Thread by @DrJessTaylor

If you want to improve safeguarding and social care training, stop letting people with zero knowledge or qualifications in neuroscience and neuropsychology teach anything about the brain to professionals. The stuff I see terrifies me - some of it is hilariously wrong.

I studied neuropsychology, but didn’t specialise in it (it was originally what I wanted to do instead of forensic). But even I don’t offer training about the brain or neuroscience, and I always call my best friend (neuroscientist, PhD) and check my thinking or theories with her.

This often results in us both literally laughing and/or shaking our heads at training courses, speeches and videos for everyone from CPS to local authorities about the brain, trauma and neuroscience.

Please check the trainer is an actual professional in neuroscience/psychology.

For them to be teaching about neuropsychology or related topics, whether you like it or not, you need to be sourcing training from academics with doctorates in that area. Don’t rely on pop psychology for something so important, and so complex.

I once went to a speech by a well known person who delivers on ‘trauma and the brain’ and it was honestly the biggest bunch of shit I had ever heard, not one bit of it was right. I thought I was going bonkers. I rang my friend and talked it through I sure enough, it was bollocks

Yet, in a room of hundreds of police, social workers, teachers etc. No one in that room knew that what they were being taught was totally confused, recycled stuff the person had probably read somewhere and then tried to teach. Who would have known? The commissioners wouldn’t.

I met some professionals working in CSE a year ago who directly told me that they had been taught

‘There’s a part of the brain at the top of the head (points to head) where the abuser controls the children, like a microchip’

I literally nearly spat my drink out.

Watched a talk in which a keynote speaker claimed that there was

‘No executive functioning when children are in trauma, and they only use their ‘reptilian brain’, with no cortical processing’

I don’t even know where to start with how totally wrong and impossible that is.

I’ve seen SO many bad explanations of how the brain responds to crisis and trauma, in which it apparently completely skips any form of executive functioning. It’s just impossible. That’s impossible.

I’ve been in the room where trainers have blamed children for being sexually abused and exploited by saying

‘The teenage brain is addicted to risk taking, it’s like heroin. They need the risk and the endorphin release, so they make risky choices which lead to them being raped’

I’ve had to spend so much time undoing bad safeguarding training in local authorities and police forces all over the UK because some cowboy trainers have come in, lied about their expertise, gift of the gab, and then trained hundreds of people in total bullshit about brains.

Some professionals in UK have been trained that children who have been abused will have permanent damage to their brains and cognitive processing and that they will basically never recover.

I’ve also come across training to social workers which says that children are ‘hard wired’ to respond to rape and abuse in certain ways - and that they have no executive functioning at all. Don’t even get me started on the ‘hard wired’ bullshit.

The thing is, when you challenge this stuff, people look at you like you’re wrong. Because they are so used to being fed this ultra easy watered down shitty brain science around trauma that when you explain reality to them, they sort of look at you like you’re a dickhead

People don’t like you saying

‘Well actually, studies around that are tiny samples, non-generalisable findings, very young topic area and we can’t really apply any of those findings to practice’

Cos, that doesn’t give them a neat tidy answer does it?

There’s also seemingly zero awareness in any of these ‘trainers’ about the counter evidence to pretty much everything they teach. But of course they aren’t aware, because they don’t actually know the topic area.

Most of what they teach are debunked neuromyths

Anyway, better end this impromptu thread by saying

- check your trainer actually has qualifications in what they are training

- remain critical of any training that dumbs down neuroscience

- red flag as soon as someone says ‘reptilian brain’ ‘hard wired’ or ‘teen brain’

Huge red flag if the trainer says that trauma responses are ‘hard wired’ or ‘skip’ cortical functioning or executive functioning.

Huge red flag if trainer starts generalising about ‘teenage brains’ - and then uses it to blame teenagers for pretty much anything

Red flag if the trainer at any point uses their fist to ‘show’ you the brain and then claims their thumb is the ‘reptilian’ brain and that the victim of abuse/trauma doesn’t use the rest of their hand ‘brain’

Ultimate red flag if trainer claims that ‘memories’ are ‘stored’ in different sections of the brain like a fuckin filing cabinet lmfao

Stop giving front line professionals shit training.

That’s my like take-home from this thread.

Stop underestimating their intelligence and capacity for complex topics and stop paying chancers ££££ for terrible training