Good thing he lived in a country with a sane healthcare system. Imagine getting this in the US and having poor or no health insurance and having no family nearby.
The larger health care options in the US are basically: go to a group meeting once every 4 months, and meet with a doctor maybe once a month at most, and receive a lot of suspicion. It's pretty shitty, hugely time consuming and offers very little in the area of actually improving my condition and behaviors.
In the wake of the closing of thousands of psychiatric beds, we call this "trans-institutionalization." It has also become more difficult to hospitalize and treat people against their will. Both of these changes were well-meaning, and sought to curb abuse (some real, some imagined). Some old psychiatric hospitals were bad places, but after they were closed there has not been an effective replacement. That makes jail/prison the default result for far too many people.
We were buying it second hand on internet (on classifieds site), for $15. So it's a good alternative.
Unfortunately when she learned about this site with drugs, she bought some barbiturates for suicide in forest. She was 4 days in coma but survived without any problems.
"Thousands of people with schizophrenia are being denied modern medicines on the NHS, according to campaigners."
I'm not sure how you get to "NICE deny access to latest drugs".
Do you have any examples where it was NICE not recommending latest drugs, and not health authorities failing to buy those drugs? Especially more recent than ten years ago, and especially if the meds work?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/11018039/Revolu...
Even though Breast Cancer Campaign receive funding from Roche they place the blame pretty squarely on Roche for unrealistic pricing.
Of course NICE rejected this medication - one of the functions of NICE is to drive costs of medication down. There was, and still is, a problem where drug companies make drugs that offer a few months of extra life and who then fund patient activist groups to advocate for those drugs to be prescribed. (This drug provides a bit less than six months of extra life so it's pretty good. Other drugs were about as expensive and it wasn't clear whether they offered a week or so extra life, or none.)
The drug is still available through the cancer drugs fund. And even if the price dropped to a point that NICE would recommend it it would still be so expensive that it would be available through specialist commissioning.
For instance, we actually have tried something like the NHS in the US, it's called the VA, and it's much, much worse than the regular US healthcare system.