Trial By Error: A Plea to Fiona Godlee on a Familiar Topic

When I was less ill, I was seconded to a committee on child and domestic abuse issues. It was not as rare as you would think for a psychologist or others to persuade vulnerable adult women that what was really sexual abuse would help them.

We also know that far too many adults finagle themselves into a situation where they can casually do things that confuse a child but are abuse. That is the reason for all the safeguards. Abusers congregate where there are opportunities so secret training will attract them like flies.

I wish I did not know what I know; you cannot see the world in the same way again. This whole situation appals me.

 

Right. I

Exactly. It does happen. People in positions of power are more easily able to abuse people and then cover it up.

 

And then to cover up the cover up. As we have seen this week.

 

I fully agree with the argument that children should not be encouraged to keep secret anything that happened in a LP training session, but even before we get to considering this, there needs to be assurances that the trainers involved were CRB/DBS checked. Do we know this?

It is a purely practical question not a matter of opinion. Has anyone asked it?

Were the usual safeguarding procedures followed with regard to the adults who had access to the children?

The small charity I was involved with used to buy time from a major children’s charity to develop appropriate procedures which included police checking even those who had access to reports about the children.

 

The therapy was conducted 1:1 but is it clear the parents weren't present?

(I seem to remember they were for the initial recruiting interviews in school)

 

Thanks Trish of course - brain fog

 

I have to agree with Jonathan here. Everyone is bombarded full-time with information--including clinicians. One of the things I'm trying to do, especially with the open letters and the cc-ing, is to create a public record available to review when this all comes tumbling down. I want to make sure at least some people dealing with this stuff in UK cannot say they haven't heard or seen anything about this stuff. The open letters have also been helpful in getting some press coverage. I have found that just pointing out mistakes doesn't work, especially if the mistakes just appear on Virology Blog. It's great, as Jonathan says, that the PACE/CBT/GET critiques are now all in the peer-reviewed literature now, with more coming.

I had obviously targeted the LP study before, but now with this uncritical mention in the review it seemed imperative to take it up a level. I also plan to write directly to the senior author and the journal pointing out the problem.

 

It's not brainwashing, it's cognitive cleansing!

 

An appalling treatment of children - coaching them to deny their experiences, and lie. And, to hide what goes on in this "treatment" process - is one of the main pillars of child abuse, and cults. Very concerning that a well known and influential medical journal, and all connected with these studies, would condone such treatment of children.

Re the statement about low bias, if something is for sale - there is bias, and lots of it.

 

I don't blame the review authors for not seeing an editor's note that does not seem to have been meant to be seen, given where it was placed. It is a different matter if the review authors fail to address this issue now that they have been alerted to it.

 

I am reminded of this quote that i have posted elsewhere on the forum

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/20...-prozac-social-environmental-connections-hari

Finally psychiatry has a dark underbelly to its history that a few have written about but have never publicly been acknowledged or atoned for

 

Is it simply the three authors who might, or might not, have been expected to see the editor's note? Would there have been peer reviewers, (and it would be interesting to ponder who they might have been) supposedly familiar with the subject matter? What about the editor him/herself? Before giving go-ahead and publishing claims that some apparently absurd, secret process is medically effective does one not take reasonable measures to check the veracity of the claim? That should include not only reading the article but also scanning any ancillary pages.

The man on the Clapham omnibus would have doubts about this quack process. Do not sophisticated readers of medical literature have doubts? The senior author apparently studied at Bristol. Is there no grapevine by which people hear what is going on?

 

When they first did that it came across as underhanded lip service, so they could just claim to have done something, and their inaction since shows that to be true I think.

 

I think we are all agreed that the review authors should have realised the problems with LP. A grapevine is also highly likely to exist. However, that still leaves the possibility that they were unaware of David's existence until now. All that I think David and I are pointing out is that they cannot really be blamed for not noticing his work up until now - if that was the case.

 

The issue of peer reviewers not challenging the uncritical mention of LP is important though. It seems to show that biomedical science exists within an intellectual framework where quality is irrelevant. And that of course has direct implications for the impact on guidelines.

 

All I was trying to do was indicate that the number of people who failed to notice, and who should have done, is possibly double that first discussed.

 

Yes, and I think that is a very good point.