Picture the scene: you have been struggling with your mental health. You eventually strike up the courage to talk to your GP, who refers you to a psychologist. After waiting for months, you are finally assigned one, and you start your sessions.
You build up a relationship and trust your psychologist – she reassures you that your discussions are confidential and that she is there to support you. Feelings, concerns and worries are shared, even thoughts that you’d never shared with anyone else. You feel safe to do so. After all, you’re talking to a professional whose job is to help people deal with feelings like yours. Then one day when you’re scrolling through social media, the algorithm presents you with a meme about psychology. You look at it, thinking you might learn something useful. Imagine how you would feel if, instead, you read this: “When your patient says ‘What do you think’ but you’d zoned out…”
Rather taken aback, you read on to see other psychologists laughing and sharing their own experiences of when they had stopped listening to their clients, including: “make a desperate rehash of the last thing you remember them saying…”, or “why don’t you tell me what you think?”
Shocked by this public sharing of what seemed to be a common experience for professionals you had previously trusted and assumed were listening closely to what you were saying, you scroll through a few more memes, seeing that there is a entire page dedicated to the experience of psychologists. You find upon looking at this page that a number of the memes refer to experiences with patients, with the following comments about them:
- “One of the reasons I don’t accept hot drinks when I do community visits is because I tend to propel them from my nostrils in disbelief when someone has actually done a home practice task as planned”
- “When you’ve spent all week formulating your client and you still don’t know what the f**k is going on”
- “Now listen here, you little shit”
- “When I worked in LD [Learning Disability] services I half expected a Demogorgon to walk into the clinic room when doing initial meetings”
“He shared personal information on a meme page”
Scrolling on with increasing concern, you then see one therapist proclaim that there “are lots of memes to be had with clients (how they treat us for example)”. The owner of the social media page agrees that he or she thinks that “making memes about clients is fine” because they are “just as fallible as we are”.
You then find to your horror that the Instagram page you’re viewing had actually previously been shut down due to ‘identifiable’ information having been shared. Yet it has clearly been re-opened. You panic, with your mind desperately trying to remember any piece of embarrassing, personal or sensitive information that you had shared with your therapist, wondering if you were the person identified. Even worse, had these professionals (including your own therapist whom you had trusted) been using you as an example, and laughing at what you had shared with them?
All of a sudden, the therapist who you thought was a professional whom you had built a trusting relationship with is now an individual who thinks it’s appropriate to publicly talk about and ridicule patients on a public site on the world wide web. Not only this, judging by the responses of her colleagues, this seems to be a standard, acceptable and enjoyable group activity.
“Crying is not an emergency”
Upon further investigation, you see that therapists’ lack of discretion extends beyond clients to their thoughts about other health professionals. Few are safe from criticism, with fellow psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors and medical-care staff all being targeted:
Looking at these jokes, you feel you’ve misjudged your therapist: you trusted her, you thought she was genuinely engaging with your story and that she wanted to help you. Instead, she and her colleagues are publicly laughing at patients like you; they have previously exposed identifiable information about patients, and they are ‘bitching’ about other health professionals in a public forum.
You wonder if your judgement of others is so poor. Clearly the trust you had was misplaced, as was your understanding of your relationship. Imagine the consequences for your mental health: the very person you put your trust in, and who was meant to help you, has damaged your wellbeing even further.
“There is a strong chance I will drop kick you in the face”
In another scenario, imagine that you’d struggled for a long time with your mental health. You don’t want medication and you know the alternative is therapy. This is a big step, and you are trying to psych yourself up to request it. However, when scrolling social media, you are hit by a number of posts that make you think twice.
Some of these posts seem to be particularly judgemental – even endorsing violence against those who hold different opinions to the therapist posting them. You read them with horror, shocked by the public displays of judgement presented by individuals who you thought were meant to be open minded, understanding and empathetic.
Many of the posts strongly condemn individuals for holding certain beliefs, and you feel concerned. You hold some of these opinions that are being condemned – clearly therapy is not for me, you think. Even when you don’t share the beliefs that are being condemned, you wonder whether that means that you can’t say certain things in therapy? Maybe you should research what you can and can’t say before you start your sessions. Your worries then escalate: could your therapist ‘cancel’ or report you for having beliefs that she doesn’t agree with? Will you upset her, will she be angry with you?
“Whiteness is still in the room”
Reading on, you are even more concerned to see that it is not only opinions that are condemned – it seems that individuals will even be judged on their immutable characteristics such as skin colour or sex. One psychologist complains about the fact that “whiteness” is “still in the room”, while another posts a disparaging meme about men. As a white male, you feel that you have already been judged: in the eyes of these therapists, you seem to be a problem that they don’t want to see or listen to – or at the very least, they hold you in distain.
“I’d be lying if I said my mental health was fully stable off my meds”
Having read these posts, you start to wonder why such individuals have decided to pursue careers as psychologists – especially when they seem to have such pre-determined (negative) ideas about groups of people. If these people only care about those they agree with – or those who are ‘like them’ – what can they bring to the table when they are working for the NHS and will be required to work with patients of a different sex, skin colour or religion? Looking further, you see that many of these psychologists seem to be in need of help themselves, voicing upset and distress at the kind of things you were expecting them to be able to advise their clients on.
For example, you see one trainee psychologist posting a stream of consciousness about her own psychological issues, another says she is “too triggered” to look at a magazine cover, another states that simply being a woman is “exhausting and scary”, while yet another states that she is unable to cope either on or off her own psychological medication.
When you see a senior consultant stating that the increasing presence of “lived experience” (i.e., psychologists who have “lived experience” of mental illness) is “the biggest game changer” she’s seen in “25 years”, you can’t help but think that if the aforementioned tweets are the consequence of the game being changed, then the field would have been much better staying as it was.
While you know that there is nothing wrong in struggling with mental health – after all, you are in the same boat – you feel uncomfortable with such a public expression of inability to cope from mental health professionals themselves. You sought advice about how you could feel better but it seems that they don’t know how to make themselves feel better either.
In the same way that you wouldn’t take your broken car to a mechanic who couldn’t fix his own car, you wouldn’t want someone who couldn’t fix their own mind to advise you on fixing yours. Of course, most people have experienced difficulty at some points in their lives, and this can develop their understanding and empathy. However, you would hope that these issues have been addressed before an individual offers advice to others – otherwise issues of risk and competence start to arise.
Summary
It is possible to argue that these are just a few ‘bad eggs’ who are very vocal on social media – and as a result they make it seem as if such behaviours are widespread. This may be true, but I invite you to search the social media accounts of clinical psychologists in your local area (especially those most recently qualified) and you will see that many, even if they don’t behave in such an extreme way, still hold similar views. This is evident when you see the responses from their peers to the aforementioned posts – they are endorsed and supported by others – these are not marginal behaviours and opinions.
As an outsider, you may wonder what on earth has brought about such an extreme departure from the professional behaviour traditionally expected of those in the mental health professions. A great deal of this is likely to be due to the wholehearted adoption of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) ideology. This is because CSJ presents the world in terms of victims and aggressors, or ‘oppressed’ and ‘oppressors’. As a result, proponents of this ideology tend to view the world in a binary way: on the one hand seeing ‘poor oppressed victims’ who need to be protected, defended and affirmed, and on the other, ‘nasty powerful oppressors’, who need to be stopped from bullying, mistreating and taking from the powerless.
According to CSJ ideology, the oppressors are bad people who need to be prevented from harming the oppressed. From this perspective, we can see how the proponents of CSJ can justify their hatred and vitriol, while still strongly believing that they are good – even nice – people, as well as competent professionals. Indeed, the more strongly and loudly they denounce, silence and even attempt to destroy those they consider the oppressors, the more virtuous they believe they are.
Another consequence of this mindset is that professional and ethical psychologists are silenced and intimidated. We hear from male trainees (males being outnumbered in the profession by women 80:20) who are silenced and disparaged in their training courses by lecturers and fellow students alike. We also know that training courses for psychologists recruit for and promote CSJ ideology, and this is one of the reasons that the field is becoming increasingly unable to offer appropriate support to patients. People with their own mental health problems, with vindictive, fragile personalities, and those with a desire to force their own opinions and beliefs on others are drawn to the field due to the opportunities it provides to develop these behaviours. If those in positions of authority in the discipline of psychology do not challenge these behaviours and traits, they are then reinforced, providing power and status to such individuals, while simultaneously reinforcing their narrative and shutting down alternative perspectives or challenges.
Ultimately, those responsible for policy-making and guidelines must be held to account – both the organisations themselves and those enabling these ideological views to spread. These organisations include the British Psychological Society, the Health Care and Professions Council and the NHS. They are of the same mindset, promoting and embedding these ideas and behaviours into policies, while steadfastly refusing to listen to any concern or criticism.
The division of the British Psychological Society in charge of clinical psychologists has become increasingly militant in its politicisation, promoting ideology over evidence and encouraging those with a similar mindset to join the profession at the expense of those with a strong scientific and research-based mindset. Indeed, the latter are dismissed as ‘White’ ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘Western’, and their expertise discarded alongside their immutable characteristics – a sign of the priorities of the discipline.
Throughout this piece, I have asked you to imagine that you are in the position of the patient, and with a quarter of the population experiencing mental health problems each year, there is a strong likelihood that either you or a loved one might be in this position at some point in your lives.
For a final time, I ask you to put yourself in the position of that patient: unless action is taken to combat the ideology that has taken over our mental health institutions, the ‘professionals’ described above are the ones who will be ‘treating’ you. You will see individuals who judge you by your skin colour, your sex, your opinions. You will see individuals who can’t look after their own wellbeing. You will see individuals who don’t have the requisite desire, ability or understanding to support you with evidence-based treatments.
Ultimately, you won’t see knowledgeable, capable professionals – you will see people who are more in need of support than you are.
And that should scare you.
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“This is calculated ‘climate change’ propaganda marketed as entertainment.”
Almost all BBC output is political propaganda marketed as entertainment or news or current affairs or sports coverage. The goes for most TV ads and probably a whole load of other TV, films that I simply cannot watch any more.
Very true, and most of us have known that for many years. But ofcourse propaganda depends on most of the people not having sufficient time or inclination to investigate every issue as they are very busy with work and raising families. I am totally aware of all the TV propaganda, the Attenborough nonsense and the endless screeching about a “climate crisis” for political purposes which most people simply have no clue even exists. They think it is all about “science”. ——As my brother said to me once “Why would they say there is global warming if it isn’t true”? A classic example of how the propaganda works for most people. ——But the bit you mentioned about TV ads was the bit of your comment that had me laughing the most even if all of this stuff is no laughing matter. Almost every TV ad features a white wife and a black husband or vice versa, and you will find it very difficult to see 5 white people in an ad. You would think in a country where only 13% of people are black that this would be almost statistically impossible, and it actually makes a mockery of their “colour blind” excuse. Just like the excuse they used in the absurd Bridgerton TV program . But imagine if we had a period drama set in the Congo in 1850 and a quarter of the actors were white, or imagine if there was a film about Nelson Mandela and George Clooney was the lead actor. There would be flames coming out from the eyes of the social justice people.——Diversity only ever works in one direction.
Western civilisation committing suicide before our eyes. The idiots. The sheep who are going along with this will regret it when it’s gone.
I was just muting the ads but I need to look away now. Luckily I don’t watch much TV, mainly old films and re-runs, and I have shelves full of old books enough to last me until I am gone so I don’t need to buy anything contemporary. As far as I am concerned the people who are pushing this crap have declared war on me.
I also mute the ads or record TV programs and skip past them. I refuse to watch anything I deem to be pushing political agendas, mainly around Equality, Diversity, Race, Gender or Climate. If I want to watch drama I do not want social justice messages crammed in there. If I want to watch sport I do not want to hear about “taking the knee” or “there are not enough minority referees” I do not want to know whether a professional football player is gay. That is none of my business. etc etc etc
Appalling climate porn from Attenborough! The poor little penguin the rain! No context and no data. It is blatant brainwashing of our young for political reasons.
The most ridiculous bit is actually Then there will be a future for the planet — the planet, an enormous ball of stone (mostly), will have a future regardless of the fate of any individual species of animals currently living on it. The hybris is breathtaking. Humans are incapable of ensuring an uninterrupted power supply to their homes in the face of perfectly ordinary storms or end periodic, long-lasting flooding of vast swathes of the countryside but they and they alone can save the whole planet which is mortally endangered by their mostly insignificant presence.
Attenborough is somewhat notorious for being in favour of human extinction, preferably human self-extinction through birth preventation. Considering this, I wouldn’t want to take any advice regarding human affairs from him as it’s very unlikely that that’s meant to be beneficial to members of a species he openly despises. Additionally, the I am the anti-messias who’s going to bring mankind death to save the world! megalomanic delusion doesn’t exactly speek for a rational mind.
Why does the BBC fund sorry would-be murderous lunatics like him?
Because they don’t have to worry about earning the money they stuff in that charlatan’s pockets
The BBC didn’t do that in, say, 1954, and hence, the stock US platitude The state is sooo eeeeeviiiillll!!!127 remains the same tired nonsense it alway was.
The prevailing political wind in 1954 was different. At least in the US there are some major media companies presenting a slightly different view (well, mainly just Fox). In the UK I think the dominance of the BBC because of it’s guaranteed income stream, the stamp of authority that comes from being the state broadcaster, and it’s long history as the only broadcaster, give it a big advantage.
What’s the German TV media like? Anyone decent reaching good numbers of viewers?
The prevailing political wind in 1954 was different.
Precisely. The problem is not that the BBC has a guaranteed income stream. The problem is that the BBC is controlled (and presumably, largely also staffed) by people paying lip services to what the BBC is supposed to do while they’re actually doing someting completely different: Instead of informing a supposedly intellectually mature audience to enable its members to form opinions of their own, they’re telling an audience they believe to be too infantile to think right about anything what the opinions of its members should be.
What’s the German TV media like? Anyone decent reaching good numbers of viewers?
By and large, I have no idea about that as I stopped viewing TV in the mid-1990s and haven’t been living in Germany since December 2010. The general situation is probably worse: There are two public broadcasters, ARD and ZDF. ARD was the original one, the ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, second German broadcaster) was originally founded because it was believed that the ARD was organizationally too close to the SPD (social democrats, originally, today, its more genderqueer diversity whatevers seeking state employment) to report objectively about a CDU government. But that was in 1959 (original plan). Today, both of them are controlled by councils proportionally staffed by members of the established establishment parties and other organizations said parties consider socially important, eg, the churches.
The platitude is yours not mine. The problem started when the BBC stopped reporting the facts and decided to share their opinions with us. It’s difficult to say exactly when that happened but my best guess is around the early/mid 70s. I moved abroad in 1970 and returned to the UK in 1975. The starting point may well have been the protests around the Vietnam war. The Beeb looked across the pond and liked the prestige given to their US cousins affecting the political discourse and decided to follow the same path over here.
The arrival of the AGW scam poured fuel onto their self righteous fire. And the desire to be seen as still relevant in an age of social media ‘likes’ just fanned the flames.
And the matter is made worse by their choice of commentators, individuals without any relevant qualifications or background on scientific issues, which they demonstrate by only ever presenting one side of the argument.
This contradicts your earlier assertion: If the present-day BBC modelled its behaviour on US media companies, said behaviour can’t have been caused by the business model of the BBC being different from theirs.
A business model is a financial issue. Behaviour is a cultural matter. If you don’t have to worry about your income then you can choose your cultural approach without concern for any negative impact on your finances. The BBC sees itself as the state broadcaster and thus above such irrelevant issues as funding. US broadcasters are commercial animals and act accordingly.
The BBC’s behaviour is caused precisely because they are not commercial.
In the 21st Century the concept of a state broadcaster is only appropriate for a dictatorship. Lies are Truth.
The BBC will put anyone in front of a camera that is prepared to spout Liberal Progressive dogma. They will put a microphone in front a bin man as long as he tells the viewers that they need to cut emissions or be taking the knee. The BBC supposedly have a motto —Free Fair and Impartial—They are none of those things. Their world view is all to the Progressive Left despite the fact that half of Licence payers are not Progressives. So it is really remarkable that a Conservative government actually had an 80 seat majority just a short time ago. But as it turned out they are not really Conservatives which is why Labour now has a 36 point lead. The entire hand wringing political class pander to globalists and UN agenda’s instead of to the people who voted for them, but as we saw in Italy that can all change, but it can only change if the likes of the BBC are exposed for what they are.
Meanwhile in the arctic, sea levels are rising due to the ice sheets being weighed down by too many polar bears, and as the little icebergs they’re drifting around on sink under their weight, the killer whales are having them for breakfast – all caught on film by a sobbing camera crew singing sad songs of lament about climate change!
I believe that the Western Antarctic peninsula is the most populous area for homo sapiens in Antarctica. Maybe the Adelies want a bit of privacy.
No, they just want David Attenborough to stop feeling sorry for them!
Must be a case of That Attenborough guy has repeatedly been seen in neighbourhood. Better move elsewhere now before it gets even worse.
Nature programmes used to be more fun when they weren’t wrapped up in political soundbites. David Attenborough used to be a firm favourite of mine for his boyish enthusiasm and knowledge about his subject but his conversion to the religion of climate change has switched off that particular avenue of simple pleasure for me. The cherry-picking of images and statistics and the emotional manipulation of a public who are desperate for some sort of meaningful connection with the natural world but then get this emotional scattergunning of emotive scenes depicting penguins on their own or being stabbed to death by starving sea gulls. All we need are the massed violins of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra playing Elgar’s Nimrod and a few bloodied feathers floating in the freezing waters and the masses will be burning their cars en masse and demanding Net Zero social credits and CBDCs and all the nonsense that is coming their way. Attenborough has that annoyingly quiet and sincere voice that makes people want to adopt him as their favourite grandad (in addition to Morgan Freeman) and, more worryingly, believe every well spoken metaphor to describe the ensuing catastrophe that emanates from his mouth. I think he is being played. If you could get access to him and show him the alternative data and facts, I’m sure he would be interested but this is a BBC show and I can only imagine that the show’s producers and backers are not interested in a balanced perspective. Cue violins as I watch my car being towed away…
Attenborough being played.
No way. He is a humanity hating eugenecist and it’s about time he sat down with God to explain his actions. Evil piece of shyte.
Strong words, HP. Is he really a eugenicist? I had no idea. Is he a mate of Gates?
Excellent article Chris
No doubt the Woke left will demand a state funeral for this cretin when he shuffles off this mortal coil. Please God.
Today’s substack by Steve Kirsch
https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=548354&post_id=79313774&utm_source=post-email-title&isFreemail=false&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1ODMwMjgzNywicG9zdF9pZCI6NzkzMTM3NzQsImlhdCI6MTY2NjE2MzQyMywiZXhwIjoxNjY4NzU1NDIzLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNTQ4MzU0Iiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.3VXtFNBPJdnch-dKIXc5Dne9HfAT_thTanjLy_OfaMA
Really all you need to know about this overall topic is that the Nazi regime was the most environmentally focussed in history (Nazism is basically Nature-worship writ large);
And that the contemporary political movement was initiated by the formation of the German Green Party (the seed corn for all the other branches, including the British one) by former members of the Nazi Party immediately after the end of WWII.
OMFG. I don’t really like this hackneyed phrase but here, it’s absolutely appropriate: I don’t know what your smoking but you should absolutely stop it.
The German green party (Die Grünen) was founded in 1980 by a bunch of somewhat prominent ex-hippies, ie, the people who believed the USA was a fascist dictatorship which would need to be overcome by a violent (communist) revolution about 10 years earlier and who were the nucleus of all-things-woke of our times. They’d stone you to death it if became known that your grandfather once knew a guy who had been a passenger on a train someone who claimed to have heard of someone else who was claimed to have seen a real photo of Adolf Hitler had also used at an earlier date because of your irredemable contamination with fascist DNA if they were only allowed to do so (they’re still working on that).
Re:
‘The German green party (Die Grünen) was founded in 1980‘
Thank you for pointing that out, I researched the history of environmentalism in Germany a long time ago and have obviously become confused about organisational origins and dates in the interim.
The fact remains that there was complete continuity in post-war West Germany with the uniquely strong Nazi environmentalist (or conservationist) agenda and policies.
Hermann Goering’s Reich Nature Protection law of 1935 which “extended protection to rare or endangered plants and nongame animals, natural monuments and their surroundings, nature reserves, and other landscape areas in open nature” (sound familiar?) was kept in place, as was Hans Klose, the Nazi Director of the Reich Agency for Nature Protection – name simply changed post-war to the Central Office for Nature Conservation and Landscape Conservation.
‘by a bunch of somewhat prominent ex-hippies‘
The 1960s western hippy movement has strong ideological connections with the early 20th century German anti-urban / nature-loving Wandervogel movement, which was subsumed into the Hitler Youth when the Nazis seized power in 1933.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandervogel
For those who still fall for the hippy ‘peace and love’ smokescreen, it’s worth remembering that the movement called those that it disagreed with ‘pigs’, had very few darker-skinned members, and one of the most famous examples of its communes was known as the Manson Family;
A long-haired and kaftan wearing grouping that murdered at least 9 individuals, including the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, in 1969.
They used environmentalism as one of their main motivations / excuses, and have a look at this image of Charles Manson:
https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a5330/charles-manson-true-crime-industry/
Note the swastika.
Beyond any hippy connections founders of the German Green Party in 1980 included August Haussleiter, a prominent Nazi who took part in Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Baldur Springmann a former member of the SA, and Werner Vorgel, another former Nazi stormtrooper was among the first members of the Greens elected to the Bundestag in 1983.
https://www.jpost.com/jewish-world/jewish-features/the-nazi-roots-of-the-german-greens-318973
the people who believed the USA was a fascist dictatorship which would need to be overcome by a violent (communist) revolution about 10 years earlier and who were the nucleus of all-things-woke of our times. They’d stone you to death it if became known that your grandfather once knew a guy who had been a passenger on a train someone who claimed to have heard of someone else who was claimed to have seen a real photo of Adolf Hitler had also used at an earlier date because of your irredemable contamination with fascist DNA if they were only allowed to do so (they’re still working on that).
Nazism and Communism are two sides of the same tyrannical, anti-democratic and mass murderous coin. Just like rival football hooligan gangs the adherents falsely perceive themselves to belong to opposite ideological and practical camps.
To illustrate this point the Nazi and German Communist Parties conspired together in the Reichstag to undermine and ultimately overthrow the liberal democratic Weimar Constitution
And just to tie the whole thing back to the inherently fascistic and misanthropic Green ideology, it is worth remembering that alongside Nazi environmentalism already covered the Marxist Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot murdered millions of civilians in Cambodia as a result of the Green-inspired ‘Clear the Cities’ programme.
I only watch match of the day now. Nothing else. Cancelled my tv license last week as I refuse to fund this woke left wing propaganda machine any more.