DR. MAX PEMBERTON: My advice for Taylor on dealing with people who are really toxic

Over the course of our lives, most of us will encounter someone who is toxic. This isn’t someone we just don’t like or get along with. That’s completely normal; we can’t be friends with everyone.

No, someone who is truly toxic has a certain ability to spread discord and fear for no apparent reason other than the unrest it causes.

Toxic people seem to have an innate need to belittle and undermine others to make themselves feel better. It can be very disturbing to encounter them as they do not seem to adhere to the usual social conventions or courtesies.

Harmful, toxic people exist in all walks of life, and wealth and fame are no protection. Taylor Swift has discussed the emotional and psychological fallout from her feud with Kim Kardashian. The pair fell out after Kim supported her then-husband Kanye West in an argument over his lyrics referencing Taylor.

Reading Swift’s account of what happened, it certainly sounds like she had a pretty horrific experience, and it’s hard not to conclude from her version of events that Kanye and Kim behaved terribly.

Swift responded to her encounter with them and the devastation it caused in her life by isolating for a year. She moved to another country and disappeared from public life.

I think a lot of people respond to things like this by withdrawing. It can really shake your faith in people, to the extent that you remain suspicious and wary of others for a long time.

Of course, Taylor Swift has the last laugh: she’s adored by her fans and was just named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.

But while it may be helpful in the short term to hide after an encounter with a toxic person, a better approach is to push yourself to keep your head up and not give in to the temptation to back away.

It can be a shock when you encounter toxic people like this, but the key is to realize that it’s not really about you; it all says a lot more about them. You are only an incidental victim in their psychological turmoil.

Last weekend I was at a Christmas lunch with a large group of friends. I sat on a table and sat across from an “influencer” who turned out to be one of the most annoying people I have ever encountered.

He was gruff and rude, to the point of being offensive. At one point he sighed loudly when someone was talking and said he wished he had sat somewhere else as no one at the table was attractive.

He made a number of very personal and disturbing comments about people, including mocking their physical appearance.

On the table were a Jewish person and a Palestinian. As you can imagine, this was a delicate situation, but they are both lovely people and we all handled the situation with grace and good humor.

Whatever the terrible situation thousands of miles away, we are all friends and it was nice to see how that transcends politics.

Only this man kept goading them and making horrible, inflammatory comments in an attempt to stir them up.

None of us had met him before, and at first I gave him the benefit of the doubt and thought maybe he was just trying to be funny in a misjudged and misguided way.

But despite people trying to intervene and calm the situation, he continued. It became clear that he did this on purpose. He wanted people to be angry.

It became so unpleasant that eventually the person sitting next to me got up and cried in the toilet. He was so ruthlessly unkind to everyone at the table that he came across more like a pantomime villain than a person.

While people may follow him on Instagram because they find him attractive, in reality only his ugly personality was on display. I really wanted to leave. But then it occurred to me that the kind of person who would deliberately spread so much misery must be incredibly miserable himself. He must be deeply unhappy.

Actually, it wasn’t about us all sitting at the table, it was about him.

And this realization helped. He craved attention, albeit in a perverse, nasty way, so I just ignored him. He spoke and I didn’t blink. I saw right through him and refused to give him the attention he so clearly craved.

Slowly, others at the table began to do the same. He wanted to get a response so we didn’t give him one.

We all moved away from him and by the end of the meal he was sitting next to the only other person he knew in the group.

Finally, he went to the host and announced that he was leaving because he was “bored.” No one said goodbye to him and no one missed him when he left. Instead, we all laughed about how awful he was and vowed to have a great night without him – the perfect way to neutralize a toxic person.

Later that night we went out – the Palestinian, the Jew and everyone else – and danced to Taylor Swift.

NHS staff Must be stung

A new Covid variant – along with norovirus, flu and a viral ‘100-day cough’ – threatens to throw emergency rooms into chaos this winter.

Yet only a fifth of NHS staff have had the Covid and flu jabs so far, despite many trusts making it incredibly easy for staff to get vaccinated.

I trust that every site has a staff member who can give the shots, so you should do your very best not to get them.

The consequence of not vaccinating staff is not only that they run the risk of having to take leave, which has consequences for services; vaccines also protect their patients. So it’s time to insist that all staff be bullied as a condition of their employment. We already have rules for other infections.

You can’t be a doctor without hepatitis B vaccinations and chickenpox vaccine or immunity. You must be vaccinated or demonstrate immunity to tuberculosis. Are flu and Covid different?

We all know people who can hear things like “Another piece of cake?” but not registering others, such as asking for help at home.

But perhaps there is no such thing as ‘selective hearing’. Professor Gill Livingston, from UCL, thinks your ears need support because higher (female) voices really do become harder to hear over time.

Antidepressants are being inappropriately prescribed to people who are lonely, rather than mentally ill, according to an open letter to the government published last week raising concerns about prescribing levels.

I’ve seen this myself – it’s part of a broader trend of medicalizing everyday suffering – turning a normal, albeit admittedly unpleasant, everyday feeling or emotion into a disease.

Everyone who is sad is now depressed, everyone who is worried has anxiety, and so on. First, they must receive emotional support. Medicalization also suggests that they can’t do anything about their problems, so they don’t even try now.

DR MAX PRESCRIBES…

A local panto

There’s nothing like a pantomime. It is perfect family entertainment, introducing children to ideas of morality and has a wonderful tradition steeped in folk law with plays by the Mummers.

Many provincial theaters rely on panto income to keep them going all year round, so they not only bring the family together but also support the arts.