Lenny Cornwall

Doctor for 39 years; Consultant Psychiatrist for 28 years; @TEWV for 25 years.

[Lenny Cornwall @lennycornwall]

https://t.co/LKxCy6c7oL

[Lenny Cornwall @lennycornwall]

Just caught up with the @TheBMA council election results. Absolute farce. 5.3% turnout of 189,000 eligible voters. Current chair gets back on with 224 first preference votes. . Current residents strike leader gets on with 166 votes. That’s not what I call a mandate for anything.

[Lenny Cornwall @lennycornwall]

@treesey My question to Julia Gilliard would be: “just as a thought experiment, if Kevin Rudd now came out as a trans woman, would that mean you weren’t the first female PM of Australia?”

[Trevor Phillips @TrevorPTweets]

My thoughts on the @EHRC guidance laid yesterday; this is not about non-existent "rights". It is about the safety of women - mothers, sisters, wives, daughters. We men need to hear their voices. Virginia Woolf : "Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes".

My intro on @TimesRadio yesterday:

Where I live there are two different routes to and from the tube station. One, let’s call it Acacia Avenue, is quiet and residential. The other, London Road, is a busy major route with lots of traffic. At all times of the day, I automatically head for Acacia Road. It’s just much nicer.

The women in my family, on the other hand, will never willingly make that walk after dark. They live with an anxiety that most men find it hard to imagine, and frankly, rarely think about unprompted.

Last year 739,000 women were sexually assaulted in Britain. Virtually all such assaults - nine out of ten - are perpetrated by men. One in four women have been attacked at some time in their lives. Acacia Avenue is exactly the sort of place in which most women fear that they become vulnerable, and they are right.

As the author Virginia Woolf once wrote " Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes".

I think this is the right context in which to understand the furore over the guidance being laid today by the government, over the meaning of the words man and woman when it comes to providing services and facilities in workplaces.

Many men think this is about a rather arcane dispute about who gets to use what loo. For their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, it isn’t.

In a previous life, as Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I had a hand in writing this country’s equality laws, in particular the 2010 Equality Act. It never occurred to any of us that there could be any confusion or dispute over the meaning of the words man and woman. But it has taken a decade of campaigning, a Supreme Court judgement and now hundreds of pages of guidance to settle the issue.

This is not about so called trans rights, which are completely unaffected by this guidance, since no-one has ever had the right to walk into a changing room reserved for teenage girls.

What it does mean is that women and girls are guaranteed the protection they deserve, and that their safety, which we spent half a decade drafting law to ensure, is protected.

But the whole business illuminates some serious issues in our politics.

First that many of our institutions, in spite of the fact that they always knew what the right thing to do was, decided to ignore the fears of their women customers and employees, under pressure from noisy pressure groups. Instead, the people who were supposed to be the grown ups behaved as though the law said what campaigners wanted it to say, rather than what it actually said. They settled for what they hoped would be a quiet life.

In a democracy, there’s little point in Parliament deciding anything if the law is then made an ass by activists intimidating bosses in companies, schools, universities and the media into doing something different.

Second, at the heart of the campaign to undermine the Equality Act is an idea that we specifically rejected in 2010, so called self-identification. That is to say, that it should be up to the individual to decide whether they have what’s called a protected characteristic - are you male or female, are you black or white. The problem is that self-ID would destroy the operation of any law against discrimination.

Look, it would almost certainly have been to my advantage as a young man to self-identify as a handsome, white public schoolboy. None of those things is true of me. And at various points I am pretty sure it’s been to my disadvantage. It is certainly statistically likely to have been to my disadvantage.

But according to the logic of those who say that self-ID should be the rule and that anyone should be able to decide for themselves whether they are male or female, black or white or Asian, were I to complain about racial discrimination, it would be difficult for anyone prove that I’d been discriminated against because of my race since anybody to whom I’d lost out could just tell the courts that they too were black.

I know that sounds like Alice in Wonderland but you can google the case where a chap, both of whose parents are white, insisted he should get money from the Arts Council because he so identified with the black struggle that he considered himself black, and everyone should accept his point of view. In the United States and Brazil exactly such outlandish claims have been made and people rewarded to the disadvantage of people actually born into minority families.

I have even been told about firms who, when reporting their gender pay gaps have put men who just happen to like wearing dresses at weekends - nothing wrong with that, let me be clear - into the female column and told their women employees that they really haven’t got anything to moan about because statistically they are paid equally, and they should get back in their box.

So today’s guidance isn’t just another tiresome chapter in culture wars. It is , I hope, a halt to the efforts to undermine one of the most important pieces of legislation on the statute book, by people who, for their own reasons, would prefer us to be living in the 1950s world of Mad Men.

[Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender @CanSG_org]

Michael Kerr will be speaking at the Rethinking Youth Gender Medicine conference 5/6 July about detransition and why he founded a website to support detransitioners https://t.co/l2QfAY8FZa
Book conference tickets here
https://t.co/ZT8rYwfcH3
Read more about Michael's journey here https://t.co/uGoW2WPhLO
Dr Stella O'Malley will talk about the Beyond Trans service that provides psychological support for detransitioners https://t.co/IdH1FlIDK8
There are a growing number of detransitioners. Two years after the Cass Review recommendation that services for detransitioners be established, and despite an official consultation on what these services should look like, there is still no action from NHS England. Detransitioners are struggling to get any help at all whether its dealing with psychological or social problems, or with physical needs related to hormones or surgery. The conference will draw together ideas about what a detransition service should look like and ensure NHS England gets the message that it can't drag its feet any longer.

[Lenny Cornwall @lennycornwall]

@ripx4nutmeg @Geri_E_L_Scott Luke 15: 7

[Lenny Cornwall @lennycornwall]

@nuwandiss Agree completely.

[POPSUK @POPSUKORG]

From one of our members in response to criticisms of the parents of Valdo Calocane #NottinghamInquiry:

“I have a loved one with an ongoing serious mental illness. I am also a carer representative at the Royal College of Psychiatrists and manage a UK support group…

[Tyler Black, MD @tylerblack32]

I remember this too! But @kemtruptweets has a lot to say here that I think people should read.

Real engagement, responsive & reflective dialogue, and principled reasoning is important for this.

I'm an avid reader of @KemtrupTweets now, and his thought influences mine.

[Lenny Cornwall @lennycornwall]

This really is an excellent article. And including the evolutionary dimension really adds value.

[Awais Aftab @awaisaftab]

When patients ask, “What disorder do I really ‘have’?” the honest answer is usually more interesting and messier than a single label. I wrote for the @nytimes on what I wish people understood about diagnoses and the nature of mental health problems.

https://t.co/ua2g6PzeAZ

[Lenny Cornwall @lennycornwall]

@Abuseumaus @paulhutcheon Why?

[Dr Terry Simpson @drterrysimpson]

My neurodivergent friends who are scientists tell me with the number of neurodivergent scientists “it is far more likely autism causes vaccines”

[Lenny Cornwall @lennycornwall]

Important new paper which could affect clinical practice - how we talk to patients about emotional distress.

[Adam Hunt @RealAdamHunt]

🚨Just published in the British Journal of Psychiatry!🚨

Evolutionary explanations of anxiety rated as 5x more useful for patients and 3x more useful for clinicians than genetic explanations of anxiety!

Our paper is the largest RCT of evolutionary explanations to date!

[Adam Hunt @RealAdamHunt]

🚨Just published in the British Journal of Psychiatry!🚨

Evolutionary explanations of anxiety rated as 5x more useful for patients and 3x more useful for clinicians than genetic explanations of anxiety!

Our paper is the largest RCT of evolutionary explanations to date!

[Lenny Cornwall @lennycornwall]

@marclaurens @luanam465 In some ways yes, in other ways no

[Lenny Cornwall @lennycornwall]

If psychiatrists love lithium it’s because patients tell us it’s been a life-saver. That feedback no doubt distorts our understanding of the evidence. I don’t think the medical model of diagnosis has much to do with it (well not for me at least).

[Dr Joanna Moncrieff @joannamoncrieff]

Psychiatrists love lithium because it is believed to be a truly targeted treatment that justifies the whole edifice of medical diagnosis. It is nothing of the sort. It is a toxic substance that suppresses nervous system activity but is too toxic to be useful as a sedative.
Its prophylactic properties have been exaggerated because it induces mania on withdrawal. Several studies show you have a higher risk of having an episode of bipolar disorder after stopping lithium than before starting it. And it does not prevent suicide, as we showed in our systematic review (Nabi et al, 2022) and has been confirmed by others.
Lithium's toxicity and lack of utility was recognised back in the 1960s and 70s, but the allure of a supposedly specific treatment overcame any sensible discussion about it. https://t.co/l1lFU7TiRW

[Lenny Cornwall @lennycornwall]

@eyefroggy Except that’s not what happens

[Lenny Cornwall @lennycornwall]

@luanam465 You can have the last word

[Lenny Cornwall @lennycornwall]

@luanam465 Inspired ignorance