Dear Supporter,
Welcome to the latest Update from Save Mental Health. We hope you enjoy our chosen topics this month:
Following on from the article by Ian Acheson that we covered last month, Consultant Psychiatrist and Forensic Psychotherapist Dr Carinne Minne expresses her concerns that “the Golders Green attack could be another NHS failure”Dr Minne, who worked at Broadmoor for 30 years, speaks of a “pass the parcel” culture which fails to detect “dangerous offenders”. She reports seeing a rising number of “‘mixed’ cases that were not ‘pure’ mental health or ‘pure’ ideological or radicalised” that required different bodies, such as Prevent and local mental health teams, to work together. However, she points out that they “often fail to communicate effectively” with the result that individuals “fall between the cracks”, sometimes with tragic consequences. Regarding the Southport Inquiry, Dr Minne wished that “the efforts that were going into analysing what went wrong at Southport had gone into stopping it from happening in the first place”.
In the Telegraph report, Dr Minne identifies a range of factors that may be playing a part in things going wrong, including over-reliance on “overcomplicated” electronic record systems; too many emails that risk important information being missed or giving the “false impression that something or someone is being dealt with”; misuse of protocols and bureaucracy to ‘pass the buck’ with no-one being held accountable;‘siloing’ of patients according to what behaviours they are exhibiting; and overloaded services.
Dr Minne calls for “a return to joined-up psychiatric services”, properly trained staff and sufficient hospital beds for those requiring care, better resources and trained psychiatric services for children and adolescents and better communication between mental health services and social services, criminal justice and education. She believes that “ultimately, it’s just about knowing the patients better than wecurrently do”.
In this excellent article,Dr Stella O’Malley of Genspect compares the principles and purpose behind these two competing models of therapeutic care and provides a useful comparative chart. She explains how gender-affirming care is “dressed in the language of compassion” but that “behind the reassuring vocabulary sits the automatic medicalisation of a person’s sense of identity”. She goes on: “therapy has moved from helping people understand themselves to helping them reshape their bodies and faces so that their appearance reflects an inner psychological reality”.
On the other hand sex-affirming care “recognises that the human body is not incidental” and that it “must be contended with, as our bodies are the foundation of our existence”. This approach is “grounded in biological reality”. Dr O’Malley points out that “We can rage against the limitations of our bodies, but we cannot deny they exist”. She concludes: “therapy, at its best, is a discipline that gently but persistently brings people back into contact with what is real”.
Following our piece last month about the ‘manosphere’, our attention was drawn to the appointment of a ‘Toxic Masculinity Officer’ by Perth and Kinross Council in Scotland, even as theCouncil Tax there rises by 8.9%. Stuart Waiton of the Scottish Union for Education writes about it here.
Increasingly, it seems, local authorities feel entitled to spend council taxpayers’ cashoninitiatives to combat ‘misogyny’ and ‘sexism’ – entirely subjective and never defined – and which is inevitably described as the thin end of a wedge, culminating in violence against women and girls (VAWG).
A charity called White Ribbon UK, which aims to prevent this and “make misogyny and sexism socially unacceptable”, offers ‘accreditation’ to a variety of organisations: local authorities; health boards; police forces; schools; football clubs; and the Church of England. Many more community groups are paying ‘supporters’. Around 100 local councils are currently ‘accredited’, apparently at a cost to taxpayers ofanywhere from a few hundred pounds to several thousand pounds each. What benefits do they reap from this, apart from the obvious virtue-signalling?
The value, we are told, lies in “demonstrating your ongoing and sustained commitment to preventing men’s violence against women by making changes to the way priorities are determined across your organisation, through communications, HR policies, employee development, training and overall organisational culture”. In other words, organisations are committed to keep taking advice and ‘training’ which appears determined to ignore reality and instead perpetuate a fantasy, that increasing rates of sexual violence are primarily a result of structural gender inequality and ‘power imbalances’ in Britain, in the twenty-first century.
White Ribbon produced a report last year, entitled The Case for Investing in Primary Prevention: Ending Men’s Violence Against Women, which states that “gender inequality is pervasive in our society and harms everyone”. What it fails to mention is that women and girls are now the beneficiaries of this, and men and boys are suffering much harm as a result. Girls and young women do better than boys on almost every metric, and many professions are now majority female, as Helen Andrews describes in her essay, The Great Feminization. Quite astonishingly, for an organisation committed to ending violence against women and girls, the ubiquitous use across society of violent and degrading pornography is barely mentioned, neither is the effect of fatherlessness, nor is the damaging sexualisation of children, and the normalising of niche and harmful sexual practices. All three fleeting references to pornography, in the 46-page document, are merely commentary on other sources, such as government guidelines for Relationships and Sex Education.
The report’s findings are not, sadly, the logical conclusions that almost anyone other than this entirely female research team would reach. And just in case we had underestimated the need to involve White Ribbon, we are told that none of their suggested interventions “can be achieved without substantial long-term funds to implement them” as many rely on “specialist services”. It is surely obvious that identifying, condemning and punishing violence against anyone, sexual or otherwise, is not complicated.
Psychotherapist and trainer Sue Parker Hall runs a Substack called the Foundation for Academic Integrity and Responsibility (FAIR), which regularly reports on the challenges faced by ethical therapists in the current ideologically and politically infused professional environment. Recently, guest writer Deanne Jade, a psychologist and Founder of the National Centre for Eating Disorders, contributed a piece which clearly analyses the growing tensions. In The psychological professions: from neutrality to political alignment, Deanne explores the cultural shiftfrom empathy and ‘unconditional positive regard’ to one of exclusion and coercion. As an example, she highlights the adoption, without consultation, of the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion therapy in 2017 (updated in 2024), and how this establishes a top-down mandate, instructing practitioners how to think about, and work with, gender dysphoria, along with the ideological reinforcement of this stance.
Deanne also raises the issue of ‘unauthorised regulatory signalling’, which moves the goalposts of fitness to practice. Even when practitioners’ beliefs are entirely lawful and mainstream, in a twisting of language, they can be deemed ‘harmful’, and so those holding them can be accused of ‘malpractice’. For example, recently, a newly elected trustee of the BACP suggested that those with so-called gender critical beliefs should perhaps not be therapists.
Finally, Deanne highlights a ‘crisis of integrity” within the psychological professions. Demands for clinical competence are being replaced with an ideological ‘purity test’. Political alignment appears to be more important than the ability to hold clients’ distress. This is evidenced by reported requests for ‘trigger warnings’ from current students in professional training, alongwith guarantees that clients will not present with certain issues or attitudes. This is critically important for the future of the psychological professions. If practitioners are unable to focus primarily on the client, and the client's needs, what therapeutic purpose are they serving?
The interim report of the Independent review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism has now been published. This review is being led by Professor Peter Fonagy, who is a former CEO of Anna Freud and is now the organisation’s Honorary President. The review has found that while the prevalence of mental health conditions among adults has risen to 23%, “the nature of distress is also changing. Thelargest increases among young people are seen in emotional symptoms, loneliness, sleep problems, loss of confidence and difficulty concentrating, rather than across all domains of mental health equally”.
This report also warns that rising diagnoses, particularly with regard to ADHD and autism “should not be interpreted straightforwardly as evidence that these conditions have become substantially more common in the population.” Diagnosis is influenced by several factors and is now “performing functions beyond clinical classification”. It has become “the practical mechanism through which individuals obtain access to support, adjustments and formal recognition”. There is a suggestion that educational systems are not only responding to diagnosis, but also “shaping demand for it”.
The role of social and institutional factors in shaping diagnosis will be examined in the next phase of the review. Combinations of influences such as educational pressures, economic insecurity, changes in family life, public awareness and digital technology will be studied as the “current position cannot be explained by a single narrative”.
Professor Eamon McCrory, current CEO of Anna Freud and Professor of Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology at UCLcommented that, “The fabric of childhood is changing before our eyes, and we have a responsibility to respond with imagination and ambition. This is not simply a challenge for services, but for society as a whole”, something we have been saying for some time. He continued, “This means less focus on a medical model driven by diagnosis and more on building the social infrastructure that best supports healthy development, in families, schools and communities, and across digital spaces”.
As our featured essay last month explained, the root of much emotional distress is social and not psychological in origin.
Some of you may have seen the video clip of educator Warren Smith that went ‘viral’ on social media a while ago. In the video Smith provided an example of the Socratic method in action, guiding a student who assumed JK Rowling’s opinions were ‘bigoted’ and helping them apply critical thinking skills to explore and questionthis assumption. He has now written a book, titled “A Mind of Your Own: Independent Thought in the Age of Misinformation”to be published on Kindle in August and in hardback in October. The book provides a five-step method designed to “cut through spin, expose deception and make decisions with confidence”. It can be pre-ordered now. You can see Warren Smith’s recent interview Feelings Over Facts on Triggernometry here.
