How psychology went mad

Psychotherapist Amy Gallagher introduces a new documentary on the threats to free speech in mental-health provision.

I was delighted to be interviewed by Amy Gallagher for her new documentary with New Culture Forum: Trans, Racist and Woke: how psychology went mad. In this guest post, Amy explains the back story behind her involvement in psychology. and the Tavistock, and why we need more light shone on the changing nature of mental-health provision.

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How psychology went mad

The profession of psychiatry and psychotherapy is fundamentally concerned with an individual’s capacity to confront, manage and stay in contact with reality. We live in constant dialogue between external reality, our representations of the world and other people, and the internal experience of our thoughts and feelings. As a mental-health professional, it is my job to help those who, for various reasons, find difficulty with this dialogue in relation to their perceptions, behaviour or ability to function in life.

In 2020, to complete my psychotherapy training, I continued my studies at one of the UK’s most renowned (and now infamous) psychotherapy institutions: the Tavistock Centre in London. Already in the spotlight for its controversial Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), and subsequent lawsuits, the Tavistock entered 2020 marking its centenary year.

To celebrate this, the Trust publicised and promoted a lecture titled ‘Whiteness - a problem for our time’ - not your usual expression of celebration. This lecture, given by psychoanalyst Helen Morgan, was advertised as representing the Trust’s policy and ethos. But it seemed to me to be less like a lecture and more like a religious sermon.

Morgan uses rhetoric and dogma not dissimilar to that of a cult leader (except lacking the charm and charisma). As she dictated her puritanical brand of so-called ‘anti-racism’, any disagreement was met with accusations of defensiveness, racism, ‘white fragility’ and ‘white ignorance’. According to Morgan, all white people (even white children) are racists. She described how ‘whites are unable to understand the world’. and that ‘facing the implications of being white is not comfortable’.

Morgan’s negative generalisations about an entire group of people based on their skin colour are, of course, deeply racist. It was obvious to me that this needed to be contested, and it was rather surprising that no one else appeared to be doing so. I explained my position on the subject of racism as akin to the ‘colour-blind approach’, and that we must never make judgements or assumptions about people based on their skin colour. I was told that this approach was ‘discredited and outdated’. In what way it had been discredited, and with what evidence, she didn’t care to explain - they never do.

What followed from the expression of my initial concerns, I could never have predicted. I was put through several years of disciplinaries (which are ongoing), told I was ‘unsafe’, that I had ‘traumatised’ people, that I was unfit to work with ‘diverse patients’, prevented from finishing my clinical work and denied entry to a profession I had been working towards for most of my adult life.

How did we get here? For the average lay person, who may know very little about the psychiatric profession, it seems increasing obvious that the Tavistock has gone mad. My lawsuit against them is one of many. Most people look on and cannot fathom how the harms that were done to children and young adults like Keira Bell (a former patient who brought a lawsuit against the Tavistock) could possibly have happened.

Fortunately, I was able to explore these questions when I was given the opportunity to make a documentary on the subject with New Culture Forum. The documentary, titled Trans, Racist and Woke: how psychology went mad, is out now on YouTube. Starting with the origins of psychology and psychotherapy, the film explores the impact that political ideology has had on the profession. Featuring interviews with Claire Fox, Graham Linehan, Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, James Esses and Dr Valerie Thomas, it attempts to answer how we ended up with the decision to close the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Service.

We live in a society that claims to have more awareness of mental health than ever before. But it is not obvious to me that this ‘awareness’ - or perhaps fixation - with our moods and emotions is necessarily helping us. When ideology is added in to the mix, we need to be careful that psychology doesn’t make things worse.

Amy Gallagher is an English Literature graduate, nurse and psychotherapist who is currently involved in a legal battle with the NHS. She is also a writer, painter, documentary maker and a political commentator.