Also striking: the wisdom and insights of Dr David Bell:
"In 2018, Spiliadis was one of ten GIDS clinicians who in frustration and growing horror about what was happening to children knocked on the office door of Dr David Bell. [psychiatrist and staff governor]
From these anguished clinicians he learnt that GIDS under Polly Carmichael was ignoring everything the Tavistock espoused."
He knew that you had to dig beneath the surface and that for psychiatry, sexuality is a key part of an individual:
'But children were being pressured by families or schooled by activist groups in what to say to receive medication. “How do you get beneath the surface then?” '
"And here is a clinic that doesn’t talk about sexuality, only gender. It’s so peculiar.”
'He notes that the current GIDS chief executive, Paul Jenkins, is the first not to be a clinician. “Almost every time he spoke at a meeting he talked about patient involvement.” While Bell agrees that we must all be involved in our medical decisions, “At a certain point it corrodes – it becomes a vehicle for attacks on expertise. So if the child or the family say they want this, we affirm them, without any interest in knowing why they want it.” '
Fashions - crazes even - in medicine: [Court of Appeal, take note]
'He puts medically transitioning children alongside the early 20th-century craze for curing mental illness with lobotomies. “Like lobotomy, there is no evidence. Like lobotomy, it starts with a patient in an impossible state and, initially, seems to work, then it becomes the universal cure.” Bell argues that with mental (as opposed to physical) medicine, “The existence of a treatment creates the illness. Good centres for pneumonia wouldn’t create more pneumonia cases. Whereas with ‘false memory syndrome’, in the Nineties, suddenly you had lots of cases. It was the same when Freud wrote about hysteria.
“So I think we have a group who, at one time, would have been anorexic. A lot of them became self-harmers, had borderline personalities, and then became transgender. So they’re people dealing with similar kinds of problems, but they get refracted through the lens of what’s going on in the culture.” Would he recommend GIDS to a young person uncertain about their gender? “Definitely not.”
Bell does not believe a national child gender service should exist. “It doesn’t make sense. We don’t have a national service for people who are depressed. It’s illogical, because any problems with gender need to be seen in the context of all the other properties children have.”