It is uncertain when the pain clinic became part of the picture. By now the memory of this period is broken and uncertain but the desire to include it here seems to indicate it was from this time.
The pain clinic seemed to be a creation of those in government who resent people needing medical support. It ran out of a bunkered unit of psychiatrists and neurologists in Gosford Hospital but seemed actually tied within the Methadone clinic . In part it seems be dedicated to protecting the private preserve of a few elite mental health professionals
There was significant evidence within the heroin community of a refusal by the local health professionals to treat the handicapped from some classes of the population. Many of the people now using illegal drugs had been driven to self medicate by the atrocious treatment they received at the hands of units like the pain clinic.
There were embarrassing signs of a culture war directed at people of the kind of lesser education found along beach-side communities as well as extraordinary racism and elitism.
The only thing our subject remembers about the discovery of the existence of a pain clinic is the overwhelming sensation of vindictiveness he got from whatever medical professional referred him to it.
In his desperation to survive through another year of the degree course he applied to them. He was foolish enough to expect to be flung into a round of x-rays and scans to assess his physical pain.
What he was flung into was a booklet of irrelevant and irrational psychological tests. He wrote them a letter asking what they were doing and explaining he wasn’t unhappy or depressed, he was painfully crippled.
Then he forgot them as his ability to cope declined and the wave of life’s demands crashed over his head and began to swamp him
The Chittaway Affair, page 4. The Pain Clinic
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