Her Name is Alice

One of the things that really shone through for me in the book is the journey that you have been on-

Mm-hmm

... you know, as a human being, um, and that, and that vulnerability.

And I suppose one of the things is really thinking about your background as a psychiatrist and this very, very bizarre, very narrow view of humanity that much of medicine still has in terms of its, you know, its concept of norm referencing and, you know, what is, what is acceptable and what is normal, and realizing that actually, you know, you too had been schooled in that.

Yes, definitely.

I mean, I was studying medicine.

Section 28 was-- had just been brought out under the Margaret Thatcher government.

So homosexuality was, you know, not to be taught in schools and stuff, and it was still in ICD-9, which is, you know, the mental and behavioral disorder section of the World Health Organization classification of disor- disorders until May 1990.

I think it stopped being used in May '92, and then, you know, came out.

It came out then.

So homosexuality was, you know, treated in our lifetimes with ECT and, you know, conversion practices and aversion therapy, giving people-- you know, showing people pictures of...

You know, um, erotic pictures and, and giving them emetics and stuff like that.

It's, and it's just shocking, isn't it, to think that that was, you know, that was a mental health condition.

And, you know, for women as well, you know, hysteria and, and also the shaming of mothers, the schizophrenogenic mother or the refrigerator mother, um, all that kind of stuff.

Um, it's pretty shameful really, isn't it? And it's just has-- you know, being trans has-- was in, um, ICD-10 and has recently been removed from the mental and behavioral disorders section and put into, um, the reproductive health section, sexual health section.

But society isn't following suit and, and I've kind of gone a bit off, I've gone a bit off kill to have an eye, 'cause yes, I was taught a lot of stuff that I regret.

Oh, this is a nugget of stuff that you and your listeners probably aren't aware of.

But for example, ME.

So when I was training as a junior psychiatrist, I had a lot of education about ME being a mental health disorder and, and a depressive disorder, and we had to give big antidepressants and get them back to work, and they were just shirkers, frankly.

And one of the doctors who was involved in that, who-- Dr. Simon Wessely, he did the PACE trials, which have been-- which were all about return to exercise, and they have been quite widely discredited.

He is now, um, on the board, uh, the research oversight board for the children and young people's gender services and, um, for the puberty blocker trial, and that is really, really concerning when he has such a history of pathologizing, um, people who have unexplained medical symptoms, and it kind of feeds into that narrative that being trans isn't really real and it's all in the head, and that's really, really worrying.

And I guess most of the doctors and nurses and healthcare people listening to this wouldn't know that, and I hope that would just give a little nugget of an interesting little fact to, to make you think, "Oh, this is all a bit strange and wrong," frankly.