lot of assessment and very little understanding’ (p141). I have had this quote ringing around my ears since I read it 2 weeks ago, because it is all too true, and tragic that so many good people go into public service and end up in a system that traps them into behaving this way! How do we change it??!

I’m not sure of the answer to that question, but Norman’s excellent book is really challenging me to try to answer it, and if you have any interest in this area then I would really encourage you to read it. It is one of my top 5 books that have most influenced me in my 30 years as a doctor so this is about as strong a recommendation as I can make! I’m delighted to say that are offering a 25% discount on both Norman’s book and my own book on anxiety and burnout (Your Worry Makes Sense) as a special offer for world mental health day. The offer is open until the end of October. Just head to JKP.com and use the code MHDAY2026 at the checkout to get the discount! 😊🎉👍

I’d love to know what you think about this topic. If you have lived experience, have you felt it was all about assessment and not enough understanding, or did you feel understood? It would be great to hear about what has gone well as well as where it could have done much better. And if you work in the public sector, do you feel overburdened with the need to do assessments to the extent that you have no capacity left for understanding? Or do you feel the assessments are about right? If we are not getting it right, how do we change it??

24/09/2026

The Conservative Party proposal to restrict what unemployed people can spend their money on is wrong on so many levels! It is baffling to me that the party that used to believe in small Government has come up with an idea so interfering in the lives of its citizens that it wants to tell people what they are allowed to spend their money on. Yes, I know that some people on benefits make foolish decisions, but so do many people not on benefits. Choosing how to spend our money is quite a fundamental right - as long as we spend it legally isn’t it up to each of us what we do with our money?

Treating unemployed people in this way is discriminatory and harmful. Worse, it will mean little to those who are genuinely treating unemployment as a lifestyle choice - they won’t be motivated to work because of this, and they will find a way around it by trading what they can buy for what they can’t.

For the majority of people who are struggling to find work this patronising and humiliating policy won’t motivate them either - they are already motivated - but it will add to their sense of shame, reduce their sense of worth and their dignity. It can only reduce their chance of finding work as a result, and for some will be the straw that breaks them and they will end up coming to see me because of the mental health effects of such a cruel policy.

And if it ever became law it would be unlikely to remain there - soon those on disability payments would be treated in the same way. Who knows, maybe they would even want to tell pensioners what they can spend their money on? They do take up over half the welfare budget after all!

What do you think? Are you as appalled as I am by this idea or do you genuinely think it has merit?

22/09/2026

There are many anxious thinking patterns that we can fall into, whether it’s overthinking, catastrophic thinking, intrusive thoughts, rumination, people pleasing and more. Each has its own nature and brings its own challenges, but common to them all is how our anxiety wants to keep our focus on the content of the thought (often characterised by ‘what if?’) rather than the type of thinking we are engaged in.

Once you learn that you are prone to an anxious thinking pattern like this, you can learn the futility of focusing too much on the immediate anxious thought - this is just the thing you are worrying about today, on another day this particular anxious thought will be forgotten and another will have taken its place. On the other hand you might recognise the recurrent theme that your anxious thoughts often come with the same anxious pattern of thinking.

If we can change our focus from the content of our anxious thought (the string) to the thinking pattern that contains our anxious thoughts (the jar) then we can learn how to tackle the overall pattern of anxious thinking and make real progress. Rather than tying ourselves in knots over each anxious thought that is here today and gone tomorrow, we can make consistent progress, learning how to overcome the pattern of thinking that we fall into so that we can start to break free.

As far as how to overcome those thinking patterns, those are topics for future (and past) posts, so do keep watching if you want to keep learning about this! For the moment, the key thing is to recognise the change of focus from the anxious thought to the anxious thinking pattern.

12/09/2026

We need to bust this myth once- who knows how many lives have been affected by this fundamental misunderstanding about doctors??

05/09/2026

There is no getting around it, making progress with anxiety involves hard work. If might involve doing things you would rather avoid, learning how to live alongside intrusive thoughts, accepting the unpleasant feelings of being anxious or practising ways of calming your nervous system. It could involve reframing your relationship with anxious thought patterns, understanding the role of trauma or neurodivergence in your own story or making important changes to avoid burnout.

You may be able to do all this without using medication, you might be able to make real progress on your own or could benefit from the help of a therapist. This is certainly the key to managing anxiety and making real progress.

But what if you know what you need to do, but just feel too overwhelmed and anxious to put it into practice? Well one option is to consider medication with an antidepressant - a very unhelpful name as they can help with anxiety as much as with depression. The medicines I am talking about are called SSRIs and the most common ones are ones like sertraline, fluoxetine and citalopram. These may well help by bringing down your overall anxiety levels - but that is only helpful if it then helps you to go out and do the work to change your relationship with anxiety.

I hope you find my apple picking analogy helpful here. People often ask me if they can get better without medication and the answer is yes, absolutely, if you can reach the apples you need to pick then you don’t need tablets. But if the apples are out of reach then the stepladder of medication might well help you. What is so important, however, is to understand that it is not climbing the ladder that gets you better, it is picking the apples, otherwise you may end up standing on top of the ladder wondering why nothing is changing! 🍏🍎

What do you think? What work have you done that equates to the apples you needed to pick? Have antidepressants helped you reach some of the apples that were higher up? Does this analogy help you make sense of the role of medication in anxiety? I’d love to hear your thoughts 😊

29/08/2026

When we are overthinking and stuck in worry it can really help to distract our brain away from the worry, but what do we turn to? It’s very easy to turn to our phone - it is hugely distracting, after all! The trouble is that although it does distract while we scroll through the posts on our feed, each interaction with our brain is too insubstantial for our brain to settle on; each passes by within a minute or so and so when we put our phone down our brain is most likely to go back to where it was last settled - back to our worries! What we need to do instead is to find somewhere substantial for our brain to settle for a while, so that our brain will roost there and, for a while at least, not go back to our worries.

This is especially challenging in the middle of the night, where we can’t do something active, but explains why reading a few pages of a book is always more likely to help us get back to sleep than picking up our phone. It is not just about blue light from a screen, but helping our thoughts to shift in a substantial way rather than just being distracted for only as long as we are scrolling.

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