UPDATE 23

13 December 2025

Dear Supporter

Welcome to the December update, the last of the year. A huge thank you to those who have responded to our requests for help and to all of you for your support. We are very grateful.  If you are missing Lucy Beney's excellent and though-provoking articles, so are we.  Sadly, Lucy wasn't able to write a piece for this update, but she sent us this article from her Substack: The Genderbread House and Other Stories: Hansel and Gretel revisited – a cautionary tale for our times.  We are sure you will enjoy this tale as much as we did.

Here is a review of the year and a reminder of what has been achieved:

January

Carole Sherwood took part in BBC R4's Antisocial on Mental Health and Race. This followed reports that Kings College London's clinical psychology doctoral programme had organised 'critical-race-theory' inspired 'race-segregated' classes for trainees.

February

Launch of the first issue of the Open Therapy Institute's journal Frontiers in Mental Health containing an article by Carole Sherwood: 'Revolution in Culture: the psychological effects of a politicized society'.

April

Save Mental Health, in collaboration with Don't Divide Us, held a NCF Locals event in Norwich called EDI in the NHS: What you need to know. Carol Richardson, a Health Care Assistant from Yorkshire talked about taking her NHS Trust to an Employment Tribunal for practicing racial segregation.  She subsequently appeared on GB News. Carol's case is awaiting judgement after the hearing last month.

Also in April Carole Sherwood took part in the Open Therapy Institute's live virtual workshop on Overlooked Issues Related to Race and Mental Health.  Her talk was based on the article she wrote for OTI's journal New Frontiers, considering the effects of racial ideology in the arts and popular culture. 

June

Tim Samuels' podcast White Men Can't Work, was released, featuring Carole Sherwood talking about the effects of EDI on mental Health. A poll by JL Partners, commissioned for the series, showed that nearly half of white men in the UK are self-censoring at work "because they fear that saying the wrong thing could cost them their jobs".  The series included an interview with an anonymous clinical psychology trainee talking about his experiences of training: how he found whiteness training "dehumanising" and how the three-year course did not address the problem of men's mental health, despite high rates of male suicide. 

Also in June, Save Mental Health and the Free Speech Union launched their cancellation survey, designed to find out what effects being cancelled has on mental health, and how people cope. If you have been cancelled, and would like to find out more, please click on this link.

July

Publication of the Family Education Trust's report written by Lucy Beney, Save Mental Health's Child Correspondent, about the Government's plan to introduce mental health professionals into all schools.  The report titled Suffer the Children – Why having a 'mental health professional' in every school is not the answer, reflects many of Save Mental Health's concerns and those of our supporters.

October

As a result of the above report, Lucy Beney was asked to present on a panel at the Battle of Ideas asking: Should there be a mental health professional in every school.  Also on the panel were: Baroness Joanne Cash, Dave Clements and Ashley Frawley. In the Chair was Professor Ellie Lee. The session was well attended and there was some lively debate.

November

Save Mental Health launched a Call to Action following an exposé in the Sunday Telegraph and a subsequent interview with Dr Christian Buckland on Talk TV, revealing that, 18 months on, the main professional therapeutic bodies had taken no action to implement the Cass Review's recommendations.   Our Call to Action invited people to report the BACP, BPS and UKCP to the Professional Standards Authority and the Charity Commission.  

Soon afterwards, on Free Speech Nation Josh Howie interviewed three members of those professional bodies who revealed the scandal of the BACP, BPS and UKCP's failure to protect children.  You can read a summary here of the points made by Alasdair Solkeld and Terry Patterson of Thoughtful Therapists and Dr Katie Alcock of Lancaster University who all spoke out so courageously.

December

Finally, if you are a member of the BACP or a therapeutic professional belonging to another professional body, you may wish to add your signature to this open letter. It's addressed to the Leadership & Ethics Committee of the BACP and calls for 'ideological neutrality', 'client sovereignty' and 'intellectual pluralism'.

Please do add your signature to the open letter if you can.  Thank you.  If you would like to find out more about the ideological capture of the BACP before signing, Peter Jenkins has written two excellent articles for Critical Therapy Antidote that you can read here and here.

Happy Christmas!

That's the end of our round-up of the year.  Wishing you all a very Happy Christmas and New Year!  See you in 2026.