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

• Dr Max says resist the temptation to shrink away in the face of a toxic person
• READ MORE:  Mind Doctor MAX PEMBERTON reveals in the wake of the fallout between Holly and Phil why he had to end one friendship

During the course of our lives, most of us will come across someone who is toxic. This isn’t someone whom we simply don’t like or don’t get along with. That is perfectly normal; we can’t be friends with everyone. 

No, someone who is truly toxic has a certain ability to spread discord and distress for no discernible reason except for the upset that it causes.

Toxic people seem to have an innate need to belittle and undermine others in order to make themselves feel better. It can be very disconcerting to find yourself confronted with them, as they seem not to obey any of the usual social conventions or pleasantries.

Noxious, toxic people are in every walk of life, and wealth and fame offer no protection. Taylor Swift has discussed the emotional and psychological fallout of her feud with Kim Kardashian. The pair fell out after Kim backed her then husband Kanye West in a row about his lyrics that referenced Taylor.

From reading Swift’s account of what happened, it certainly sounds as though she had a pretty horrific experience, and it’s hard not to conclude from her version of events that Kanye and Kim behaved abysmally.

Taylor Swift, who has just been made Person of the Year by Time magazine,  has discussed the emotional and psychological fallout of her feud with Kim Kardashian 

Swift responded to her run-in with them and the havoc it caused in her life by isolating for a year. She moved to a different country and vanished from public life.

I think a lot of people respond to things like this by withdrawing. It can really shake your belief in people to the extent you’re untrusting and wary of others for a long time after.

Of course, Taylor Swift has had the last laugh — she’s adored by her fans and has just been made Person of the Year by Time magazine.

But while hiding away after a run-in with a toxic person can be helpful in the short term, a better approach is to push yourself to keep your head up and not give in to the temptation to shrink away.

It can be a shock when you are confronted with toxic people like this, but the key is to appreciate that it’s not really about you — it all says far more about them. You are just an incidental victim in their psychological turmoil.

Just last weekend I was at a Christmas lunch with a large group of friends. I was on a table and sat opposite an ‘influencer’ who turned out to be one of the most obnoxious people I have ever come across.

He was sullen and rude, to the point of offensiveness. At one point, he sighed loudly when someone was talking and said he wished he had been seated somewhere else as no one on the table was attractive.

He was making some very personal and upsetting comments about people, including mocking their physical appearance.

Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift fell out after Kim backed her then husband Kanye West in a row about his lyrics that referenced Taylor

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

Whatever the awful situation thousands of miles away, we’re all friends and it was lovely to see how that transcends politics.

Except this man kept on and on goading them, making atrocious, inflammatory comments trying to get a rise out of them.

None of us had met him before, and at first I gave him the benefit of the doubt and thought perhaps 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 apparent that he was doing this on purpose. He wanted people to be upset.

It became so unpleasant that in the end the person sitting next to me got up and went to cry in the toilet. He was so relentlessly unkind to every single person on the table, he was coming across more like a pantomime villain than a person.

While people might follow him on Instagram because they think he’s attractive, in the flesh, his ugly personality was all you could see. I very much just wanted to leave. But then I thought that the kind of person who would deliberately spread so much misery must be incredibly miserable himself. He must be profoundly unhappy.

Really it was nothing about any of us sitting at the table, it was about him.

Dr Max Pemberton advises keeping your head up and not giving in to the temptation to shrink away when you encounter a toxic person 

And this realisation helped. He was craving attention, albeit in a perverse, nasty way, so I simply ignored him. He spoke and I didn’t bat an eyelid. I looked straight through him and refused to give him the attention he so clearly craved.

Slowly, others on the table started to do the same. He wanted to get a reaction and so we gave him none.

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 party.

Eventually, he went up to the host and announced he was leaving because he was ‘bored’. No one said goodbye to him and no one missed him when he went. Instead, we all laughed at how awful he was and vowed to have an amazing night without him — the perfect way to neutralise a toxic person.

Then later that evening we went out clubbing — the Palestinian, the Jew and everyone else — and danced to Taylor Swift.

NHS staff MUST be jabbed

A new Covid variant — along with norovirus, flu and a viral ‘100-day cough’ — risks throwing A&E services into chaos this winter. 

Yet as few as one-fifth of NHS staff have had their Covid and flu jabs so far, despite many trusts making it incredibly easy for staff to get vaccinated. 

In my trust, every site has a member of staff able to give the jabs, so you have to go out of your way to not get them. 

As few as one-fifth of NHS staff have had their Covid and flu jabs so far, despite many trusts making it straightforward for staff to get vaccinated

The result of staff not being vaccinated isn’t just that they risk having to take time off work, affecting services; vaccines also protect their patients. So it’s time to insist that all staff get jabbed 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 TB. Are flu and Covid any different? 

We all know people who can hear things like ‘Another slice of cake?’ but fail to register others, such as requests for help at home. 

But it may not be ‘selective hearing’. Prof Gill Livingston, from UCL, thinks your ears may need support as, in time, higher-pitched (female) voices genuinely get harder to hear. 

Antidepressants are being prescribed inappropriately to those who are lonely, rather than mentally ill, according to an open letter to the Government, which was published last week and raised concerns about the rate of prescribing. 

I’ve seen this myself — it’s part of a wider trend of medicalising everyday distress — turning a normal, though admittedly unpleasant, everyday feeling or emotion into an illness. 

Everyone who’s sad is now depressed, everyone who’s worried has anxiety and so forth. First, they should be getting emotional support. Medicalising also suggests they can’t do anything about their problems, so they now don’t even try. 

DR MAX PRESCRIBES…

A local panto

Many provincial theatres rely on panto income during the festive season to get them through the year

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

Many provincial theatres rely on panto income to get them through the year, so they not only bring the family together, they support the arts, too. 

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