And as for today’s addiction specialists? Some of them may stand in Dent’s shoes but I have yet to meet one who is truly capable of lacing them.Ĭonfronting this I simply had to explain the gulf between my grandfather’s approach and philosophy and the over-medicalised red-tape idiocy of today the huge hole that this represents in terms of social provision, the destroyed communities, the homelessness, the addicted and the inevitable worldwide consequence, the countless millions of voiceless dead. My maternal grandfather symbolised the polar opposite of this ‘pill-a-day’ culture. Medicine, particularly in the field of the psycho-social diseases, is dominated by pharma and bureaucracy, which can only result in things getting worse. What I soon realised is that what is missing today is any sense of moral or ethical probity. I sought counsel among today’s addiction specialists to see if they could help make sense of it all. I discussed this with my mother and she gave me her father’s memoirs and piles of unpublished manuscripts. And of course, with Dent being my grandfather, I felt an acute sense of unease at the exponential rise in suffering that nobody currently seems capable of arresting.

Like all of us I have known many who have fallen victim to addiction and its allied conditions the depressions and anxieties. But I’d be lying if I said it was easy being faithful to what actually happened was critical, but I also felt a compelling need to do the story and its political message justice. It could be said the stories behind my book Hardy Tree landed in my lap – I am, after all, the grandson of its subject John Yerbury Dent, once known as a pioneer of addiction therapies.

Free fall by joyce sweeney