PUBLIC STATEMENT - LISA BLAKEMORE BROWN
31 January 2007 8:00 am
It is my view that the British Psychological Society have pursued vexatious complaints against me from sources of dubious credibility. This year will mark 10 years since I first encountered harassment from the British Psychological Society. I will not discuss this harassment here in detail, because it is obvious.
Instead of investigating my concerns, the Society sought to use an aged method of discrediting the messenger - abuse the stigma of mental illness. I find the accusations against me to be insulting, defamatory and malicious. Many members of the public believe it is comparable to the method used in a Totalitarian Regime. The BPS has a mandatory role to investigate the serious issues raised in the public's interest. Yet, as a authority it has been misled by various individuals, some with a criminal past and has sought to victimise me for expressing my honest views on the ethical issues affecting the public.
Over more than a decade I have raised a number of issues surrounding the management of children with ADHD, Asperger syndrome and Autism. I have discussed the difficulty of pigeonholing children into these diagnostic categories through my metaphor of the tapestry. Each child is different. I have also discussed Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy. I have challenged academic thinking about some of these problems in my writings, in court, in helping individual families facing legal challenge, and in my professional practice. I have mentioned that all is not well with our scientific evidence underlying the issue of vaccines and their potential side effects. I know that many people agree with my views. Some of my views may well be wrong. But that is what academic debate is all about.
The British Psychological Society will know full well that many of the things I have raised are correct. They will also know full well that many of the matters I have raised with regard to the manipulation of these procedures are correct, and have been shown to be so. And yet you have accused me of being paranoid based on my stating of the obvious. That was the charge panel members.
I believe that the BPS has behaved very badly. They have misused psychiatric assessment. They have contributed to the distortion of academic debate, and they will have contributed to the fear that professionals feel of challenging the unknown. In so doing the BPS has also failed the public. This is Soviet psychiatry at it’s worst, and we do not expect that in 21st Century Britain.
Thank you
Addendum: 1pm 31 January 2007: I am informed that the British Psychological Society have threatened legal injunction to prevent publication of the transcripts of these hearings. Having read the case transcripts, I find them most extraordinary. They read like an encyclopaedia of legal and psychological abuse. They also represent the most fundamental manifestation of the abuse of science and suppression of dissent. The British Psychological Society should be ashamed. The BPS should immediately make them available for public scrutiny. A.B
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7 comments:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=17142012&query_hl=3&itool=pubmed_docsum
Can you see any reason to attack this paper as trying to make older men anxious? Well read the response in the Schizophrenia Forum funded by NARSAD.
Does Dr. Gorwood's paper suggest possible public health information that might threaten the powers that be? It seems like an intelligent attempt to help prevent some cases of devastating illness.
Another example of threatening the domain of powerful interest groups like the BPS attacking Lisa Blakemore Brown.
'...When one imagines using mental health professionals to target undesirable individuals, one almost always thinks of totalitarian governments such as the former USSR, China, and Cuba. There is a long and ugly precedent of using mental health professionals in those societies to target politically undesirable people and have them placed in mental institutions involuntarily.
Human rights groups refer to this practice as "political psychiatry." Victims of political psychiatry are usually people who have filed grievances or complaints against employers or officials, or are union organizers, people who have publicly criticized officials, members of minority religions, and whistle-blowers. Because of reports of the former Soviet Union and China committing political dissidents to mental institutions, the World Psychiatric Association passed the Madrid Declaration in 1996 declaring that "all forms of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment on the basis of the political needs of governments are forbidden." Unfortunately, no such declarations have been made for or by psychologists to condemn political psychology...' PsychologistEthics.net
The British Psychological Society - The Secret Brotherhood
Scandal has hit the once quiet British Psychological Society. Tonight the organisation has been reeling from accusations comparing its conduct to the Salem witches trials of 1692. This is of course not the first time a regulatory body has been accused of taking this radical stance to silence its critics.
A number of professionals have unanimously accused the organisation acting as a “soviet style regime”. The Society based in Leicester has been under fire from various academics since their secret hearings regarding leading psychologist Lisa Blakemore Brown came to light. Transcripts supplied by a source at the Society were apparently “ shocking” and a travesty of justice.
Read the rest on .......
http://www.nhsexposed.com/healthworkers/psychology/british-psychological-society-brotherhood.shtml
Dear Dr. Miller
President, British Psychological Society
As a US pediatrician, I was surprised when I read the charges against Ms. Lisa Blakemore-Brown, astonished when I saw that a hearing was actually going to be held and thoroughly dismayed at the outcome of said hearing.
I don't know if you use the sentence to "railroad someone" in England. In case you don't, it means "To convict an accused person without a fair trial or on trumped-up charges" and that Dr. Miller, is exactly what a committee of the BPS has just done. I would not have expected this to happen in England and certainly not at a hearing of a prestigious society such as yours.
I respectfully submit that the hearing and the verdict, if it stands, will forever be a black mark on the Society.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Martin Luther King Jr.
Sincerely,
F. Edward Yazbak MD, FAAP
Falmouth, Massachusetts 02540
The BPS is not a regulatory nor disciplinary body for the profession of psychology.in Great Britain. It is merely a membership-based association and all they can do therefore within their powers is to cancel the membership of Lisa Blakemore-Brown but as she resigned from their membership over five years ago, then such a course of action is not open to them. No doubt they will seek to redress this by making a rule that they can still examine complaints against a former member if the complaint was made during that person’s membership of the BPS. In this case it was not made during Lisa’s membership and therefore there are no lawful grounds for their jurisdiction in these matters. If the BPS were now to make such a rule it could not be applied retrospectively. That would be contrary to legal principles and particularly the principle of natural justice. (You cannot be tried for an offence that was not against the law at the time it was committed).
In effect the BPS has no jurisdiction whatsoever in this matter and as such therefore, the Panel had no legal or administrative basis or validity and the appearance of Lisa B-B before their Panel must therefore have been of her own volition and solely to help them to clear up this matter. The BPS seem to have been unable to find any evidence to support the complaints made against her and the complaints must therefore be assumed to have been groundless and malicious but the BPS appear to have then changed tack and sought to question her fitness to practice on health grounds. This secondary issue appears to have been introduced after it was found there was no evidence on which to consider the original complaints.
I am informed that although she did not have to do so, Lisa B-B agreed to submit a mental health assessment to the BPS Panel and quite naturally such assessment by a respected psychiatrist found her to be totally mentally competent. I would suggest that such would probably not be the case if applied to the BPS Panel.
I am informed that the Panel reached their decision to cancel Lisa B-Bs membership of BPS (although she was no longer a member) without giving reasons for so doing. Surely in any decision-making process the process of reasoning and a clear statement of the reasons precedes the conclusions and justifies the decisions made?. In this instance, the decision was made and then they began searching around for their reasons? (Come back Franz Kafka, all is forgiven).
Such simple and logical processes are obviously beyond the competence of the hierarchy of the BPS and raises serious questions regarding how these people who comprised the Panel were able to get into the psychological profession in the first place and about their own standards of practice.
I think that every psychologist in the UK who is in membership of the BPS must seriously question whether they would wish to continue in membership of such an organisation. Firstly that this case of Lisa B-B has seriously damaged the reputation and standing of the BPS and secondly, that they themselves may be subjected to the same injudicious processes and have their careers wrecked by this incompetent body, especially if they should have the temerity to challenge an unsound and unscientific theory. Academic freedom and the right to a contrary view clearly does not exist in the BPS.
The BPS would desperately like to become a regulatory and disciplinary body under statute and with the support of the government, but this case has clearly shown that they are far from being competent to fulfil such a role and I’m sure the government will have taken careful note of their incompetence and irrationality, when they are already facing similar problems with the GMC.
Charles Pragnell Dip.S.W.., L.R.C.C.
The BPS is not a regulatory nor disciplinary body for the profession of psychology.in Great Britain. It is merely a membership-based association and all they can do therefore within their powers is to cancel the membership of Lisa Blakemore-Brown but as she resigned from their membership over five years ago, then such a course of action is not open to them. No doubt they will seek to redress this by making a rule that they can still examine complaints against a former member if the complaint was made during that person’s membership of the BPS. In this case it was not made during Lisa’s membership and therefore there are no lawful grounds for their jurisdiction in these matters. If the BPS were now to make such a rule it could not be applied retrospectively. That would be contrary to legal principles and particularly the principle of natural justice. (You cannot be tried for an offence that was not against the law at the time it was committed).
In effect the BPS has no jurisdiction whatsoever in this matter and as such therefore, the Panel had no legal or administrative basis or validity and the appearance of Lisa B-B before their Panel must therefore have been of her own volition and solely to help them to clear up this matter. The BPS seem to have been unable to find any evidence to support the complaints made against her and the complaints must therefore be assumed to have been groundless and malicious but the BPS appear to have then changed tack and sought to question her fitness to practice on health grounds. This secondary issue appears to have been introduced after it was found there was no evidence on which to consider the original complaints.
I am informed that although she did not have to do so, Lisa B-B agreed to submit a mental health assessment to the BPS Panel and quite naturally such assessment by a respected psychiatrist found her to be totally mentally competent. I would suggest that such would probably not be the case if applied to the BPS Panel.
I am informed that the Panel reached their decision to cancel Lisa B-Bs membership of BPS (although she was no longer a member) without giving reasons for so doing. Surely in any decision-making process the process of reasoning and a clear statement of the reasons precedes the conclusions and justifies the decisions made?. In this instance, the decision was made and then they began searching around for their reasons? (Come back Franz Kafka, all is forgiven).
Such simple and logical processes are obviously beyond the competence of the hierarchy of the BPS and raises serious questions regarding how these people who comprised the Panel were able to get into the psychological profession in the first place and about their own standards of practice.
I think that every psychologist in the UK who is in membership of the BPS must seriously question whether they would wish to continue in membership of such an organisation. Firstly that this case of Lisa B-B has seriously damaged the reputation and standing of the BPS and secondly, that they themselves may be subjected to the same injudicious processes and have their careers wrecked by this incompetent body, especially if they should have the temerity to challenge an unsound and unscientific theory. Academic freedom and the right to a contrary view clearly does not exist in the BPS.
The BPS would desperately like to become a regulatory and disciplinary body under statute and with the support of the government, but this case has clearly shown that they are far from being competent to fulfil such a role and I’m sure the government will have taken careful note of their incompetence and irrationality, when they are already facing similar problems with the GMC.
Charles Pragnell Dip.S.W.., L.R.C.C.
It was interesting to read about the Madrid Declaration by the World Psychiatric Association as posted by pierre-joseph proudhon, given that it was psychiatrists employed by the BPS in the Blakemore-Brown case who claimed her to be paranoid when they had never even met her.
Does the WPA Declaration apply to British Psychiatrists or is that something else this country has abandoned?
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