DR MAX PEMBERTON: I’ve been threatened, harassed and even my friends and partner have been targeted. This is the dark truth about the world we are now living in… I’ve seen all the evidence

A few years ago the police came to my flat to assess how secure it was. They checked the door, the windows, the entrance to the building, and then they put my address and phone number on a ‘rapid response’ list, meaning that if I ever rang, they’d come at once.

I hadn’t committed a crime and I wasn’t a witness to one, but I’ve covered plenty of controversial subjects in this column over the years, and some of them predictably produce a hostile reaction.

That’s part of the job and I’ve no complaint about it, because if you put an opinion in a national newspaper you can hardly object when people disagree.

But there’s a point at which disagreement turns into something else. I’ve been threatened. My partner has been harassed, and so have my friends, my agent and my publisher.

Someone even worked out the name of the woman who ran my website and bombarded her with messages, leaving her frightened.

Photographs of my flat have been circulated online, alongside discussions of where I lived.

The energy these trolls have is extraordinary.

I thought about all this last week reading beauty writer Rosie Green’s article describing how she’d finally tracked down the woman who’d spent years leaving vicious comments beneath her articles.

Green found an address and went to the house to confront her, though the woman wasn’t in. They later exchanged emails.

What struck me was how ordinary the woman turned out to be. We like to imagine trolls as sad, lonely people hunched over a keyboard in a bedroom.

It’s a comforting picture, because it makes them pitiable and therefore harmless, and for a proportion of them it’s accurate. Psychological research has found that people scoring highly for sadism (meaning they enjoy causing others distress) and for psychopathy, are considerably more likely to behave this way online. That explanation covers a minority, though, and it’s the wrong explanation for the people who’ve come after me and others.

These people weren’t hiding. Many used their own names and their own photographs, and they didn’t think they were doing anything shameful.

If you’d asked them, they’d have told you sincerely that they were protecting unwell people from a doctor who was letting them down. In truth, they were attacking someone whose opinion they simply didn’t agree with.

Yet every message, every photograph of my flat, every call to my publisher was, in their own minds, a righteous act.

That’s why I now think the way we talk to each other is dangerous. Moral certainty takes the brakes off. When you’re convinced you’re defending the vulnerable, ordinary restraint starts to look like cowardice and cruelty starts to look like courage. Social media is engineered to reward these tendencies.

Research has shown that posts using moral and emotional language travel further and faster than anything else, so outrage gets you an audience.

Expressing contempt for a stranger used to cost you something socially. Now it earns you followers. There’s also a cruelty in the arithmetic that nobody sending the messages ever sees.

Each person writes one comment, thinks little of it and gets on with their evening, while the person receiving it opens their phone to thousands.

So what should you do if it happens to you? Showing that you’re upset only encourages them, since your distress is the desired outcome and confirms the blow has landed. Appealing to their humanity rarely gets anywhere either, because they think they’re the humane one in this exchange.

Psychologists suggest responding indifferently with a plain statement that the behaviour isn’t acceptable works better than anything else. However unsatisfying that may sound.

It’s also important that other people step in. Someone met by a crowd of approving strangers feels emboldened. Whereas someone whose comment is met by half a dozen people saying ‘that’s not on’ tends to lose interest fast.

So when you see a stranger being trolled online – even if you don’t agree with that stranger’s opinions – say something in their defence. You’ll be doing more good than you know. 

Why Alex’s rage was revealing

The One Show’s Alex Jones has described the moment she realised she was probably perimenopausal – when she threw a four-pint carton of milk across her kitchen. Until then, she’d been unsure. 

This is an articulate, well-informed woman of 49 with access to any doctor she chooses, who didn’t know whether she was perimenopausal until she found herself hurling dairy products. 

The problem is that many doctors have spent decades describing the menopause almost entirely in terms of hot flushes and night sweats. The mood symptoms barely feature, yet they’re often what women notice first. 

These include irritability that comes from nowhere, rage wildly out of proportion to whatever prompted it, low mood, and the unsettling sense of not recognising yourself.

 I’ve lost count of the women I’ve seen in clinic who assumed they were depressed, or that their marriage was in trouble. Some were using antidepressants. Nobody had thought to ask about their irregular periods 

You may have seen reports last week that eating dark grapes, blueberries and other deeply coloured fruits improves heart health. Before you fill your trolley, some context. That review was paid for by Bloom Fresh International, a company which breeds a new red-fleshed table grape sold in this country under the name BoomBites. 

Not one human trial has ever tested those grapes on anybody’s heart. Eat berries, by all means, but this is marketing dressed as science. So when a health story urges you towards one narrow type of food, scroll to the funding statement at the bottom. It usually explains everything.