Seriously damaged
Interesting.
Consultant psychiatrist Dr David Bell, who served as a staff governor at the Tavistock Trust, wrote an internal report in 2018, raising the concerns brought to him by colleagues about the way the Gender Identity Development Service was treating patients.
He faced disciplinary action.
But after 24 years working with the Tavistock, Dr Bell, a former President of the British Psychoanalytic Society, has recently retired, and in his first television interview since then, he began by outlining his worries about the service.
I must be missing something. How can you face disciplinary action for doing your job? It’s just Orwellian.
Rob, I was threatened with disciplinary action for teaching about the environmental impacts of agriculture in my environmental science class. It’s actually not unusual to face disciplinary action for doing your job if your job involves telling people what they don’t want to hear.
I guess I’m lucky. I’ve seen workplaces that were horrible, but all the people that I have worked for, and the workplace that I manage, have always encouraged honesty, facts and ethics. Always tell a client something they don’t want to hear as nicely as possible obviously, but hiding bad news is just counter-productive in the long term.
One of our competitors seems to take a different approach. It’s interesting because we’ve seen a sharp stratification in the market place as to which customers and other consulting professionals align with which.
I’d struggle working in an environment where I was afraid just to do my job well and properly.
Oh, I’ve been in trouble lots of times for doing what I believed to be my job. The problem was that my employers didn’t necessarily believe that’s what my job entailed.
They were wrong.
Oh great, the head was a psychoanalyst. Not a real psychologist or psychiatrist. If you’re still stuck in Freud’s late 19th century speculations, why would you bother about applying any rigor to evaluating your treatments and policies?