Dr Jessica Taylor New Book

[Seiheiki]

Hi,

Is anyone else going to the Birmingham book launch of Sexy But Psycho on Sunday night?

Quick Washable, I think the fact that you still engaged with the school made the difference. Jessica claimed she did none of year 11, worked in various pubs and hotels, and then turned up to sit the exams just to piss off the teachers. I did O levels, so accept things may be different now, but when I didn't have sufficient attendance for 2 subjects, I wasn't allowed to take them.. The Tahitian pearl story is just ridiculous.

[quote Labtest7]@dobedodo I did O levels and was not entered for 2 of my exams because of.poor attendance in those subjects. I also find that some great horror is always befalling her; someone pointed a gun at her in her own garden, she and wife had their drinks spiked, she had some terrible.illness a few years back that's never been mentioned since.....embellishing is really just a euphemism for lying. I also don't find anything she says novel or groundbreaking.[/quote]
Yeah, the gun pointed at her in her own garden, the drinks being spiked on holiday, some unspeakable trauma she and her wife witnessed while staying at a hotel in London for a conference, having a carcinoma removed from her cervix… it’s a lot.

I also don’t think she’s got many novel ideas. A lot of her work is highly derivative, but thanks to her love of the limelight, those ideas are reaching a wider audience of a different demographic beyond academia, and that’s very important.

Does anyone know her company’s name? I know it runs under victim focus but the only company I find on companies house “victimfocus ltd” is dormant.

BUT despite all I’ve said I still think she is raising some important issues. I have a close friend who is a clinical psychologists and whenever I’ve asked her what she thinks about something related to her field she just states “well the guidance says….” And even if I push for discussion she just doesn’t seem to think past what’s been told. Maybe that’s just my friend and I guess you don’t want clinical psychologists going off piste. But I have dozens of friends who’ve gone to their gp because they are anxious /sad and they all walk away after 1 appt with a prescription and no counselling. Some with the belief they have a chemical imbalance. I know it’s partly because of nhs resources but I think her raising the fact that we pathologise trauma response is so important. It’s definitely emboldened me to look at my issues differently. I don’t agree with her absolutes, some people are helped with medication but I’ve seen far more who’ve ended up in a worst state because of it.

Oh god is this another 'the state just puts them on tablets' merchant?

Medication saved me, it's the reason my son has a mother. I have neither the time nor the headspace to unravel all human suffering back to a historical route, unless genuine material difference can be made.

When you're feeling shit, you really really want to feel not shit. For many people, the way to achieve that is to take anti depressants.

I just thank god I wasn't born in my mother's generation and whacked out on valium. I function perfectly well on ssri tablets and it it's the 'easy option' then thank fuck because who wants a hard one.

Dobedodo if you look at her actual results that I attached, she has nowhere 13 and no As. I cannot understand the reasoning behind her lies as she has a PhD so what do gcses matter? When people can tell such petty lies I doubt everything they say.

I left a private forum last year because of a similar thread (as well as other issues), and left with a 'go well' message from the admin.

I do hope this thread doesn't go the same way. IMO if you've got an issue with someone, trashing them behind their back isn't the way to deal with it.

@Thelnebriati

I left a private forum last year because of a similar thread (as well as other issues), and left with a 'go well' message from the admin.

I do hope this thread doesn't go the same way. IMO if you've got an issue with someone, trashing them behind their back isn't the way to deal with it.

What a strange thing to say.

You can critique someone’s work without always having to let them know or involve them in the conversation.

If someone doesn’t like me or my work, I don’t expect them to run their opinions past me each time they express them.

OK. I'm not sure OP is getting the thread she expected.

A lot of counsellors become counsellors because they themselves need counselling.

I think that may apply here.

I think she's doing some really interesting and useful work.

I agree she can be absolutist but I think sometimes you need those people who are, to push the doors open on a debate.

I think she's 100% right that far too many women are given diagnosis when actually they're dealing with trauma. And this is something that really needs looking at.

I think she's wrong that this is happening ALL the time, I suspect she's suffering a bit from "if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

I think, as middle aged and older feminists (assuming some of you here are, like me) we need to recognise that she's only about 30, and must surely be suffering from a lot of trauma herself from the abuse she's on record as having been through. I'd like to support her in her growth and development, not tear her down.

It dismays me when I see people tearing her down with very personal attacks. (Not talking about those who are just disagreeing).

I don't think you need to agree with someone 100% to support them having a platform. She's reaching audiences the rest of us aren't, most of the time, raising awareness and asking some really important questions. And we should support her in that IMO.

@GlorianaCervixia

The idea she often promotes that psychiatry hasn’t been questioned or that that psychiatrists in general aren’t alive to issues of sex, class and power is very strange to me. It’s not my experience at all, especially as so many more women have entered the profession.

I’m not denying at all that there are bad psychiatrists who provide poor care or that psychiatry shouldn’t be subject to scrutiny. I just think she says so many things that are demonstrably false that it undermines her credibility for me.

I've not read the book yet, but from what I've gathered from social media, isn't she attacking psychiatry itself? Saying that the whole method of diagnosis is suspect, that many of conditions are historical and cultural. It's misogynist as we live in a misogynist society.

So it wouldn't matter if indiviudaul psychiatrists in general are "alive to issues of sex, class and power" if they're working withing a diagnostic framework that was misognynist?

As I said though, I've not read the book. I've ordered it but it's not arrived yet.

Has anyone here read it and can shine some light?

Nope. She's coming across as a bit of a dick tbh. She is always making grand statements regarding MH issues, that show no actual understanding of MH issues or neuroscience. Sure there are historical issues with how women were treated and that those ideas are ingrained into how we treat women in medicine.

She said that because there's no physical test for MH issues, then it doesn't exist, a people shouldn't be medicated for it. She said something along the lines of because there's no blood test, or brain scan that shows MH issues, how can Dr's prescribe medication? She says that Dr's don't know how, if or why antidepressants work, and therefore should stop prescribing them. And we need to stop accepting them, and need to start questioning them.

There were lots of people agreeing with her, that "big pharma™️" wants us all medicated, that we just need to change our diets, and exercise more. That Dr's are poisoning us, lots of conspiracy bullshit posts.

But then there were people vehemently disagreeing with her, asking if ASD ADHD or fibromyalgia are real because there's no bloodtest or scan that shows those conditions. She came across as ableist as hell, in my opinion, dismissing and minimising my MH issues, and ADHD.

I thought she was good initially but I am completely off her now. She has no clinical experience or training so what she is spouting on Twitter is dangerous nonsense and because she is not clinical she cannot be properly censored by a professional regulator for it, instead of using it for self promotion or whatever psychodrama is playing out in public.

It is sad because if she had gone into a clinical training and done the hard work she could have slogged away doing plenty of hard work with women who certainly need it, whether in NHS or VAWAG third sector services as well as perhaps doing her own personal therapy that I would say she could benefit from s well - she has had a lot of traumatic experiences embellished or not, and I suspect that she is unraveling with the success and the lack of any supportive structure around her e.g. a young adoring wife mirroring and reflecting her success back at her isn’t giving her many strong boundaries back, which a robust workplace would, which is worrying when they work in partnership and so very publicly.

I am going to mute her because I am at the point I no longer can regard her as a helpful feminist figure and I don’t think that is because she is attacking my profession- have sat on that for a while as I work through it in my head rather than just muting her out of pique. I think she is unable to do any nuance about how her perspective is harming women too.

Psychiatry like most of medicine has a very murky and misogynistic past, and it remains ambivalent at best towards women, but not all of this is down to psychiatry per se. A lot is down to a very broken, understaffed and underfunded system from primary care up that cannot offer much beyond a prescription for antidepressants. I see nothing in JT’s messaging to address this so far?

Well, the anti psychiatry movement is not a new thing.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry

I find a lot of what she's saying interesting. It's a chance to question much of what is accepted, shake things up, look from a completely new angle.

And tbh given the utterly risible to non-existent state of mental health care in this country, I think we need a shake up, alright.

Here's a study on antidepressants and placebo effect:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/

This was all quite big news at the time, several years ago now. Various other similar trials linked to in the sidebar, too.

Are women over-medicated due to trauma - yes

But does that mean all women on medication for non-tangible conditions are "simply" traumatised - no.

Sounds a bit too much like "you should try aloe" to me, very ableist. And there are aspects of the business that come across as a bit too pyramid-sales to me:
"Pay me and i'll train you in this thing I've (largely) made up, then you can charge others to train them" etc

I too am someone who read her previous book with interest but after peculiar behaviour on social media now have come to question her ability to be truthful.

This instance was her claiming to work with lots of victims of satanic abuse, and when other (some male) experts asked her to prove her claims as in their view satanic abuse is a load of nonsense, she then pulled the 'you're all women haters for questioning me'.

She then doubled down, accused them of being misogynists and offered zero evidence to back up her claims. It was quite jaw dropping, and I unfollowed her and now am left questioning her truthfulness in general.

@GlorianaCervixia

I’ve been wondering for a while how much clinical experience she actually has. I think she got her PhD only two or three years ago?

Her statements recently about medications have really concerned me. She doesn’t listen to doctors who tell her she’s mistaken but she also doesn’t listen to women telling her that medications made huge positive changes in their lives. She seems so heavily invested in her view that all mental health issues come from trauma that she can’t listen to other people’s experiences. I find her view of medications disappointing and quite stigmatising.

I’ve worked for a long time in mental health and I have been surprised by some of the very broad claims she makes about how psychiatry, medications and diagnosis work. I unfollowed her a while ago.

I think she’s very, very good at creating a brand for herself and promoting that brand. I’m less convinced about the substance behind it.

This! I actually unfollowed her yesterday. Medication saved my life and I actually got quite angry and upset reading her posts!

The non-existent state of mental health in this country is not the fault of psychiatrists or mental health workers here though, it reflects the historic underfunding of mental health as a service in the NHS throughout its history which has sped up and worsened immensely since 2010.

When austerity came in the NHS was expected to make ‘efficiency’ savings (cuts to services including essential services) of 4% every year. Mental health trusts were asked to make 8% efficiency savings from 2010 on.

So for the past decade all the good things we managed to build up in the New Labour investment years like counselling and personality disorder services that were maybe a fraction of what were needed in some areas of the country where we had passionate staff who used the investment and the staff training budgets wisely - yep, all cut. Gone. Gutted. They were seen as the fat to be trimmed because what do you trim when you have to keep the inpatient units and beds for the the patients who are psychotically ill suicidal and manic and demented and detained under the mental health act, and let’s face it, too many of those got cut in scandalously outrageous numbers that too few people outside of the families and carers really care about because it’s not really talked about.

During all this, recruiting staff, good staff has been horrendous, but yet still somehow still we do manage to get some along with just enough to keep thing afloat.

It is making me feel like a clenched fist to write even some of this miserable reality down - and I am completely aware of my great privilege to work as a psychiatrist and to spend my life in this work. I don’t bear a fraction of what my patients and families do, so to see JT sneer at services or treatments when she has no idea of any of the reality of frontline mental health work when she is using it as an opportunity to make an easy buck, rather than to use her talents to sit in a room with a patient, or to work patiently with a group of commissioners for months and years to actually bring about services for women in reality…

Sorry, my blood sugar may be a little low!

The gun thing was bonkers, to put it mildly.
She’s a very skilled self publicist and has created a very successful business, no doubt about that.

Certainly a very ‘eventful’ few years, didn’t seem to have all this the drama when she was Jess Eaton.

She definitely doesn’t listen to people with a different opinion.

@Carryonmarion

I am glad to see that she is getting success and recognition and would go to the event if I lived nearer. No one is 100% right about everything, even clinical psychologists with years of experience. I know because I have worked with them for over 20 years. In the field of psychology it is important to engage in debate and listen to lots of opinions and voices, so long as those opinions are backed up by evidence. There are way few too people like Jessica with lived experience, as well as qualifications getting their voices heard in the field and influencing policy, in particular working class women who always need to shout twice as loud. I do approach her work from a critical perspective (as I would do the work of others in the field) but welcome diversity. Also I respect the fact that she has bypassed the toxic academic publishing route and made her research accessible and open to criticism from those who are not able to access research hidden behind an academic publisher's paywall.

I agree with all of this. I couldn't put it as well as that - was struggling to get the words in the right order, so didn't post my essay!