Category: ‘False Memory Syndrome’

"The Psychologist", 'False Memory Syndrome', Academic freedom and censorship, Identity Politics

More hubris in the BPS: on being the ‘Head of Science Communication’

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David Pilgrim posts:

Recently BPS members may have noticed that the role of editor of The Psychologist has been extended to that of being ‘Head of Science Communication’. This announcement sets many hares running. I have been a psychologist for forty years and have two higher degrees in the subject. I still could not give a coherent account of what the discipline is, which does not reflect my stupidity but my warranted caution. If psychology is a science, then how is it to be defined by those running the BPS? Occasionally it is confessed that the Society is a ‘broad church’. That is a fair starting point, but I think its flock, whether they are BPS members or outsiders, may reasonably want to hear more. What they actually get (if the content of The Psychologist is anything to go by) is a strange brew of scientism and virtue signalling. 

For example, this month (May 2025) the cover’s headline is Educate your sons (as a small blessing, we were spared today’s breathless exclamation mark). The sub-heading tells us that Jayne Meyrick will be discussing ‘gender-based stereotypes, attitudes, violence and more’. Fair enough, but why the prescriptive headline instead of the valid sub-heading not sufficing more modestly? Should any branch of human science (spoiler alert here, Psychology is not the only game in town) be so crassly preachy? Surely the values involved in parenting are not the possession of Psychology, or any other discipline. For those of us old enough to remember, we know that it is inconceivable that the predecessor of The Psychologist (the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society) would have presented such a moralistic prescription. Its possibility today emerged from a cultural context in which EDI priorities overlay most professional discourse, with identity politics, for now at least, shaping the academic agenda (Pilgrim, 2022).  Psychology with a capital P reflects its fluxing historical context (Richards, 2009) and the context we are in today is authoritarian and sanctimonious. A contempt for academic freedom, virtue signalling and Salem-style speech policing are de rigueur.

If Psychology is a moral science, which arguably it is, then its authority needs to be defended in principle, and in convincing detail, before any of us is subjected to its definitive strictures (more on this below).  This would require a metaphysical exercise to clarify basic assumptions about ontology, epistemology and ethics and how they articulate – see Brinkmann (2011).  In The Psychologist, that required exercise is ignored in favour of moral grandstanding to favour the discipline’s preferred worthy squeaky-clean image. 

Heavy is the head that bears the crown

In the midst of all of this unexplained froth about the BPS being a ‘broad church’ the task of being a communicator of science is unenviable and inevitably challenging.  However, leaders in the discipline seem unfazed by the prospect and Jon Sutton now looks forward to his authoritative role. He can join forces with his colleague with the formerly designated Orwellian title of ‘Director of  Knowledge and Insight’, now rebranded with the equally grandiose title, ‘Director of Research, Education and Practice’. The challenge for these BPS leaders is to find ways of communicating about ‘psychological science’. In the generous tradition of George Miller (1969), they might still opt to ‘give psychology away’, as if the Society is sitting on a scarce and rich body of accumulated knowledge to be shared noblesse oblige.

Miller is a key figure within the liberal wing of Anglo-American psychology and is credited with being a founder of cognitive psychology. At once this was an epistemological game changer as it displaced behaviourism, which in its salad days had allegedly dispatched psychoanalysis forever though it, of course, failed. And, as Miller’s collaborations with others was to prove, maybe philosophy, the scourge of the discipline of Psychology at the turn of the 20th century, still could pack a punch about matters psychological, as his colleague Noam Chomsky was to prove. 

So, what exactly is the big deal about the confused and confusing discipline of Psychology? After all and without looking too far we find a few other contenders offering serious insights into the human condition. Apart from philosophers, we might add topflight historians, economists, anthropologists, neurologists, psychiatrists and last, but not least, novelists. The last one is counter intuitive. However, a skilled fiction writer can explore our interiority and the subtleties of our interpersonal relationships, within a cultural and economic context of a particular time and place. That complexity rarely (if ever) appears in psychology textbooks read by undergraduates. I certainly have learnt more from good novelists than the bank of psychology books on my groaning shelves.

Then beyond behaviourism and the ‘cognitive revolution’ during the 1980s and 90s we endured radical social constructivism and the postmodernist’s Nietzschean disdain for facts. This upended positivism, and its adoration of the psychological laboratory inherited from the 19th century, alongside a eugenic actuarial approach to personality and intelligence. Followers of the competing trends probably sat together in the corridors of academic psychology departments in a state of mutual bemusement. This ‘psychological science’ stuff was becoming a complex mixture of historically layered bids for epistemological legitimacy. 

In that context, what exactly will Jon Sutton be communicating about? Will it be all these epistemological layers, or just this year’s model of disparate pieces being promoted by The Psychologist? To be fair that dilemma must also face the producers of All In The Mind, which seems to have a hotline to the BPS for advice, occasionally hosting guests to demonstrate the most recent breakthrough in psychological knowledge. Apparently, all is well then in the state of Leicester (unless, like the one in London, the office might be about to close). Until then the BPS might be thought of as the repository of the wisdom previously enjoyed by psychiatry and applied philosophy. The competitors have been seen off and ‘communicating science’ thus reinforces and celebrates that triumph. But behind the rosy picture, confusion and uncertainty reign.

Back to the strange brew

To make sense of this considerable challenge for Jon Sutton, we can return to the ‘giving psychology away’ trope of Miller. Given the sub-title of his seminal text Psychology: The Science of Mental Life (Miller, 19991), what exactly is that science being given away, and might many outside of Psychology reasonably claim some legitimate authority about ‘mental life’?  

In 2015 the Division of Academics, Researchers and Teachers in Psychology (DART-P), hosted a symposium at the BPS Annual Conference. The aim was:

…to explore current thinking, developments and practice within contemporary psychology education, with a view to stimulating critical discussion and reflection on psychological literacy and its delivery within both pre-tertiary and higher education contexts. Ultimately, the symposium, and this article are intended to facilitate exploration of the opportunities provided by psychology education, at all levels, to develop students as psychologically literate citizens. (Hulme et al., (2015) emphasis added).

The paper by Hulme et al. drew upon Miller but also the work of McGovern et al. (2010), who offered a definition of ‘psychological literacy’. It listed the skills expected of a psychology graduate:

• vocabulary and knowledge of the critical subject matter of psychology; 

• scientific thinking, disciplined analysis of information to evaluate alternative courses of action; 

• creative and ‘amiable sceptic’ approach to problem solving; 

• applying psychological principles to personal, social and organisational issues in work, relationships and the broader community; 

• acting ethically 

• competent in using and evaluating information and technology; 

• communicating effectively in different modes and with many different audiences; 

• recognising, understanding and fostering respect for diversity; 

• insightful and reflective about one’s own and others’ behaviour and mental processes 

Hulme et al. proceed though with a key insight relevant to Jon Sutton’s challenge today:

‘…the specific subject content that is to be learned by psychology students becoming psychologically literate is not defined in McGovern’s account.  Instead, the emphasis is on learning enough psychology to be able to think critically, solve problems, and apply knowledge of psychology to become an effective scientist and citizen. To a large extent, McGovern here encapsulates the way in which psychology education facilitates students’ enculturation into the discipline….., and supports them in learning to ‘think like’ a psychologist….Psychological literacy is also perceived in McGovern’s  account as facilitating self-awareness and understanding in a social context. The underpinning knowledge and skills that constitute psychology are thus much wider than its academic ‘ingredients’ might suggest.  Trapp et al. (2011) designated psychology as a STEM + subject, arguing that it fosters all of the skills that might be expected of a typical science graduate, alongside communication and interpersonal skills more typical of social sciences or humanities…’ [emphasis added].

The first sentence points up the challenge of content I raised earlier – what precisely is the psychological science that is to be communicated? The laudable cognitive skills emphasised by the authors would, as they say, be important for any critically competent graduate in science but also, as they note by the end, of any graduate in the social sciences and humanities. Maybe Psychology has no mandate to claim a particular legitimacy to understand human experience and conduct. Understanding human activity and experience in its social context has been examined with some success by anthropology and sociology (the clue is in their names). When it comes to content (the elephant in the room avoided by McGovern et al.) the list of cognate disciplines I made earlier would supply the very same material. 

Maybe this coyness on the part of psychologists to define their authority over the content of their work, substituting instead a generic scientific skill set, is because they know that in truth their discipline is so hopelessly contested in terms of its theory and practice. Moreover, by focusing on the study of individual human functioning, in relation to conduct, interiority and small group interactions, they simply cannot compete with those disciplines in the social sciences and humanities offering a wider lens and a longer view.  

Surely the inherent individualism of psychology operates against a desirable outcome of comprehensive context-dependent understandings of human life. This is at its most obvious in the hubris of experimental psychologists, who privilege ‘psychological literacy’ of their own preferred type. They lament the incompetence of ordinary people to reason psychologically in their daily lives. 

A good example here is the role of experimentalists supporting the false memory movement, who disparage the reasoning of judges and juries and offer them condescending advice (French, 2018; Conway, 2011). By contrast, those recognising the implications of experiments producing closed system findings, which have poor ecological validity, have warned us quite rightly that Psychology struggles constantly to justify itself as an empirical science (Uher, 2021; Smedslund, 2016; Adolph, 2019). A symptom of the undeclared pre-Popperian legacy of naïve realism is that the BPS has been proud and unreflective about aligning its policy on memory and law with the false memory movement and its supportive experimentalists (Conway and Pilgrim, 2023). They have a narrow focus on one form of false positive, when human memory is frail across all social contexts in open systems. For example, when validly accused men who rape women and children deny their guilt, do they have a false memory? Have the experimentalists in the false memory movement ever written a book called ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ (cf. Loftus and Ketcham, 1991)?  

Trying to define psychological science is like trying to grasp fog or catch the wind. What the content is about in practice reflects layers of knowledge present since the end of the 19th century and contemporary normativity. However, reflecting a residual confidence in empiricism and positivism Hulme et al. (ibid) let slip the fetish of ‘presentism’ common in academic Psychology. That is, what has become known recently is good but what is old is inferior. They complain that A level students still learn too much about historical figures in the discipline and not enough is taught to them of findings and theories from recent decades. 

That lament reflects an unexamined assumption (or ‘doxa’) which is that ‘psychological science’ proceeds through time in an aggregating and constantly improving manner. This presumption about scientific incrementalism is pre-Popperian in its outlook. It might also explain why the history and philosophy of psychology is still taught so poorly in higher education, reflected in the very precarious survival of the History and Philosophy Section of the BPS. If A level psychology students are indeed still being fed too much information about history, then ironically that might be their only chance to see the light about a contested discipline. For example, the fetish of behavioural statistics is rooted in the empiricist Humean assumption about the causal relevance of ‘constant conjunctions’ (the correlation between two variables with the rest of reality controlled out). The limitations of that closed system thinking still haunt Psychology. 

Insights after the Popperian watershed

Before Popper’s critical rationalism displaced positivism in the philosophy of science, there was the assumption that covering laws would be discovered, which would be applicable to all times and places. The chances of this being true were high in closed systems. For example, in physics or chemistry and even in some branches of neuroscience today, context-independent findings might align with this expectation (cf. Tortorello, 2015). Also, where psychological knowledge is being applied in closed systems it might have legitimate utility. Ergonomics and attention span in pilots could be examples.  However, what all applied psychologists who work with clients from a range of biographical contexts know, is that complexity and unique circumstances require careful exploration. The imposition of forms of prepared knowledge to allcomers is unwise. 

In open systems, laboratory findings are of dubious utility leaving us at best with trends or demi-regularities and at worst with evident unpredictability in human conduct. All human activity is part of an open, not closed, system. Thus, as well as Popper’s focus on science as a social activity and his replacement of verification with falsifiability, the appearance of general systems theory in the mid-20th century advised us about the central importance of context-dependent reasoning (Bateson, 1972). 

To reinforce this point, critical realists have noted that any comprehensive human science should be sensitive to complexity and layers of reality (Pilgrim, 2020). Bhaskar (2016) offered us his four planar social being framework to this end. The first plane is our material rootedness in nature (which we emerged from and return to).  The second plane of reality is that we exist within our relationships to others from conception to grave (we are an interdependent and hierarchical species). The third plane of reality is the supra-personal socio-economic context we are thrown into at birth, which then fluxes during our lifetime. It matters whether we are thrown into a war zone or a tent of plenty, whether we are poor or rich, whether we are born male or female etc.  The fourth plane is our uniquely structured personality arising from the other planes (we have a ‘concrete singularity’). 

My view is that this critical realist framework requires human conduct and experience to be studied with a variety of methodologies and by a range of disciplines, which I listed earlier. Psychology will not only fail if it tries to colonise that inter-disciplinary challenge because it is not competent to deliver a full understanding of our four planar laminated existence but it will also lack insight into its own incompetence. 

Take the example of my complaint that The Psychologist mixes virtue signalling and scientism. That contradiction has arisen in the social context of the growth of identity politics and the self-righteous policing of speech. Being ‘psychologically literate’ might offer some contribution to understanding it, for example, in relation to binary cognitions and thinking too quickly rather than reflectively about complexity. However, those frailties also arose from the growth of a new form of authoritarianism, which encourages a form of witch-finding both on the right and left of politics. Neoliberalism and the failure of Marxist-Leninism have afforded that context of emergence for identity politics. They have fed the EDI industry at the turn of this century, leaving structural power discrepancies unscathed. 

A proper reflective exploration of this complexity is not the particular forte of Psychology but requires epistemic humility, when conversing with those from other disciplines. Without that conversation, leaders in the BPS and the content of The Psychologist will probably keep producing its strange brew of scientism and virtue signalling.  Accordingly, they will lack an understanding of their own context of theory and practice, bearing in mind that hubris often precedes nemesis.  What chance a sophisticated ‘communication of science’ in this blinkered world? Moreover, Jon Sutton has his work cut out for a pressing contextual reason: his paymasters are skating on thinning ice, as we have demonstrated repeatedly on this blog.

References

Adolph, K. E. (2019).  Ecological validity: mistaking the lab for real life. In R. Sternberg (Ed.) My Biggest Research Mistake: Adventures and Misadventures in Psychological Research pp 187–190. Sage.

Bateson, G.  (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind.  Chandler.

Bhaskar, R. (2016). Enlightened common sense: The philosophy of critical realism Routledge.

Brinkmann, S. (2011).  Psychology as a moral science: perspectives on normativity  Springer.

Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2022). The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 23(2):165-176

Conway, M.(2012). Ten things the law and others should know about human memory. In L. Nadel and W.P. Sinnott-Armstrong (Eds.). Memory and law : Oxford University Press.

French, C. (2018). Reaching ‘Brenda from the chip shop’: scientific literacy. The Psychologist March, 45.

Hulme, J, Skinner, R., Worsnop, F., Collins, E., Banyard, P., Kitching, H., Watt, R. and Goodson, S. (2015). Psychological literacy: A multifaceted perspective. Psychology Teaching Review 12, 2, 13-24.

Loftus, E. and Ketcham, K. (1991). Witness for the defense. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 

McGovern, T. V., Corey, L., Cranney, J., Dixon, W. E., Jr., Holmes, J. D., Kuebli, J. E., Ritchey, K. A., Smith, R. A., & Walker, S. J. (2010). Psychologically literate citizens. In D. F. Halpern (Ed.), Undergraduate education in psychology: A blueprint for the future of the discipline (pp. 9–27). American Psychological Association.

Miller, G. (1991). Psychology: The science of mental life  Penguin.

Miller, G. (1969).  Psychology as a means of promoting human welfare. American Psychologist, 24(12), 1063–1075. doi:10.1037/h0028988 

Pilgrim, D. (Ed.) (2023). British Psychology in Crisis  Phoenix Books.

Pilgrim, D. (2022). Identity Politics: Where Did It All Go Wrong?  Phoenix Books.

Pilgrim, D. (2020). Critical Realism for Psychologists  Routledge.

Richards, G. (2009). Putting psychology in its place: Critical historical perspectives. Routledge.

Smedslund, J. (2016). Why psychology cannot be an empirical science. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 50, 2, 185-95. 

Tortorello, F. (2017). What is real about reductive neuroscience? Journal of Critical Realism 16 (3):235-254.

Trapp A., Banister P., Ellis J., Latto R., Miell D and Upton D. (2011). The future of undergraduate psychology in the United Kingdom. Higher Education Academy Psychology Network, https://groups.psychology.org.au/Assets/Files/Future%20UG%20UK.pdf

Uher, J. (2021). Psychology’s status as a science. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 55, 212-224

"The Psychologist", 'False Memory Syndrome', Academic freedom and censorship, Board of Trustees, Gender, Identity Politics, Memory and the Law Group

CASS, COLUMBO AND THE BPS

AdminBPSWatch

 

David Pilgrim posts….

When BPSWatch.com began we were like the dishevelled TV cop Columbo. An early mistake we made was to look to those responsible for the corruption and dysfunction in the BPS to clear up their own mess. Basically, we were too trusting of the personal integrity of the powers that be and the Society’s complaints policy. Quickly we discovered that those in charge ran a very well-oiled bullshit generator (Pilgrim, 2023a and https://bpswatch.com/2021/10/31/the-abuse-of-history-and-the-bps-bullshit-generator/). Letters were not answered, the complaints process was broken, critiques were censored, prompts about ignored emails were ignored further. Too many nudges from us led to claims of harassment followed by threats of disciplinary and legal action.  We moved to making sense of the public policy implications of a culture of deceit and mendacity, with a cabal running the show totally lacking transparency about governance. Soon two child protection matters came into particular focus. 

The first related to the distortions created by the policy of the BPS on memory and the law [see here, here and here], which has been captured by experimentalists concerned singularly with false positive risks and so-called false memories. This narrow consideration has wilfully excluded the wider research evidence about childhood sexual abuse and its underreporting (Cutajar et al 2010). It diverts us from the needed consideration of false negatives, the epidemiological iceberg and needed justice for the victims of both historical child abuse and more recent sexual crimes against adults. The clue about this bias was that those capturing the policy, who were hand in glove with the British False Memory Society (now defunct), such as the late Martin Conway, recipient of the BPS lifetime achievement award and eulogised here (https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/martin-conway-1952-2022) (Conway and Pilgrim, 2022).  

The second child protection scandal, we have examined is that of the complicit role of the BPS leadership in the psychology-led GIDS at the Tavistock Clinic (now closed).  The recent Cass Review has evoked raw feelings in backlash. Hilary Cass, a respectable and, until recently little known, academic paediatrician has, after publishing that Review, been advised by the police not to travel on public transport. Sadly, Cass now competes only with J.K. Rowling as the woman who transgender activists are most likely to disparage and threaten. The past and current stance of the BPS to this iatrogenic scandal, with psychologists at its centre, is thus of public interest.

The FtM (Female-to-Male) activist Professor Stephen Whittle haughtily described the Cass Review in The Guardian as having the ‘fingerprints of transphobia all over it’. This casual contempt (note from an alleged academic) for serious analysis has been common in highly educated circles from transgender activists and their allies. Because they have previously been riding high, with virtue-signalling organisational leaders obediently cheering them along, they have held a simple line: any criticism always comes from those who are merely reactionary and ‘transphobic’. ‘If you are not for us then you are against us’ is the hasty immature cognitive binary of most forms of identity politics and the sex/gender debate brings this point out graphically (Dutton, 2022). Except, of course, that a cornerstone of transgender activism is that there is to be ‘no debate’.

The term ‘transphobic’ is applied knee-jerk fashion to all gender critics now organised across a range of disparate feminist, religious and scientific groupings in Britain. By pre-empting debate, transgender activists have de-skilled themselves. Why bother with logic or evidence when the truth is already known about ‘gender identity’? Why bother with complex deliberations about competing human rights when there is only one ethical imperative of ‘trans liberation’?  Why bother appealing to the facts of life when arbitrary self-identification trumps everything? This de-skilling has left transgender activists floundering once their name calling runs out. ‘You are all transphobes!’ would make a very short journal submission or exam answer, as would the more threatening ‘Kill a TERF!’. It could, though, reference the cultish leader Judith Butler who has had a lot to say, even if it is largely unintelligible (Butler, 1999). 

For any naïve but honest person oblivious to newer expectations of language-policing, this is a confusing topic. Terms like ‘cis’, ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ are bemusing to anyone not under the sway of the postmodern turn and, in its wake, the severing of the link between material reality and the indexical role of language. Noam Chomsky has returned repeatedly to refer to the ‘gibberish’ and wilful obscurantism of postmodernist texts (Chomsky, 2018). They are full of word salads and at their most mystifying in Queer Theory and in some versions of third wave feminism, with Butler leading the charge. Concurring with Chomsky, Martha Nussbaum confirmed that she (Butler) deliberately obfuscates (Nussbaum, 1999). Given that intellectual giants like Chomsky and Nussbaum cannot understand what Butler is getting at, sentence by sentence, then what chance for mere mortals?  

A naïve but honest person is ‘transphobic’ if they describe a man in a dress as…. a man in a dress. A naïve but honest person is ‘transphobic’ if they simply want to ask, ‘what is a woman’ (i.e. there is to be ‘no debate’) (Andrews, 2021; cf.Stock, 2021). A naïve but honest person is ‘transphobic’ if they expect adult human females to have their own places to undress, go to the toilet or be protected from a predator revelling in being ‘a woman with a penis’. A naïve but honest person cannot grasp the notion of a ‘translesbian’ and most real lesbians are unimpressed by a con man in their midst. A naïve but honest person, on very good grounds, does not believe that a man can give birth to a baby. The list goes on.

For those offering a more knowing critique to defend common sense about sex, careers have been wounded, sometimes fatally. From Kathleen Stock to Graham Linehan, and from Maya Forstater to Rachel Meade, the consequences have been clear. ‘Better to agree with the transgender activist bullies than hold them to account’ or, even more modestly, ‘just do not disagree with them’. This seems to have been the stance taken by most managers and professional leaders across British culture in the past decade. Cass, however, in her report, has set many hares running about the justice and sanity of this collusion with transgender activism. 

The recent cheerleaders (i.e., opportunistic trans-captured managers and the ‘be kind’ politicians of all hues) are reflecting on their crowd-pleasing errors and some are deleting their old tweets. U-turns have been forced, such as that from Wes Streeting MP, on the Parliamentary Labour Party. Some NHS CEOs are now eating humble pie. Those denying Cass information about follow up data on biomedically transitioned young people have been forced to release the information, raising the question about what they were covering up in the first place.  

In recent weeks, puberty blockers have been decommissioned in the NHS first in England, but with Scotland and Wales quickly following suit. The government have announced that the distortions of language in NHS policy documents (‘cervix havers’, ‘chest feeders’, ‘peri-natal care’ etc.) will cease, not only because they have denied the biological reality of being a woman (or a man), but because it makes no clear functional sense in medical records, risk assessment, data collection or research. How many MtF (Male-to-Female) transsexuals do any of us know who have died from ovarian cancer or FtM transsexuals from prostate cancer?  (Send your answer on a blank postcard.)  

Women, not men, have babies and FtM transsexuals special pleading for ‘perinatal care’ are still women, even if they resent their natal bodies. However, now they make demands for sensitive and immediately available medical interventions to protect them from the iatrogenic risks created from the hormonal regimes that, note, they had previously demanded and received. These points about biological reality return recurrently because that reality cannot be talked out of existence using a postmodern fog of words (Dahlen, 2021; cf. Pfeffer et al, 2023). Sex is immutable, can be detected in utero and is then recorded at birth. It is not ‘assigned’. That fact of life about our conception is as certain as our death. Sometimes variations of sexual development are invoked in the justificatory rhetoric of transgender trans-gender activism, but this is a red herring. Sexual dimorphism is a mammalian feature in 99.99% of offspring and even in the rest, genetic determinism still obtains.

For those of us who have never voted Conservative, we are relieved that the current health minister, Victoria Atkins can ‘state the bloody obvious’, in sympathy with any other sensible people in society who has not been captured by this ideology. They know in good faith that a woman is an adult human female, a man is an adult human male and public, private and third sector organisations have all been in the thrall of a sort of collective madness for too long. So, amid this political disruption triggered by Cass, where does this leave the BPS and its leadership? Back to Columbo.

Lessons from Crime and Punishment

The writers of Columbo took their inspiration from Dostoevsky and his tale of ‘ideological madness’, which triggered and justified homicidal violence. In Crime and Punishment at first the detective Porfiry Petrovich feels his way into the circumstances of the murder committed by Rodion Raskolnikov. Soon Porfiry knows exactly who the culprit is, but he bides his time. A central theme at this point in the book is not ‘who dunnit?’ but ‘when will they confess?’

The analogy between Porfiry and BPSWatch.com works so far but the two scenarios are different for the following reasons. First, BPSWatch has not been preoccupied with a murder, but with organisational misdeeds and policy advice, which have put children at risk. Second, we are concerned to bring many more than one perpetrator to book. Third, we can only speculate about their inner worlds. Raskolnikov struggles throughout the plot with angst and guilt about his crime. To date there has been little evidence of contrition from the BPS leaders in relation to their responsibility for the corruption and dysfunction we have elaborated on this blog. Ipso facto the BPS bullshit machine does not have a ‘confession’ button on its control panel. What we see at the top is not guilt, shame or contrition but apparently la belle indifference.

Applying the analogy and its caveats to the post-Cass scenario, who would we place in the dock? There has been a spectrum of intent, culpability and complicity. In the vanguard have been nameable transgender ideology activists who have captured the policy apparatus. This is evidenced by the public statements of the two most recent chairs of the BPS Sexualities Section, newly renamed the Section of Gender Sexuality and Relationship Diversity (GSRD). The rights of lesbian women like those of all women are pushed aside in the pursuit of (MtF) trans rights. Just as with Stonewall this BPS Section has virtually abandoned a focus on same sex attraction. Now the obsession is with ‘gender identity’ not sexuality.

Adam Jowett, former chair of the erstwhile Sexualities Section of the BPS moved on and up in the cabal by becoming a member of the ill-constituted Board of Trustees. BPSWatch has long noted the lack of independence and blatant conflict of interest inherent in the structure of the BPS’s governing body (https://bpswatch.com/2023/12/03/evil-secrets-and-good-intentions-in-the-bps/). Jowett moved to attend to the history of British psychology, now viewed through the anachronistic lens of current LGBTQ+ campaigning. With colleagues he has been influential offering research to the British government about ‘conversion therapy’. The outcome though has been lacklustre. For example, we find this statement from the Jowett et al research in 2021:

“The UK government has committed to exploring legislative and non-legislative options for ending so-called “conversion therapy”. In this report the term “conversion therapy” is used to refer to any efforts to change, modify or suppress a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity regardless of whether it takes place in a healthcare, religious or other setting.”.

However, the problem for the report writers was the lack of evidence to support their search for transphobic therapists or conversion practices, as they acknowledge here:

“ There is no representative data on the number of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people who have undergone conversion therapy in the UK. However, some evidence appears to suggest that transgender people may be more likely to be offered or receive conversion therapy than cisgender lesbian, gay or bisexual people. There is consistent evidence that exposure to conversion therapy is associated with having certain conservative religious beliefs.” (See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/conversion-therapy-an-evidence-assessment-and-qualitative-study)

The research then could find no solid evidence that conversion therapy was prevalent in mainstream mental health practice and a weak speculation is left (mainly from a US not British cultural context) that ‘reparative therapy’ in religious therapy exists. Jowett et al are fighting a battle about aversion therapy in the 1970s (won by gay activists) and eliding it with the threat of exploratory psychological therapy with children today, which is a recurring tactic of transgender activists (Pilgrim, 2023b). 

That tactic has been replayed in the BPS by Jowett’s successor Rob Agnew, who describes him as:  “lead author of one of the most important pieces of LGBTQ+ research in the last 50 years” https://www.linkedin.com/posts/drrobagnew_british-psychologists-at-pride-2023-joining-activity-7056511344367296512-Cmyg/). Agnew is openly and stridently a transgender activist on social media and in pieces published in The Psychologist. A favourite pastime is his calling his colleagues “bigots” and attacking psychoanalysis. The links to individual statements below are easily found on his LinkedIn profile where he is “Chair of Section of Psychology of Gender, Sexuality and Relationship Diversity, British Psychological Society”. Although there is the disclaimer “(opinions my own unless otherwise stated)“, his legitimacy as a BPS leader is foregrounded. This specially conferred legitimacy is obvious, and reflected in the confidence and certainty with which he speaks. Here are some samples of his reaction to the Cass Report on social media: 

“Bad news for our trans youth this morning, but let’s be honest, we knew it was coming.” 

“Why was Cass unable to find the research needed to provide trans youth with vital medical approaches that other countries found?” 

“Here are some facts for you: Puberty blockers are not experiemental (sic), we have decades of research on their effects. They are safe. They are reversible. There is some evidence of minor enduring differences after cessation however these costs are vastly outweighed by the immediate benefits to the child/young person.”

Agnew reifies the existence of “trans kids” as a self-evident fact (cf. Brunskell-Evans and Moore, 2018). His “affirmation only” approach precludes psychological exploration (note he is a psychologist). Why does he separate this group out from other troubled youngsters?  Cass (who is not a psychologist) is wiser in acknowledging that children can at times be ‘gender questioning’ during the existential turbulence common in adolescence. The abrogation of safeguarding advocated by Agnew, (i.e., claiming that puberty blockers are safe) is the very opposite of a cautious protective approach. Contrast that with Cass who has emphasised that, “Therapists must be allowed to question children who believe they are trans….. exploration of these issues is essential” (https://archive.ph/c4Vlr).

In October 2023 Agnew rejected the idea that women should have the right to have single-sex wards. He stated wrongly that there had never been a demand for it and that there had been no complaints. He clearly had avoided any disconfirming evidence that MtF transgender patients might harm women in healthcare settings (see https://www.medicalbrief.co.za/uk-hospital-tells-police-patient-could-not-have-been-raped-since-attacker-was-transgender/).  For Agnew, the finer feelings of MtF transgender patients revealed who he prioritised in relation to dignity, ignoring women’s privacy and safety. When Cass reported, Agnew toed the line of all the other transgender activist organisations that she was wrong for excluding studies that might undermine her conclusions and advice. That view about a purported 100 excluded studies was repeated and then quickly retracted by the Labour MP Dawn Butler in parliament. 

Cass made very clear her criteria for inclusion and the standard of evidence required to warrant biomedical interventions with physically health children. Agnew and Butler were both wrong but only the latter has admitted it. Defiantly Agnew claims to be working with others on a scientifically more valid alternative to the Cass Review; meanwhile he relies on, contributes to and repeats the authority of the WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) guidelines. These are not analogous to the cautious equipoise from NICE guidelines about clinical risk and efficacy. In the past twenty years, the activists driving WPATH have been part of a sinister turn: there has been a deliberate mission creep from adult transsexuals to children. As the Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy has recently noted, transgender activists made a major tactical mistake when they ‘went for the kids’. 

Agnew has complained that ‘cis het’ people like Cass should not pronounce on matters trans. Despite his ad hominemdismissal of this respected female paediatrician, her views are shaping an incipient NHS orthodoxy (Abassi, 2024).  Agnew has failed to grasp the range of forces against him. To be gender critical in Britain is not merely the preserve of religious conservatives but extends to all philosophical realists and a swathe of liberal and left-wing feminists. That broad and expanding alliance reveals that ‘trans liberation’ today really is not the same as gay liberation in the 1970s. Agnew like Billy Bragg, preaching from his secular pulpit, makes that false comparison. Political opportunists like Eddie Izzard have become a laughing stock, as desperate to get into women’s toilets as to find a local Labour Party prepared to adopt him as a candidate. Meanwhile, at the time of writing, the organisation Agnew represents, the BPS, is like a paralysed headless chicken. It seems unable to find a convincing response to the Cass Review, which is evidence-based and prioritises child safety. 

Other key activists have played a leading role in capturing the BPS position on sex and gender. Christina Richards led the charge for inclusivity and affirmation, including for ‘trans kids’, when chairing and pushing through the 2019 gender guidelines from the BPS (https://www.bps.org.uk/guideline/guidelines-psychologists-working-gender-sexuality-and-relationship-diversity). The guidelines resemble no other professional practice documents. Of six members who produced these under Richard’s control, two have forced the BPS to remove their names in professional embarrassment. Patients were to be called ‘sluts’ if they so wanted it and BDSM and other variants of ‘kink’ were a part of a de-repressive future to be celebrated by psychologists as being essentially non-pathological. Richards declared publicly that the debate about the effectiveness and safety about puberty blockers was now ‘shut’ (cf. Biggs, 2023). This is said in a YouTube video in which Dr Richards appears; the relevant segment occurs at about the 40 minute mark. This statement was made pre-Cass, but then or now it was a ridiculous claim, not worthy of a leader in an allegedly learned organisation.  No academic debate should ever be ‘shut’. Moreover, when a topic is fraught with conceptual and empirical uncertainty it deserves more discussion not less. 

Richards, like Jowett paving the way for Agnew’s stridency, also warned against unwelcomed ‘bigots’ applying for psychology posts in gender services, encouraged by the special feature interview with the editor of The Psychologist (https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/featured-job-highly-specialist-clinical-or-counselling-psychologist).  Complaints from one of us (Pat Harvey) about these unprofessional interventions from Richards were, true to form, rejected by the powers that be in the BPS (Harvey, 2023). Cass has thrown a spanner in these works and the BPS is now, advertising for psychologists interested in a new review focusing on children alone, having stalwartly refused to initiate this until it became inevitable, but too late.

Igi Moon is the other highly influential activist at the BPS and has led the MOU campaign against conversion therapy. For a while the administrative costs for this campaign were borne by the Society. Between 2015 and 2017 the MOU switched from only focusing on sexuality to include ‘gender identity’. This change was politically significant pre-Cass (Pilgrim, 2023b). Moon has depicted exploratory psychological therapy and formulation-based case work as being a form of conversion therapy. Cass disagrees. 

For now, Cass, not the likes of Agnew, Moon or Richards, is shaping public policy. The days of the latter being driven by Stonewall are seemingly over and its dissenting splinter of the LGB Alliance is pleased to be in the ascendency. As for Mermaids, their shroud waving of the oft regurgitated ‘better a live trans daughter than a dead cis son’ cuts no ice empirically (cf. Wiepjes et al 2020). Moreover, their failed legal action against the LGB Alliance has left them both poorer and looking decidedly foolish, especially in lesbian and gay circles. They are currently still being investigated by the Charity Commission; their in-schools campaigning, and breast binding merchandising, are declining in popularity but reflect a continuing defiance of a post-Cass policy trend.

Probably we will be waiting for a very long time for activists to recant and confess to the errors of their ways. ‘Ideological madness’ (pace Dostoevsky) can be refractory, so there is little point in holding our breath. However, when we turn to the administrative apparatus that has given these transgender activists succour, and provided a public space of legitimacy, others should go in the dock. 

Sarb Bajwa, the Society’s £130 000 plus per annum CEO has repeatedly ignored multi-signed letters of concern about the problematic sex and gender policy line; his contempt for ordinary members and their complaints seems boundless. Having survived the 18 month £70k fraud spree of his executive assistant, using his BPS credit card, enjoying almost a year on the salaried leisure of his suspension, he has come back to “work”. He has watched the resignation and departure of the recently appointed independent chair of the board to whom he was (notionally) accountable. 

Rachel Dufton, Director of Communications, runs the propaganda wing of the BPS, loyally supports the CEO and keeps a watchful eye over all BPS publications, including The Psychologist and Clinical Psychology Forum. She assured, pre-Cass, a uniformly pro-affirmation position. For example, her team censored a piece I wrote for Forum, raising concerns about GIDS and freedom of expression (even though it had been agreed for publication by the editor). When I complained about this censorship, it was investigated and the ‘comms team’ decision was upheld on grounds of the poor quality of my piece. After a year of repeated inquiries, I was eventually told that the investigating officer who was considering the complaint was the CEO. 

Neither Bajwa nor Dufton are experts in either healthcare ethics or the history of British clinical psychology, but the agenda was power not academic norms. The New Public Management model requires that authority does not come from true wisdom borne of relevant research but only from ‘the right to manage’.  The latter includes ‘controlling the narrative’ of the organisation; the managerial mandate always overrides democratic accountability, and transparency is an option but not an obligation. The ‘comms team’ has a role here that subordinates all other interests, such as those members pressing in good faith for the BPS to regain its role as a credible scholarly organisation. For now, that credibility is in tatters.

Pre-Cass, when the censorship of my piece was blatant, the editor of Forum was instructed by the ‘comms team’ to print an apologia for GIDS from its past leader Bernadete Wren. She informed the world that a ‘social revolution’ about sex and gender had now taken place and that GIDS was a progressive form of paediatric healthcare. An alternative view, now replacing that, is that clinical psychology was heading up one of the worst iatrogenic scandals of this century to date, with a generation of physically healthy children being disfigured and sterilised by an evidence-free biomedical experiment.

Jon Sutton must also be in the dock. He is the long serving editor of The Psychologist. He has published innumerable pieces defending the affirmative stance but refused to publish alternative accounts. One piece was published from a transgender activist, Reubs Walsh, who was not even a BPS member. It had been prepared over months with editorial coaching to maximise its credibility (https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/blow-rights-transgender-children).  Contrast that scenario of editorial favouritism with a considered critique from the educational psychologist Claire McGuiggan and her colleagues, who are gender critics. She has protested without success that a piece from them was offered to Sutton to be summarily rejected (see McGuiggan et al 2024). A number of complaints about Sutton’s biased decision-making to the editorial advisory board, chaired by Richard Stephens, have got nowhere. As with Bajwa supporting Dufton, the same seemingly unconditional confidence of Stephens for Sutton is evident.

If there is any doubt that The Psychologist remains captured by transgender advocacy, it has listed the Singapore based Gender GP as a go-to resource. This organisation is in the business of prescribing puberty blockers and cross sex hormones, in many cases to minors. At the time of writing in a high court ruling (https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Approved-Judgment-Re-J-1-May-2024.pdf) the judge has said the following: ” I would urge any other court faced with a case involving Gender GP to proceed with extreme caution before exercising any power to approve or endorse treatment that that clinic may prescribe”. In response to our complaints about the endorsement of this unethical organisation, Sutton and Stephens were dismissive. 

Finally, there are the faceless people inside the BPS, Trustees with conflicts of interest, and other senior managers who we might put in the dock. Were they all true believing transgender allies all along? Might they have kept quiet despite the problems that were obvious about this and other murky matters? The latter included the fraud and the kangaroo court expulsion of a whistleblowing president, which we have covered extensively on this blog. This unedifying scenario of mass silent complicity in the BPS recalls the view of the sociologist Stanley Cohen discussing ‘states of denial’ (such as ‘moral stupor’ about the scale of child sexual abuse in society):

Intellectuals who keep silent about what they know, who ignore the signs that matter by moral standards, are even more culpable when their society is free and open. They can speak freely but they choose not to. (Cohen, 2001: 286)

For now, we await a public confession from those at the top of the BPS about their policy position pre-Cass. What have they to say now about a psychology-led iatrogenic scandal involving child victims? Anything at all?

Conclusion

The Cass Review is likely to shape public policy on the sex/gender question for the foreseeable future. The transgender activists have lost their mandate on the bigger political stage. This leaves the BPS leadership in a tricky position. The previous virtue-signalling support they made for policies, such as the highly flawed gender document of 2019 or the MOU campaign on conversion therapy from 2017, with its mangled understanding of the concept, is now looking politically implausible and embarrassing. 

The discredited GIDS regime was led by British psychologists, and it is dishonest to conveniently ignore that fact. Consequently, it behoves those managing the BPS now to do their own look back exercise about that tragic piece of recent history. Even on instrumental grounds, it might be better to get on with that task of reflecting on lessons learned, in advance of a fuller public inquiry into transgender capture in British organisations, which is in the offing. The chance of this advice being heeded is slim. Given the lack of intellectual integrity (and quite frankly competence) of senior managers and their complicit Board of Trustees, the BPS leadership is now highly compromised and may opt to return to its comfortable ostrich-with-its-head-in-the-sand tradition. 

Playing the Columbo role here, we may be waiting for a long time for honest confessions from those at the top pre-Cass; many have bailed out and scattered in self-preservation. Managers (especially of the finance variety) have come and gone quickly. What might happen is that those remaining will adapt pragmatically to the new public policy landscape in healthcare and education, picking up the crumbs they can opportunistically. The recent emphasis on the need for more and more psychological therapies for children and young people provides such an opportunity. This might happen under the radar, with the inconvenient truth about GIDS then being quietly ignored, in a state of collective denial or dissociation. 

This returns us to the lesser considered matter in this piece, I began with. If sometimes some people have false memories, why do experimental psychologists focus overwhelmingly on the weak and the vulnerable within this claim (i.e., distressed children and adults reporting being abused in the past)? Why put so much forensic emphasis on the risks for those claiming to be falsely accused? After all, logically it is quite likely that perpetrators in positions of power might, for instrumental reasons, hysterically forget their own misdemeanours. They have a lot to lose if the truth comes out. 

Why don’t our experimentalist colleagues try to make sense of la belle indifference of those at the top of the BPS? We certainly need a formulation about why it is so obviously an organisation without a memory.  To compound the woes created by that collective amnesia, there is no independent Chair running its governing body and a CEO facing a petition for his removal. How much worse can this organisation get before it collapses or the Charity Commission eventually wakes from its slumber to take control? We have been asking a variant of that question on this blog for far too long, but we will keep asking it while ever children remain at risk. 

 References

Abassi, K. (2024) The Cass review: an opportunity to unite behind evidence informed care in gender medicine. BMJ 385:q837

Andrews, P. (2021) This is hate, not debate Index on Censorship 50, 2, 73-75

Biggs, M. (2023) The Dutch Protocol for juvenile transsexuals: origins and evidence, Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 49:4, 348-368.

British Psychological Society (2019). Guidelines for working with Gender, Sexuality and Relationship Diversity. Leicester: British Psychological Society.

Brunskell-Evans, H. and Moore, M. (Eds.) (2018) Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Butler, J. (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge

Chomsky, N. (2018) https://www.openculture.com/2018/02/noam-chomsky-explains-whats-wrong-with-postmodern-philosophy-french-intellectuals.html

Cohen, S. (2011) States of Denial London: Routledge 

Conway A and Pilgrim D. (2022) The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation. 23(2):165-176

Cutajar, M.C., Mullen, P.E., Ogloff, J.R.P., Thomas, S.D., Wells, D.L. & Spataro, J. (2010) Psychopathology in a large cohort of sexually abuse children followed up to 43 years. Child Abuse & Neglect 34, 11, 813-22  

Dahlen, S. (2021) Dual uncertainties: On equipoise, sex differences and chirality in clinical research New Bioethics. 27, 3, 219-229.

Dutton, K. (2022) Black and White Thinking London: Bantam

Harvey, P. (2023) Policy capture at the BPS (1): the Gender Guidelines In D.Pilgrim (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix.

McGuiggan, C., D’Lima, P. and Robertson, L. (2024) Where are the educational psychologists when children say they’re transgender? https://genspect.org/where-are-the-educational-psychologists-when-children-say-theyre-transgender/

Nussbaum, M. (1999> The professor of parody: the hip defeatism of Judith Butler. New Republic https//newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody

Pilgrim, D. (2023a) BPS Bullshit In D.Pilgrim (ed) British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction Oxford: Phoenix.xNussbaum, M. (1999) The professor of parody: the hip defeatism of Judith Butler. New Republic  https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody

Pilgrim D. (2023b) British mental healthcare responses to adult homosexuality and gender non-conforming children at the turn of the twenty-first century. History of Psychiatry. 34(4):434-450.

Pfeffer CA, Hines S, Pearce R, Riggs DW, Ruspini E & White FR (2023) Medical uncertainty and reproduction of the “normal”: Decision-making around testosterone therapy in transgender pregnancy. SSM – Qualitative Research in Health, 4, 100297

 Stock, K. (2021) What is a woman? Index on Censorship   50, 2, 70-72

Turner, J. (2024)   Cass was a skirmish: now prepare for a war https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cass-was-a-skirmish-now-prepare-for-a-war-qgpvp9zz9

Wipes, C.M., et al. (2020) Trends in suicide death risk in transgender people: realists form the the Amsterdam Cohort of Gender Dysphoria studiy (1972-2017). Acta Psychiatric Scandinavia 141, 6, 486-491.

'False Memory Syndrome', Board of Trustees, Change Programme, Expulsion of President-Elect, Governance

Resigning from the BPS

AdminBPSWatch

­­­ One of our contributors (Ashley Conway) has agreed that his recent letter of resignation can be made public and it identifies many of the concerns that we, at BPSWatch, have referred to in this blog.

Why I am resigning from the British Psychological Society after more than 30 years of membership.

My first ever publication was in 1978 – in The Bulletin of the British Psychological Society – ­­the forerunner of The Psychologist, the house journal of the Society. I have published professional papers, chapters and books in every one of the decades since the 1970’s. I have spent my whole working life as a psychologist, and as member of the BPS. And now I am resigning from the Society that I have been a member of for so many decades.

I have three principal reasons:

1. The fact that the BPS has allowed policy takeover by advocates of the non-scientific False Memory Syndrome (see Sinason & Conway, 2022) for the last 25 years has directly and indirectly colluded with British psychology failing survivors of child abuse and adult sexual assault for a generation.  It has acted in a way that is detrimental to genuine victims, and has been advantageous to abusers of various kinds, including paedophiles and rapists (see e.g. Conway & Pilgrim, 2022 and Conway, 2023).  Its collusion with the deniers of the realities of those reporting abuse becomes a child protection issue, in which I consider the BPS is failing badly.

2. The vile and very public bullying by the BPS of our elected President, Professor Nigel MacLennan.  In so doing, the Society has betrayed members’ wishes and destroyed trust in the electoral system of our Society.  The members wanted a reforming president, the BPS didn’t.  So they quickly got rid of him in the most unpleasant and unique way. 

3.   These appalling things could only happen in an environment completely failing in transparency of good governance.  This failure leaves a Society that not just actively bullies, and facilitates policy capture by minority groups favoured by the BPS hierarchy, but has enabled corruption and fraud as well (see bpswatch.com for further revelations – including commentary on the NCVO and Korn Ferry reports on BPS dysfunctionality).

The BPS, a registered charity, has been operating without much regard for Charity Commission guidelines, with many Trustees in dual and conflicting roles, who cannot, in any meaningful sense, be construed as independent. In recent times there has been at least one massive fraud, the loss of which was not fully covered by their insurers – meaning that members’ subs were used to cover the additional money lost to theft, which resulted from, at best, incompetent oversight. Presumably members will be paying again for what will probably be very significant legal fees (but the BPS won’t tell us about that) and, if justice is done, huge costs in compensation to Professor MacLennan, at some point in the not too distant future, when the legal wheels finally begin to turn.

Unless it is happy to demonstrate its own gross hypocrisy, if it is keen to expel bullies, the BPS should have immediately expelled the person who made the YouTube speech and every Trustee that approved that awful bullying footage defaming our elected president. But we all know that won’t happen. The Society will protect its own, and to hell with the annoying members.

Of course we will get – “this is all in the past” etc. and probably not be reminded that six million pounds of members money has been spent on a “change programme”, which has achieved … what exactly? They don’t want to let us see the reports that we paid for, so we don’t know. Who has benefitted from the money spent on the programme?  What was the procurement process?  Were any of the consultants known to the elite group in the BPS, deciding who should get rich from the £6 million? 

For me, any changes promised now are too little and too late. And quite frankly I have little faith that anything useful would emerge for members, and more importantly vulnerable individuals in need of skilled psychological help.

I say all this with much genuine sadness. I have been proud to be a psychologist, hoping to make a positive contribution to life, but the BPS has now become an organisation of which I am ashamed to be a member.

Ashley Conway PhD, January 2023

References

Sinason,V. & Conway,A. (Eds) (2022) Trauma and Memory – The Science and the Silenced. London: Routledge. 

Conway,A. & Pilgrim,D. (2022). The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society. Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 165- 176. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HADJSG9IEXN8F5CKU4BX/full?target=10.1080/15299732.2022.2028222

Conway, A.  (2023 / In press)  Policy capture at the BPS: the memory and law controversy.  In: Pilgrim,D (Ed) British Psychology in Crisis. A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction.

"The Psychologist", 'False Memory Syndrome', Academic freedom and censorship, Board of Trustees, Expulsion of President-Elect, Gender, Governance, Identity Politics, Memory and the Law Group, Prescribing Rights

Legal storm clouds over the BPS

AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts….

For those new to the chaos in the BPS, its organisational vulnerability today is multi-layered. The Charity Commission has, until very recently, been ‘engaged’ with the Society about lack of compliance concerning governance arrangements. Slowly, maybe resentfully, the leadership in Leicester has tinkered around the edges. 

The Society’s ‘Board of Trustees’ has been a phoney structure since the 1960s, but now a few public invites are to be issued, to appoint nominally independent members. All trustees in a charity should have no conflicts of interest, not just a couple of tokens. As with other matters, the BPS leadership seems to lack insight about even the most basic principles of organisational probity (see below).

But compliance with charity law is the least of the problems for the current BPS leadership or, note, past leaders with their ongoing legacy liability. We were told via YouTube, when Nigel MacLennan was expelled kangaroo-court-style, that this has been a ‘challenging year’. This of course was special pleading from those running the Society. The wider membership had been kept completely in the dark about the corruption and misgovernance, so they experienced the lock down, oblivious to any personal pain suffered by the leadership, with its ‘challenges’.  

This glib ‘challenging year’ trope in BPS propaganda has persisted, both vague in its detail and directed at sympathy from anyone taking it seriously. Covid-19 had been a safe cover story of collective bad luck and victimhood. Whichever way the challenges in Leicester are spun to the outside world, the reality is that the BPS is in serious legal trouble.

Three imminent legal threats to the reputation of the BPS

Here are three points to consider seriously:

1 Nigel MacLennan’s Employment Tribunal will require that the BPS must now take the dirty washing it has stuffed in a bin bag and put in a cupboard somewhere, and empty it out on to the floor of the courtroom for all the world to see. The evasions and snail-pace adjustments, which might have worked in response to the Charity Commission, will not be tolerated in a court (which is the formal status of an Employment Tribunal). Much more could be said on this, but a sub judice caution comes into play here, so I am just reporting the material fact of what is about to happen in 2023.

2 Post-Cass Review and Post-GIDS closure, the BPS guidance on gender has now been withdrawn. The leadership are not responding, in a timely manner, to a dilemma shockingly new to them. In the autumn of 2019 criticisms I made of Tavistock Clinic GIDS were censored by the BPS. In the summer of 2020, representations from many BPS members about the serious inadequacies of the 2019 guidelines on gender were simply ignored. In the autumn of 2020, a detailed formal complaint concerning the form, content and context of 2019 revision of the gender guidelines was made but not upheld. Also in autumn 2020, further representations about the risks of extending prescribing rights to psychologists (which would have included hormones) were ignored by BPS leaders. In the spring of 2022, yet another multi-signed letter to BPS leaders about the risks posed to the public by the gender guidelines was simply ignored. This did not even receive an acknowledgment, let alone a considered response.

Only when the world outside was telling Leicester in stereo, and at full volume, that the game was up on the ‘affirmative model’, was action triggered. Over the recent years, its own members had been treated with total contempt, when lobbying for the withdrawal of the trans-captured gender document. The wise have kept a copy of the policy document now removed. It cannot be deleted from history, no matter how convenient that would be for all of those, from the Board of Trustees and the Practice Board to the ‘Comms Team’ and The Psychologist, who were complicit actors in a flawed policy.  

The credibility of their group-think will now fracture in the full public glare of legal scrutiny. Recently The Times reported an incipient class action, involving up to a thousand ex-patients of the Tavistock Clinic (in truth that figure may be larger or smaller). Whatever their number, the legal bill will be picked up by the NHS Litigation Authority (NHSLA). Its work is supported by top-sliced money from constituent local Trusts, so it is supplied ultimately by the tax payer. 

The Tavistock Clinic will survive, albeit embarrassed. It will be rid of a capricious historical deviation, which held the proven tradition of cautious exploratory psychological therapy in complete contempt, confusing a passing and modish social trend with a genuine ‘social revolution’. The medical sterilisation of healthy children is shaping up to be yet another ‘great and desperate cure’ in the murky biomedical history of psychiatry (and now, more importantly, psychology) (Valenstein, 1986). These children, who cannot vote, give consent to sex, buy alcohol or even have a piercing or tattoo at their own request, has been put forward by adult identity politics activists as a harbinger of social progress. 

In the censored exchange in 2019 and noted above, between me and Dr Bernadette Wren, that assumption of political and ethical worthiness was debated. As a champion of the now discredited GIDS, Wren actually described the explosion in referrals as reflecting a ‘social revolution’ (sic). I am sure she believed that, but history will surely not vindicate her position, given that her claim is already unravelling and there is a service policy push back, here and in other countries, about the ‘affirmative model’. Social contagion, yes. Social revolution, very doubtful. A passing postmodern phase of anti-realist madness, most probable.

Many liberal and left leaning people (this is not just a Daily Mail editorial frothing at the mouth) simply never bought the GIDS progressive claims. Nor did they fail to spot the trans-capture in the BPS and elsewhere, including in the Royal medical colleges, which should have known better. For example, a group have just written to The Observernoting how the leadership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists had fended off representations, similar to our own in the BPS (see under heading Trans Concerns) https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/commentisfree/2022/aug/14/why-surprise-when-wealthy-capitalist-makes-large-donation-to-oxford-college

This span of dissenting voices has now been vindicated.  Complex existential challenges, each with their unique biographical context, cannot be cured by crass interference with the body, but it seems that mental health professionals are still slow learners. Their organisational leaders, fawning for popular support in an age of identity politics, have for now often lost their rational capacity to assess evidence or accept material realities that are immutable (Pilgrim, 2022). 

Faced with this historical moment of reckoning, the BPS does not have the luxury of a legal fund, like the NHSLA, to fall back on. The grateful medical negligence lawyers, who are now welcoming ‘regretters and detransitioners’ through their shiny doors, will inevitably take an interest in the professional advice that supported the ‘affirmative model’, now defunct at the Tavistock. The cabal in Leicester would be wise to take their own legal advice about what is in the pipeline.  It will of course be paid for by members’ fees. It may well entail very large amounts of money.

3 And then there is the contentious memory and law group, which has been the other main arena of policy capture, afforded by weak governance. The enmeshment of the BPS and the British False Memory Society is now clear (Conway and Pilgrim, 2022). However, in 2014, the editor of The Psychologist made this definitive and untenable statement: “Neither The Psychologist nor The British Psychological Society has links with the British False Memory Society.” 

This denial was at odds with the fact that the Chair (now deceased) of the BPS Memory and the Law Group was on the Advisory Board of the British False Memory Society, during the time that Elizabeth Loftus was on the International Panel of Associate Editors of The Psychologist.  She was also an advisor to the US and British False Memory Societies (The first was closed down after the Jeffrey Epstein case.) Loftus testified in defence of both Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021 and Harvey Weinstein in 2020. In the first case she asserted, with no evidence, that the prospect of financial gain could distort the memories of complainants. This line of speculation in legal settings is not peculiar to Loftus. It has been used by convicted individual abusers, as well as those claiming that child sexual abuse is a moral panic.

In this context of the serious legal considerations of sexual abuse, the biases in the BPS policy to date are very important, as is the supportive role of The Psychologist.  In May 2014, its editor provided a short hagiographic account of his interview with Loftus (he met at a conference dinner), who had ‘been voted the most influential female psychologist of all time’. It goes on, ‘Her wit and creativity shone through as she rattled through real-life stories, wrongful convictions and ingenious research that all illuminate the faulty nature of memory…. One thing seems undeniable: whatever the future brings for memory research and practice, Professor Loftus will be at the forefront of it for many years to come.’  

Because the BPS is an organisation without a memory, others have to recall the origins of its partisan policy focus. The BPS line, from their highly biased report, considering only the matter of false positive decision making, has fed defence teams hired by those accused of sexual abuse. It has offered absolutely no balancing advice about false negatives, in order to support prosecution teams. Those in the BPS, who have been concerned to expand the policy on memory, to include evidence of the social epidemiology of child sexual abuse and its proven mental health impacts (e.g. Cutajar et al. 2010) have been systematically excluded from a new working group looking at the topic. 

This scandal of biased policy formation then is ongoing. It is not just a part of BPS history, now regretted. The group recently appointed to update the document remains shadowy and has only included (unnamed) so called ‘memory experts’, from the closed system world of experimental psychology. All attempts by those BPS members interested in the clinical and epidemiological evidence (an open system feature of the world outside of the laboratory) to join the group have been blocked repeatedly. Moreover, all attempts to ascertain who exactly is on this group have been met with refusals on grounds of data privacy. It seems that the older biases to consider false positive decision making may well remain. The implausible claim that the BPS is guided by the organisational principle of transparency is also obvious here. 

Meanwhile, the BPS, as with now withdrawn gender document, seems to have no capacity to reflect on the child protection implications entailed in a lop-sided and partisan, form of policy formation.  The only sop that excluded critics have been offered is to submit papers to a minor journal, which is under the editorial control of FMS supporters. As with the case of the gender document, the temporary capture of a weakly governed Society, by a particular interest group, has to await external scrutiny to expose its bias and the dangers this poses to the public. Once again, internal dissent has been quashed at the expense of both membership democracy and academic integrity.

As the evidence now accumulates from historical inquiries into child sexual abuse, both in the UK and Australia, the BPS policy is a new potential target for angry survivors, seeking personal justice. Their lawyers will have spotted that line of attack. The current BPS position, to date, has colluded with the idea that child sexual abuse has been a trivial moral panic. The truth of the matter is that its scale has been strongly under-estimated, as is now becoming clear, in both the statutory inquiries and clinical research (Pilgrim, 2018; Children’s Commissioner’s Report, 2016).

Conclusion

The BPS leaders are in for another ‘challenging year’. Hiding in the dark, under the security blanket of group-think, will not make the lawyers disappear by magic. They will still be there, rubbing their hands, when the blanket it whisked away. Critics of all the three forms of BPS failing, noted above, may have been easy to ignore by the cabal. The rule of law is a different matter. If those in Leicester are not worried by now about imminent legal threats to the reputation of the Society, then they clearly do not understand what is going on.

References 

Children’s Commissioner’s Report (2016) Barnahus: Improving The Response to Child Sex Abuse in EnglandLondon: UK Children’s Commissioner’s Office 

Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2022) The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 23:2, 165-176, 

Cutajar, M. C., Mullen, P. E., Ogloff, J. R. P., Thomas, S. D., Wells, D. L., and Spataro, J. (2010). Psychopathology in a large cohort of sexually abused children followed up to 43 years. Child Abuse and Neglect 34(11), 813–22.

Pilgrim, D. (2022) Identity Politics: Where Did It All Go Wrong? Bicester: Phoenix Books.

Pilgrim, D. (2018) Child Sexual Abuse: Moral Panic or State of Denial? London: Routledge.

Sutton, J. (2014). BPS – obsessed with the false memory syndrome? Editor’s reply. The Psychologist 27, 5, 303.

Valenstein, E. (1986) Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness New York: Basic Books.

Administrator’s note

All of these topics have been subject to comments on the blog. By clicking on the category immediately above the title you will find the relevant posts.

"The Psychologist", 'False Memory Syndrome', Academic freedom and censorship, Expulsion of President-Elect, Gender, Governance, IAPT, Memory and the Law Group, Prescribing Rights

The British Psychological Society: Failing the Public

AdminBPSWatch

Pat Harvey posts….

Because of their acknowledged expertise, Psychologists enjoy professional autonomy; responsibility is an essential element of autonomy. Psychologists must accept appropriate responsibility for what is within their power, control or management. Awareness of responsibility ensures that the trust of others is not abused, the power of influence is properly managed and that duty towards others is always paramount.

Statement of values: Psychologists value their responsibilities to persons and peoples, to the general public, and to the profession and science of Psychology, including the avoidance of harm and the prevention of misuse or abuse of their contribution to society.

BPS Code of Ethics and Conduct, 2018.

A dysfunctional Society

The British Psychological Society’s serious governance dysfunction, the central concern of BPSWatch (1) has important consequences, not only for the way it behaves towards its own membership, but ultimately in how it functions in relation to its responsibilities to the wider community. A Royal Chartered Charity, (2) its formal Objects may not explicitly state that it has that latter duty and responsibility to wider society, but the second Object requires it to have a Code of Ethics and Conduct (3). That Code includes the statement shown above and only a legal weasel or a BPS bureaucrat might, if pushed into a corner, attempt to deny that the Charter does not require a duty to the public at large. 

The growing awareness of the organisational dysfunction and the wilful withholding of information about this brought us together to form BPSWatch and the associated Twitter account @psychsocwatchuk. Whilst we and others have as yet failed to create sufficient pressure to see the ongoing involvement of the Charity Commission with the BPS over its governance problems escalate into a full Statutory Inquiry, we have helped to get information out into the mainstream and other media: The Times, The Telegraph and Third Sector. They will no doubt renew and sharpen their interest as anticipated legal cases become public. Meanwhile the individual concerns initially brought to us about specific policy topics which have been mishandled remain unresolved. It is our contention, and that of the complainants who have contacted us, that each of these is a matter of public concern and public protection.

 Unbalanced Views and Member Complaints

Psychology is, and should always be, alive and comfortable with controversy and debate. Members have a right to expect an open facilitative climate, where the best of psychological research, practice and policy formation would be supported and discussion promoted.  We, and others, think the BPS is failing to do this and efforts to complain about such failures have led to our focus on the actual suppression of viewpoints and the active censorship of controversies including  

Gender

Memory-Based Evidence

Prescribing Rights

IAPT

These impact directly on practitioners and the people and services they work with, but they also impact upon discussion in public life. They are matters of concern to the mental well-being of individuals who are vulnerable and finding themselves in threatening situations in their communities, in a clinic or in court. They are psychological matters still open to alignments of differing viewpoints.  We believe the BPS has a duty to address these, elucidate their conflictual aspects, review and weigh the evidence base and its adequacy, and specify remaining questions. 

Since this has not happened, members have tried to complain. They have often been ignored or met resistance.  A network of disparate, dissatisfied complainants discovered each other by word of mouth and email chains, and we were encouraged by this to set up BPSWatch.  The writer came into this originally due to what I believed to be grossly inadequate and incomplete BPS guidelines on gender for practitioners (4) which I had discovered in connection with a high profile childcare case which went to court.  I considered the guidelines totally unfit for purpose and was minded to complain. I then came across a statement made by a key player in their construction. This person’s formal presentation as an expert psychologist was recorded at an academic forum which was posted in an online video. They made a categoric statement that, based on what they held to be definitive research findings, the question of psychological outcomes of gender reassignment surgery was closed, stating “…the debate is shut. There is not a debate about that anymore…”. This is not a statement that any Chartered Psychologist should be making either in form or in content. It constitutes what will be taken by audience and viewer as authoritative summation of the current evidence base on outcomes of surgery. It misrepresents how psychologists should talk about scientific enquiry, and is actually untrue. It is, therefore, unethical. Furthermore, as a ‘take-away message’ in that forum and online, with the implied weight of the British Psychological Society behind that person’s position and reputation, it is seriously irresponsible. That message had the potential to impact directly, if heard, upon people making life-changing choices.

The BPS complaints team batted the complaint about the statement away. The first response (stage 1), was a blithe and ironic “…we are a broad church…”. I persisted, with references, and this aspect of my complaint, whilst taken more seriously and addressed in more detail, was rejected. They stated “…Although there will always be some dissenting voices, the idea that this represents a real schism in the scientific community [note, this misrepresents my precise concern] … is incorrect…”. In fact, subsequent reputable research publications (5) have strongly supported my contention that the jury was still out on this, and the debate is, and should, remain open. Uncertainty about those outcomes remains, and needs to be the subject of much more adequate data collection, follow-up and methodologically sound research. The psychologist I complained about was peddling certainties, taking a protagonist/activist position in the guise of the science, and the BPS was wrong to continue to support that. Vulnerable people, their families and their rights are ill-served by false certainties coming from supposedly highly authoritative sources, backed by the BPS

Conflict Avoidance

I have cited the above to illustrate not only the tortuous experience of trying to make a complaint to the BPS but also to illustrate how poor is the quality of the Society response. In the case of another of the topics listed above, Memory-Based Evidence, the BPS took a different tack – they dumped the challenge half-way through. The BPS’s previous out-dated guidance on this area was deemed to have been skewed at the time (2008, 2010) by the impact of the false memory/recovered memory lobby (6). The BPS had seemed, over the years and in the pages of The Psychologist, to have had stars in its eyes around a famous and foremost proponent, Elizabeth Loftus (7). She had been made an Honorary Fellow of the Society and lauded for her subsequent awards. Not all members were happy about this (8). For the interest of the reader, an admirable and informative account of the journalistically styled ‘Memory Wars’ can be found outside the pages of academic journals and The Psychologist in the link below (9). Such informed coverage puts the BPS house journal to shame. During the of writing this article, a US jury have shown limited sympathy with the defence case for which Loftus gave her usual form of evidence (10) and Robert Durst has been found guilty of a murder committed 20 years ago.

 A BPS-appointed Task and Finish group was set up to revise their outdated guidance. There was a good deal of demand for this from practitioners who appear in court in connection with many kinds of trauma, particularly in the context of historical child abuse allegations.  Well into its work, the working group was unexpectedly closed down (11). The Psychologist published a statement from the Chair of the Research Board suggesting this was an amicable and consensual decision – we have been directly informed by participants it was not.  As one comment amongst the many to The Psychologist stated “…I am a member of the Memory Based Evidence Group and I would like the right of reply to respond about some of what has happened in this Group, which was tasked on writing a document on Memory and the Law. I am unhappy about the Research Board’s decision to disband the group, and I do not think that there has been a satisfactory answer to why such a decision was made; this decision was made without consultation with the group members, nor with the wider Society….“(11). The announcement in The Psychologist was made with this statement “Unfortunately, the standards of evidence for the report and the need for consensus and a convergence of evidence from experimental work and clinical practice, [my emphasis] as defined within the Terms of Reference for the group, could not be met.”. (11)

Contained within this statement, one which might immediately raise the questions: “Who set those terms of reference?” and “Isn’t the contentiousness the very reason for these guidelines?” is a clue to where some of the underlying and poorly managed tensions may originate. Academic/practitioner conflicts have dogged other psychological associations; for example the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science in the USA (12). As someone from a practitioner background, my view would be that there are serious drawbacks to research which sets out to answer questions arising from the clinical environment using crudely artificial analogues. Memory based evidence is one topic illustrating the drawbacks in using research set up in staged non-personal settings to discredit the opinions (in the legal sense) of practitioners working in non-analogous trauma related circumstances.  If you have any doubts about the dire need for an authoritative dispassionate view on this particular controversy to protect individuals on both sides in an adversarial court environment, consider what the absence of that psychological balance does – it leaves courts wide open to the machinations of the British False Memory Society. How it actually goes about doing its work is described in detail in this video (13).  A balanced view from the BPS could surely weigh the concerns about false positives and false negatives within the context of BFMS strategies, the applicability of academic research to traumatic memory, and social context of the serious underreporting of child sexual abuse (14). This would greatly assist in the court setting which itself attempts, as does a practitioner, a case-by-case assessment of veracity. The BPS Research Board have in effect kicked the revision of the guidelines into the long grass, the old guidelines having been archived.  These, however, are still available to be cited and used on the uninformed if you know where to look online. 

The BPS Working for the BPS?

Further discussion of these topics, and also of the implications of the BPS failings on Prescribing Rights and IAPT, can be found in specific articles on the blog (15, 16, 17). They illustrate a systematic failure to conduct proper consultation over key concerns in service provision models and health service professional practice. Why and how is this happening? 

The BPS, it seems, has an opaque system and uses equally opaque criteria for choosing its preferred advisors and for what policies are to be discussed with government departments and the NHSE. Feedback to members is minimal or non-existent. We have been reliably informed that a BPS CEO felt quite free to negotiate with NHSE without the presence of any psychologist. This leaves the room for a Society with an ever more rapacious in-house business agenda to be sucked into any government ideology where a shared vested interest may appear. The wider views of members working in the field may well be sidelined or completely ignored. The alleged current government agenda on privatising health care/moving to insurance models is open to facilitation by the self-interest of particular voices who manage to gain favour. In that context, note the latest BPS attempts to convince the NHSE and PSA that the Society can regulate an influx of less qualified younger members who will bring in fees and subscriptions to swell the coffers. There is little reason to think this will go well. In contrast to welcoming ever wider groups for membership, senior members seem to be regarded as a nuisance – maybe more trouble than they are literally worth, unless they are securely corralled within the system’s tent and staying ‘on script’ with the assistance of the Society’s Comms team – being one of the ‘cronies’.

Cronyism and Its Ills

We arrived at the term ‘serial office holder’ to describe how some psychologists have made a parallel career from being a BPS ‘apparatchik’. These psychologists move from one office to another over years (sometimes decades), sometimes elected, sometimes appointed. They make a virtue of their extended contributions. They are able to use the BPS logo on their websites and list the many impressive offices they have held on their CVs. Thus their BPS career is likely to enhance their professional reputation. They like to give each other honorary lifetime memberships and even when that is done in an AGM on Zoom in 2021, you may be expected to stamp your feet under your desk in approval.

 It would seem highly likely that a regime where cronyism is a norm will lead to complacency, lack of critical reflection, closing ranks, and resistance to newcomers taking important roles. An extreme example of this was the opposition to, and the action taken against, the President Elect 2020-21, Dr Nigel MacLennan. He was elected on a reforming mandate and then expelled. The expulsion was heralded in a vilifying YouTube video for all to see even before he had chance to appeal. We know many members thought that horrible and immoral, and one can only shudder at the extent to which living in the BPS bubble has distorted the judgement and the personal morality of those implicated in, and complicit with, show trial tactics. The person chosen to conduct his ‘appeal’, far from being independent of the previous proceedings and personnel involved, described himself in an interview with The Psychologist, on assuming his own presidential office, as “…a BPS Junkie since 1984…”. He has been around the corridors, real and virtual, of the BPS for more than 30 years, the BPS and he being ‘in each others’ DNA’ so to speak. 

Not all serial office holders are treated well in the BPS, however, particularly if they start to question how things are being done. They too may be attacked and threatened like MacLennan. We have heard how some become very distressed, visibly so in meetings, but then increasingly conform; others resist but remain peculiarly defensive of some idealised notion of the organisation and its capacity for change despite all evidence of its malign dysfunction. These patterns are reminiscent of what has been called Stockholm Syndrome. It is pertinent to consider how an unhealthy organisational environment where the main focus is self-perpetuation might allow for another form of organisational capture, by activism. Any would-be activist moles would be well-advised to get their feet under the table by not rocking the organisational boat and to volunteer for taking on work others don’t want. Then they just need to wait for their policy agenda to float into view and haul it in.

Psychologists, Psychology and Activism

The writer has been a lifelong political activist and vigorously supports, in her personal life, action on climate change, poverty, inclusivity and world peace. I took to the streets in the 1970s when my town elected National Front/National Party councillors. I was part of the making of a World In Action TV programme on that racist environment. Those passionate views had to be put on mute in my clinical work. I currently hold strong views about many of the contentious topics in psychology, but our focus at BPSWatch is to ensure that no partisan view – including my own – within an area of ongoing scientist/practitioner debate captures the BPS. Some activists had assumed because we criticised BPS bias that we supported their ‘side’ of a particular argument, hence we have revisited and set out our agenda (19) – good governance, not certain ‘causes’.

We argue in BPSWatch that gender, memory-based evidence, prescribing rights and IAPT are amongst the topics that have been captured by a particular viewpoint and its activists. What follows capture is that debate is shut down, information restricted. Certain topics are being precluded from teaching and some psychologists are being maligned. Deeply unfair accusations of transphobia, sexism, racism, classism (the list grows daily) are never challenged by the BPS. This is aided and abetted by The Psychologist which actively fails to give balanced coverage to all legitimate views. Members have told us how their contributions have summarily been spiked in the in-house publications. It is not for the BPS to enter party politics and campaign, for example, on specifics such as Universal Credit. Rather, it should be making available the best research on poverty in relation to child development, adult mental health, crime and suchlike, and vigorously bringing this to the attention of politicians and decision makers. The same applies, as with the topics covered above and numerous others, to public awareness of the best evidenced range of views within which individual people are making the kinds of choices that many face and which will often change the course of their lives. This does not include rushing to be a signatory to a range of worthy campaigns (and how is the decision to sign – or not – made?). These psychological matters are serious.

The Results of Misgovernance are Failing the Public

The well-staffed, wealthy but seriously misgoverned charity that is the current British Psychological Society continues to fail its members and the public on the most crucial of standards, and for this we will continue to hold it to account.  We have hoped to see moves for radical change which would enable open communications with the large membership, bottom-up consultations and an inflow of new actively welcomed volunteers.  We hope to see new healthy structures at the top of the organisation, independent lay people as trustees. We believe it is only then that the BPS will serve the membership and the public as it should. Sadly, it just is not happening and there are no signs, despite the recent talk of ‘crossroads’, change programmes and tinkering with governance, that the change will come from genuine reflection within. Perhaps, therefore, it must come from without.

**************

Notes and Links

  1. Why the blog and why now? Charity Commission to Blog Author: “We are currently engaging with the society over a number of issues and have found deficiencies in some areas of operation” https://bpswatch.com/2020/11/20/why-the-blog-and-why-now/ 
  2. https://www.bps.org.uk/sites/www.bps.org.uk/files/How%20we%20work/BPS%20Royal%20Charter%20and%20Statues.pdf
  3. https://www.bps.org.uk/sites/www.bps.org.uk/files/Policy/Policy%20-%20Files/BPS%20Code%20of%20Ethics%20and%20Conduct%20%28Updated%20July%202018%29.pdf
  4. https://www.bps.org.uk/news-and-policy/guidelines-psychologists-working-gender-sexuality-and-relationship-diversity 
  5. https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2020.1778correction 

“The results demonstrated no advantage of surgery in relation to subsequent mood or anxiety disorder-related health care visits or prescriptions or hospitalizations following suicide attempts in that comparison. Given that the study used neither a prospective cohort design nor a randomized controlled trial design, the conclusion that “the longitudinal association between gender-affirming surgery and lower use of mental health treatment lends support to the decision to provide gender-affirming surgeries to transgender individuals who seek them” is too strong”.

  1. https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-30/august-2017/positives-negatives-and-empirical-reasoning 
  2. https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-26/edition-5/news
  3. https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-30/february-2017/no-congratulations-here
  4. https://www.thecut.com/article/false-memory-syndrome-controversy.html 
  5. https://www.courttv.com/title/8-4-21-the-jinx-murder-trial-intense-cross-examination-of-memory-expert/
  6. https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-34/april-2021/not-good-look 
  7. https://behavioralscientist.org/long-winding-road-125-years-american-psychological-association/ 
  8. See Dr. Kevin Felstead, Communications Director, British False Memory Society reveal their strategy at I hour 4 minutes in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WsY-AqM4Y8 
  9. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/02/millions-children-religious-groups-vulnerable-abuse-england-and-wales
  10. https://bpswatch.com/category/false-memory-syndrome/
  11. https://bpswatch.com/category/prescribing-rights/
  12. https://bpswatch.com/category/iapt/
  13. https://bpswatch.com/2021/09/07/bps-bullshit/ 
  14. https://bpswatch.com/2021/09/14/what-this-blog-is-about-a-re-statement/ 
'False Memory Syndrome', Memory and the Law Group

On memories of abuse….

AdminBPSWatch

The BBC website, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail are all reporting on the trial of an alleged sexual abuser, the widow of a former High Court judge. All quote the following statement by the prosecuting QC

“He tried to bury away the memories and not to think about them”.

As is her right, we have no doubt every effort will be put into her defence, perhaps even involving the British False Memory Society.

How will any witnesses for the prosecution or the barristers involved be able to rely on a balanced, empirically based set of guidelines to argue against any claims that the accuser’s memories may be ‘recovered or false’? The short answer is that they won’t because ‘The BPS’, in its wisdom, has given up on any pretence to take this matter with the seriousness that it deserves by abandoning the revision of its Memory and The Law guidelines (see here).

We can only hope that the court is able to hear from a balanced and fully informed range of expert witnesses. It is shameful than none of the psychologists who may be in that position will be able to call on the backing and support of their professional society.

The BPSWatch Editorial Collective

'False Memory Syndrome', Memory and the Law Group

The British False Memory Society – a personal story

AdminBPSWatch

A quarter of a century ago information about myself and my supposed false memory was given to the British False Memory Society (BFMS) without my consent. This information has been used to construct all sorts of theories about myself and my memory. It is very bizarre as it was all third-party information. There was nothing objectively true or false about it, no court cases, and no police involvement. It was simply disputed within family conversations. I do not understand how it is ethical for psychologists to affirm that my disputed memories are false without having further evidence.

This is the reality of the experience of someone whose life has been directly affected by the controversy surrounding the accuracy of memory – away from the laboratory, away from academic debate – this is what happens to real people in real life. The quote comes from a post sent to us following our coverage of the Memory and Law debacle. The full post is here and contains important and well-researched information about the British False Memory Society, members of its Scientific Advisory Board and the tactics used by the BFMS.

One of the areas that is of particular concern to us is the reference to the Centre for Memory and Law at City University. In the absence of formal, up-to-date, evidenced-based balanced guidance for practitioners and the courts, where will lawyers go? The Centre’s title says it all, and yet it is headed by someone whose links with the BFMS are well-known. Karl Sabbagh, who was convicted of grooming of a teenage girl in 2019, remained an adviser to the BFMS until 2021 who only acted when contacted by a journalist [see here] – how can we trust them?

We continue to urge the BPS to rescind their decision to abandon the work of the Law and Memory Group; to ensure that any future group is properly representative of all the views and controversies; and that any new group is set up to included the voices of those who have experienced the machinations of organisations such as the BFMS at first hand.

Posted by BPSWatch Admin

Important Addition information (16 April 2021)

In the original version of this post a reference was made to the BFMS Archive being held at City University. We have been informed by City University that it “.. does not hold personal data for which the British False Memory Society is a data controller.  Any enquiries about this should be directed to the BFMS. Any files for which BFMS is a data controller were securely transferred to the BFMS from City in December 2017.”.

'False Memory Syndrome'

Four views of ‘False Memory Syndrome’

AdminBPSWatch

Peter Harvey posts….

The dissolution of the BPS Memory and Law Group has brought the controversial issue of the so–called False Memory Syndrome back into the spotlight. We show below four quite different views about how this is presented. First, a piece by the Editor of The Psychologist; second, a letter, denied publication by that same Editor setting out a very different view of Professor Loftus’s work; third, a long article from the US publication Mad in America entitled “The False Memory Syndrome at 30: How Flawed Science Turned into Conventional Wisdom”. And finally, an example of how the concept can be used to defend those accused of sexual assault. Do we need any more evidence to support the case for the BPS rescinding its fundamentally flawed decision to disband the Evidence-based Memory Group?

An ‘adulatory’ view

Jon Sutton reports from a talk at Goldsmiths, University of London

If Professor Elizabeth Loftus had her way, the solemn oath taken before witnesses take the stand would be ‘Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, or whatever it is you think you remember?’ So far, she said with a wry smile, it hasn’t caught on.

Professor Loftus – who has been voted the most influential female psychologist of all time – was speaking at this special event presented by the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, Goldsmiths, and the Centre for Inquiry UK. Her wit and creativity shone through as she rattled through real-life stories, wrongful convictions and ingenious research that all illuminate the faulty nature of memory.

Beginning with some classic cases of political figures reporting memories that can’t be true – such as Mitt Romney’s account of the Golden Jubilee that occurred nine months before he was born – Loftus showed that ‘all that Yale school or Harvard training doesn’t stop you having false memories’. And this has implications way beyond goofing politicians: DNA exoneration studies suggest that faulty memory is responsible for wrongful conviction in more than 75 per cent of cases.

In case the assembled audience thought they were somehow immune to this, Loftus showed otherwise with a fascinating paradigm involving photos of faces. A post-event activity that induced us to pick a wrong person led to around half of the audience subsequently picking the wrong person in the test phase. ‘You’re wrong because I made you wrong,’ said Loftus, ‘right here in the middle of a lecture on false memory’.

But that’s somewhat artificial, say the critics (and Loftus says she has had a fair few, who do not like the message of her research). OK, says Loftus, what about our new study looking at military personnel taking part in a mock prisoner phase of survival school training? Here, the provision of misinformation following four days of evasion and half an hour of interrogation led even highly trained soliders to make false IDs with high confidence.

Loftus admitted to ‘nagging concerns’ around the ethics of such findings. ‘Aren’t we putting a recipe out there that could help bad people do bad things?’ On balance, she and her collaborators feel that it’s best to get the research out there in the hope that awareness could lead to ways to overcome the problem. And there is a lot to counter: Loftus’ research has shown that false memories can be induced in a variety of ways, including the use of imagination, dream interpretation, hypnosis, the provision of false information or doctored photos, and even simple exposure to other people’s memories.

It’s a research journey that has taken some tremendous turns. I love how the way the ‘lost in the mall’ analogue – convincing participants that they got lost in the shopping mall as a child – evolved in response to the repeated insistence of reviewers that ‘maybe that really happened’. When that accusation was even levelled at a study that persuaded people that they had been licked by Pluto at Disneyland – ‘disturbingly and persistently’ – Loftus and her team simply switched to Bugs Bunny, a Warner Brothers character!

Loftus had provided ample demonstration of the repercussions of false memories, in accounts of repressed memory accusations. (‘There is no credible scientific support for the notion that memories can be massively suppressed in this way’, she concluded). But what about positive effects? If psychologists can convince adults that they got sick eating a particular food as a child, could this technique be used to help people avoid fattening foods? Yes, and others have now found that this effect lasts, and affects actual eating behaviour. Welcome to the mental diet!

Can these false memories be distinguished from true ones? Not by rated emotion, and neuroimaging reveals only small differences, with true memories showing more activity in the visual cortex and false memories showing more in the auditory. But, said Loftus, ‘we are a long long way from taking a memory, examining it in the brain scanner and saying whether it is true or not.’ Memory is malleable, concluded Loftus, and if there was one take-home message from her life’s research it was this: ‘Just because memory is expressed with confidence, detail and emotion, doesn’t mean it’s true.’

After the talk, I had the pleasure of sitting next to Professor Loftus at dinner. I very much enjoyed our chat about a potential revolution in memory, as wearable devices and large, cheap storage bring ‘memory prosthetics’ to the masses. If we all have ‘personal CCTV’, like the dashboard cam footage of the Russian meteor strike, do our own memory failings become less of an issue? The professor quickly reminded me that such footage could be doctored, potentially leading to an arms race for the truth. One thing seems undeniable: whatever the future brings for memory research and practice, Professor Loftus will be at the forefront of it for many years to come. 

See also https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-21/edition-10/one-one-elizabeth-loftus 

and https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-25/edition-7/interview-memory-warrior

A ‘Critical’ view

What is it about the BPS and the False Memory Syndrome (FMS) devotees?

No empirical validation has been offered for “False Memory Syndrome” as a diagnostic construct despite years of intense scrutiny; nor have its symptoms been systematically described or studied.  No professional organisation accepts it as a valid diagnosis.            . 

The leading light of the FMS lobby is Professor Elizabeth Loftus.

In the May edition of The Psychologist, the Editor, Jon Sutton, described his meeting with Professor Elizabeth Loftus (p.236).  The piece was inappropriate for several crucial reasons. Firstly it lacked objectivity. 

Dr Sutton wrote that he “had the pleasure of sitting next to Professor Loftus at dinner” and that her “wit and creativity shone through”.  I too have had the pleasure of Professor Loftus’s company for several hours, in one to one discussion, albeit some years ago. I had lots of questions for her then, and would have even more now. Here are some questions that the Editor might have asked Professor Loftus:


1. Is it true that it was the filing of two ethics complaints against you that caused your resignation from the American Psychological Association (APA) in the late 1990’s?

2.  In 2003 the APA gave you an award for Distinguished Scientific Applications of Psychology.  That’s a big change – resignation to award in a few years – what happened?

3. Are you a member of the APA today?  And what are your reasons for being (or not being) a member of the APA?

4. Memory can be unreliable in two directions – false positive (when somebody comes to believe that something happened, which did not) and false negative (where somebody comes to believe that something did not happen, that did).  False positive and false negative memory might be likened to Type 1 and Type 2 research errors, would you agree?

5. Your “lost in a shopping mall” study demonstrated that older family members play a powerful role in defining reality for dependent younger family members. You believe that it is possible that memory is so malleable that an individual could falsely recall a complex history of abuse, that in fact never occurred.    Is it equally possible that someone who was abused could be persuaded that their recall was a false memory, and that they could come to falsely believe that they had not been abused?

6. Could a perpetrator who had committed acts of abuse falsely believe that he or she was not an abuser?  (A “False Innocence Belief Syndrome” ?).


7. If the answer to this question is yes, why don’t you investigate “False Innocence Belief Syndrome” as an area of false memory?   If the answer is no, do you believe that false memories only go in one direction (false positive)?  If so, what is the evidence for that? 

8. You get some emotional reactions to your opinions.  Perhaps because it might appear to some that the direction of your work helps abusers, and disadvantages genuine victims of abuse – what would you say to that?

9. Who has benefited from your research?

10. Ted Bundy was one of America’s worst serial rapists and murderers.  He murdered 30 women in 7 states and was executed in 1989.  In an earlier article, The Psychologist reported your comments regarding Ted Bundy when you testified on his first case.  You stated: “… that was before we really knew who Ted Bundy was. He was a charming man! He was absolutely charming and obviously very sick but we didn’t really know that at the time.”  His biographer Ann Rule described him as “a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human’s pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death.”  You have testified in many cases where people are accused of very serious crimes.  Is it possible that you may have mis-judged others, as you did Ted Bundy?   

11. False Memory Syndrome is sometimes described as a modern day pseudo-scientific version of the Oedipus complex – a way of dismissing the account of an abuse victim as fantasy, that allows our society to avoid dealing with the very uncomfortable possibility that the vast majority of allegations of sexual abuse are true.  How would you comment on that?The article in the Psychologist appeared five days before a long overdue BPS ethics committee meeting, where questions had been tabled regarding senior Society members acting as scientific advisors to the British False Memory Society, and possibly contravening the BPS Code of Ethics and Rules of Conduct under our Royal Charter.

It is unfortunate that concurrently the official journal of the BPS published a glowing and uncritical piece about one of the most controversial proponents of False Memory Syndrome. To an objective observer it could appear that this was a piece of propaganda for the FMS lobby, and raise concern that the BPS has an unhealthy bias in this arena.

Yours sincerely

Ashley Conway PhD AFBPsS

A transatlatic view

For those of us not familiar with the publication Mad in America, its Mission Statement is

…. to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care in the United States (and abroad). We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society, and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change.

The whole article (published 8 February 2021) is accessible here and the concluding paragraphs are these:

For too long, society turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse of children. It was a taboo subject, kept quiet within families and covered up by institutions. Soon after states finally began providing adults who remembered such childhood abuse with the legal standing to sue, the FMSF began waging a vigorous public relations campaign that discredited their memories—in both courtrooms and, to a large degree, in the public mind.

Indeed, the false memory syndrome, which was said to be grounded in cutting-edge science, regularly produced a legal—and, one might say, an epistemological—stalemate: It was the delayed memory of the accuser against the denial of the accused, and without any corroborating evidence of the abuse, it was impossible for a jury or a judge to know what had really happened.

In addition, the false memory syndrome turned those accused of abuse into “victims.” These cases were no longer simply “he said/she said,” cases, but rather “he said/she was tricked into creating false memories” cases.

However, public understanding of this dynamic has perhaps entered a new phase. There is now increasing public awareness that the sexual abuse of children is all too common. And as society assesses the claims of adults who recall memories of child abuse, it should know this about the relevant science: The false memory research provides little evidence that memories of sexual abuse are often implanted by therapists. But there is a large body of research providing evidence that dissociative amnesia is a common response to childhood trauma.

An example of how FMS can used.

From Time’s Up website of 6 February 2021 these are the introductory words to an article about the Harvey Weinstein trial

As Harvey Weinstein’s legal team mounts its defense, it has been reported that it will call at least one expert witness to the stand to testify to “false memory theory,” a tool that has been used to try to discredit survivors of sexual assault for decades.

Surely it’s time for the BPS to do the right thing and face up to its responsibilities.

'False Memory Syndrome', Ethics

Does the BPS Care About Ethical Standards Enough to Enforce Them?

AdminBPSWatch

Ashley Conway writes:

Following on from my earlier post –

The Charity Commission says that the BPS must follow the demands of the Royal Charter and Statutes and Rules of the Society. The Royal Charter states:  that the Society should “…maintain a Code of Ethics and Conduct for the guidance of Members and to compel the observance of strict rules of professional conduct as a condition of membership.”.

I believe that this is an area where the BPS completely fails to fulfil its obligations.

About a third of BPS members are also registered with the HCPC, and the BPS is happy to pass on responsibility for dealing with rule violations by them.  But what of the other two thirds of the membership?  The answer seems to be that the BPS does everything it can to avoid taking any responsibility, usually passing the buck to the member’s employer.  But what if they have no employer (i.e. are self-employed?) or their employer uses Non Disclosure Agreements to avoid scandal, as some universities do (see here and here)?  This could mean that ethics violations go unreported and can be repeated by a guilty individual, possibly causing great harm to vulnerable people.

I cannot find anything in either the Charity Commission requirements or the BPS Charter that says that this responsibility about ethical standards can be farmed out to third parties or ignored.

What follows is a specific example of the problem.  Elizabeth Loftus is an Honorary Life Fellow of the BPS who enjoys a high profile internationally, despite considerable controversy.  This, from The Psychologist (July 2011, 24, 490-503):

Star power arrived at the 2011 Annual Conference this year in the form of Elizabeth Loftus (University of California, Irvine), the doyenne of false memory research who’s had the mixed fortune of attracting death threats and the highest academic accolades. 

However, there are, I would suggest, serious ethical questions to be raised about her conduct.

  1. As far back as 1995, complaints were made to the American Psychological Association (APA) against Loftus by Lynn Crook and Jennifer Hoult.  Both have complained that Loftus grossly mis-represented their life stories (see here and here).  Loftus resigned from the APA just before the complaints process was about to be initiated.  There were allegations that she had been tipped off about it, because for both the APA and Loftus, resignation was the best way to avoid the investigation and unwanted publicity.  
  2. She has come in for strong criticism from judges for the nature of her expert witness testimony.  In the case referenced in her TED talk described below, referring to Loftus’s actions in question (Loftus falsely claiming to be a clinician’s supervisor to gain personal information for her use), the court stated  “In our view, intentionally misrepresenting oneself as an associate or colleague of a mental health professional who has a close personal relationship with the person about whom one is seeking information would be a particularly serious type of misrepresentation …” .  In another case Judge John Fedora dismissed Loftus’s opinion as “Having been rendered after an uncritical review of an absurdly incomplete record carefully  dissected to include only pieces of information tending to support Appellant’s repressed memory theory …”.
  3. In her TED talk there is further evidence of possible ethical breaches.  (i) She reveals the name of a victim of abuse who was promised anonymity, when her very personal story was used as a case study by respectable psychologists;  (ii) Loftus states:  “She accused her mother of sexual abuse based on a repressed memory” without informing us that actually the person in question had made revelations of abuse as a little girl, which had videotape and verbatim documentation.  So the accusations were based on much more than an adult’s “repressed memory”, and the truth goes very much against the false memory hypothesis that Loftus is seen to support.  (iii) Loftus states: “I became part of a disturbing trend in America where scientists are being sued for simply speaking out on matters of great public controversy.”.  But the litigation issue was not about speaking out on matters of great public controversy.  The real reason that she was being sued was for  “… for defamation and invasion of privacy…” as she herself reveals in this same talk.
  4. There have been important questions raised over the validity of the data in her famous “lost in the mall” study.

I have raised this issue of Loftus’s behaviour on a number of occasions with the BPS.  This year I wrote to the CEO about this and related issues three times.  I received no reply, which I now know has been the experience of many others.  I did, finally, get something back from a very senior member of the BPS who said “In relation to Prof Loftus, election as an Honorary Life Fellow confers membership of the Society so the member conduct rules would apply, as they do to all members. I would draw your attention to the fact that, since the Society is no longer a regulator, it normally requires ‘allegations to first have been determined using other appropriate procedures’ such as by the appropriate regulatory body.’” I genuinely do not understand this response.  What would be an appropriate procedure and who would be an appropriate body for Loftus?  The complainants above did not find one.  Where in the Charity Commissions rules for the Society, or the Royal Charter, does it say that the Society is no longer a regulator?  If this really means that the BPS takes no responsibility for enforcing its Conduct Rules or Code of Ethics, what is the point in having them?  

And BPS – how does this fit in with the requirement to “… compel the observance of strict rules of professional conduct as a condition of membership.”?  

I think that the BPS owes us all an answer to this question.