Doc Martin GP

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

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.

28/08/2026

Intrusive thoughts, and the same goes for anxious thoughts, only stick around when we give them attention. The more we find ourselves thinking ‘what if…’ or the more we avoid anything that might cause the intrusive or anxious thoughts to come into our head, the more we supply this oxygen and the bigger the thoughts get in our minds. When we accept the thoughts, acknowledge their presence, and agree that we don’t like them, but we are going to live with them anyway, the more we deprive them of this oxygen. Then, gradually, often with us barely noticing it, they become weaker and eventually, like a candle running out of oxygen, they flicker out.

How do you deal with your intrusive thoughts? Do you recognise this pattern? What works for you? I’d love to hear in the comments! And if you think this is an important message to get out there to help other people, it would be great if you could share this to your story 😊😊

27/08/2026

There is a lot of emphasis on the menopause at the moment and a welcome awareness of how it can impact women both physically and mentally, but it’s important to not forget that hormones can have an impact before the menopause also. There is no laboratory test to prove that hormones are having an impact on mental health, so it is a matter of looking for a cyclical pattern and any associated symptoms.

It is important to understand that while premenstrual syndrome can be mild, it can also be very severe, even to the point of making a woman suicidal once a month. At the severe end it is known as Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder or PMDD. Treatment includes all the usual steps we would include for any mood disorder, but it can also be treated with hormones (usually the combined contraceptive pill). Another effective treatment is to take an antidepressant either every day or, unusually, sometimes for just 2 weeks a month.

PMDD seems to be caused by a sensitivity to progesterone, and so the huge rise and fall in this hormone is the cause of the symptoms, although the exact mechanism for this isn’t clear. It is certainly not a simple hormone deficiency and so when the combined pill works, it does so not so much by replacing the hormone as by suppressing the menstrual cycle. Other treatments that do this include inducing a medical menopause with drugs called GnRH analogues, taken with HRT or, as a last resort, surgery to remove the womb and ovaries.

26/08/2026

With anxiety, our instinct is to fight it or run away from it - after all, it usually comes with a surge in adrenaline, the fright, fight, flight hormone, and so it makes sense that when we are frightened we will instinctively want to fight the anxious feelings, or run away from them. It seems counterintuitive to try to accept those feelings. To learn to be ok with them, to feel anxiety in our stomach, fluttering in our heart and dizziness in our head but to be able to say to ourselves, that’s anxiety, I recognise it and although I don’t like it I can be ok with it, is not easy.

And yet that is exactly what we need to do.

Because when we accept it, we become less afraid of it happening, and then we start to break the fear-adrenaline-fear cycle, the anxiety has less hold on us and, little by little, it diminishes. I can’t give you a timescale for this, or promise it will disappear altogether, but I can promise that it is a far better way than fighting anxiety or running away from it.

How are you finding acceptance when it comes to anxiety? I’d love to hear in the comments. What has worked for you? What are you working on? It’s by hearing other people’s experience that we can all learn from each other 😊 Do like, comment and share this if you think it’s helpful! Thank you so much 😊

26/08/2026

It’s so easy to convince ourselves that if you care about someone (or something - it can apply to pets, or the environment, or even world peace) then you should worry about them. It can feel like a duty of care - you are trying to protect them with your worry and so if you were to stop doing like that it would feel like you have stopped caring about them. But knowing that someone worries about you does not make you feel loved. In fact (and this is hard to say since the worry is well meant) it can be very draining and restricting to know someone is worrying about you; it can limit how much you want to tell them, since you know they will worry, and so creates barriers between you.

It’s important to think about this when you are trying to understand your worry, since the false belief that worry and care are two sides of the same coin will inhibit you from making any progress with your worry. What will help is to think about what really does show that we care - like quality time, encouraging words, showing kindness, physical touch and being interested in someone’s life. In fact, we can actually care more by worrying less! 😊👍

23/08/2026

How do you stop catastrophic thoughts? The simple answer is that you don’t! If you are prone to catastrophising, you will probably have great difficulty persuading your brain to not go there, because it is so used to heading that way - it is like a well-worn groove or a train on a track and it goes to the worst case scenario every time.

The way to start to change how your brain works is not to try to stop one way of thinking, but to introduce it to a new way of thinking. Think of it like an exercise, so that you give yourself 2 minutes when you think about the best explanation for what you are worried about. So perhaps the lump you have felt could be a normal, healthy lymph gland, or your child hasn’t texted you because they are having a nice time with their friends (and you like them not being glued to their phone anyway), or you could actually pass that exam! The key thing is that you don’t try to persuade your brain that this alternative explanation is true, because you will likely fail to do that. Instead you simply discipline your brain to consider it for 2 minutes, then you can go back to worrying! Since it is only 2 minutes, you will probably manage to do this. Then the key thing is to practise thinking of alternatives like this - every time you find yourself catastrophising, practise spending 2 minutes considering an alternative explanation. What you will find over time is that this way of thinking develops it’s own groove, and that your brain becomes more likely to think this way in the first place!

Of course, there are other techniques you can use at the same time, like acceptance of the worry and using grounding techniques to manage the symptoms of worry, but this is a key part of gaining mastery over our thoughts.

22/08/2026

Sometimes I just have to speak out! The proposal to cut over £50 billion from the UK welfare budget is horrifying enough, but the justification that it is morally the right thing to do is what makes it truly sinister. It reminds me of ‘newspeak’ and ‘doublethink’ in George Orwell’s novel, 1984, where good is called evil and evil called good, and the indoctrination is so complete that the citizens forget they ever believed it to be the other way around 🥹

There is nothing suicidal about empathy and we should call out this horrible ideology loud and clear. Empathy is what makes society. Yes, it should be wise and not naive, and certainly getting the benefits system right is important, and challenging, but a vital measure of a civilised society is how it cares for those who are disadvantaged.

When politicians argue that it is somehow self-destructive to care for others, we need to stand against this politics of division and self-service. We have a welfare system because it is the right thing to do to support people in need and help them find a way out of that need, because it creates a better, safer society for all of us, and because so many people see society as ‘us and us’ and not ‘them and us’

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