Dr. Carl Elliott

And then when they blow the whistle, it turns out that that's not the case.

They think the authorities are going to do something, that they're going to leap into action and rectify the injustice, and then that doesn't happen.

And they think their friends are going to stand by them, and then that doesn't happen.

Even if they have some measure of success, they very often come out of it with a kind of almost obsession with what they've been through, an inability to get over it and put it behind them because it's so disruptive to the way that they had always seen the world.

Yeah.

I mean, being in the hole is a very dark place and it tends to turn people inward.

And in the hole, you can't really think about anything other than yourself and what this is doing to you and how you get out of the hole.

I mean, I can remember talking to the whistleblowers in Sweden in the Paolo Macchiarini scandal and hearing from them just how obsessed they became

You know, because they could see it.

They were surgeons.

They could see what was happening.

They could see that things were going very bad and that people were dying and no one would believe them.

And so there's a kind of desperation to it.

You know, this feeling that nothing else is as important as making people aware of this.

And yet no one is paying attention.

Part of it is that very often it doesn't really feel like a decision.

It feels like there's no choice.

I mean, people will say, really, I had no choice.

I had to do it.

Fred Alford, who wrote a terrific book on whistleblowers, said, the question presents itself to whistleblowers not so much as what should I do, but how did it happen that I find myself in a position where there is nothing else for me to do but act?