@Cwenthryth
Surely any public comment about someone else’s health/mental health - like calling someone MH-related slurs etc - is offensive objectively whoever does it, but becomes more inappropriate when done by a practicing doctor who has privileges and responsibilities around diagnosis? The tribunal tweets seemed to suggest that “offensive” would be a worse thing than “inappropriate” but surely that’s not the case in every instance.
The GMC are clear that, if you identify yourself as a doctor on SM, you are acting as a doctor. However, we use so many metaphors about the body and medicine in normal speech that this creates grey areas. If I tell someone on Twitter to go and boil their head, I’m clearly not giving them literal medical advice to do so.
In AH’s case, I expect he will argue that tweets like the ‘morning medication’ one as general metaphors that shouldn’t be given additional weight, just because he’s a doctor. If it were an isolated tweet, I think that would actually be a reasonable argument, which is why it’s so important that the GMC presents the tweets as a pattern of behaviour.