People say and post ‘end mental health stigma’ because they don’t realise or understand that stigma is the name of the game - stigma is the point, stigma is the process, stigma is the power, stigma is the labelling, stigma is the centre of mental health and psychiatry.

A Thread Without stigma, there are no psychiatric labels. They can’t exist.

You can only be diagnosed with a mental disorder if someone in power believes you differ sufficiently from ‘normal people’, and are therefore ‘mentally disordered’ - the entire thing is stigma and stigmatising.

One of the attitudes I test a lot in my academic research is the answer to this item:

‘I believe women and girls should report all instances of male violence in order to protect other women and girls from the same perpetrator’

I usually follow this up with the next item:

⬇️ ‘I believe that women and girls should be held responsible if they don’t report to the police, and then their perpetrator goes on to attack another woman or girl’

I’ve tested these two items on thousands of people over the last few years, and the results are always concerning.

I strongly believe that one of the biggest mistakes we ever made was psychologically and systemically separating ‘us’ from ‘them’ - ‘the clients’ from ‘the professionals’.

Here’s why ⬇️ It’s a false dichotomy. It is an illusion that serves the professional. It makes them feel powerful.

We have all been groomed into believing the ‘them’ and ‘us’ story.

There are 10 common myths about male violence towards women and girls that are holding us back from making any change:

⬇️ 1. If a woman is raped, she will fight back or scream for help

Fact: Over 70% of women who are raped will freeze and will stay silent. Fighting back is extremely rare. It is safer for many to stay still, and it is often involuntary.

The reason there is so much Christian symbolism in horror films about psychiatric wards & insane asylums is because after the witch trials were made illegal, Christian churches set up ‘insane asylums’ where the treatment for ‘hysteria’ & ‘madness’ was conversion to Christianity. It is important that we understand the enduring and devastating relationship that psychiatry and religion had/has with each other and the way we never really moved from seeing people as evil, mentally ill, insane & mad.

History is vital to our understanding of current oppression

A reminder that Elsevier made $10.5 BILLION in 2022 from selling your academic journals and articles behind paywalls, and make more profit than Amazon, Google, and Apple every year…

And paid the academics who wrote the articles $0
And paid the reviewers of the articles $0 This is why I don’t participate in the academic publishing industry. The academics are convinced that the only way their ideas will be taken seriously is if they GIVE AWAY their work to billion dollar corporations who will sell their work forever behind paywalls.

Here are two examples of smart, educated professionals who just cannot see what is right in front of their faces.

Two peer-reviewed studies, published in top-performing journals - and yet not able to see the way trauma impacts us, without suggesting psychiatric disorders. This is where we are going wrong. We are always looking for what is ‘causing’ psychiatric disorders, and despite us knowing that every psychiatric disorder in the DSM positively strongly correlates with trauma, we ignore that association and go in search of something else,

But wouldn’t it be much easier to convince us that it’s in our brains?

That our mushy tangle of billions of neurons are just malfunctioning? That we have been born with personality disorders? That we have inherited genes that make us depressed? That we have mental disorders? Wouldn’t it serve the toxic elite capitalist patriarchy to get us all not only to accept mental disorders, but celebrate them, want them, need them to ‘validate’ our suffering?

Wouldn’t it be brilliant to stop us from ever looking at the toxic environment we grow in?

It fascinates me that I make people so uncomfortable when I say that perpetrators, abusers, offenders, and bullies CHOOSE how they behave, & every action is an active choice.

People would rather lean into the belief that they have mental disorders, BPD, NPD, ASPD etc.

🧵 They complain and say my argument that these people are making choices to harm and abuse others is too simple, too basic.

So in that case:

1. Why do so many perpetrators and abusers ‘choose’ a target victim? Doesn’t that instantly demonstrate choice?

I have been crushed and destroyed several times in life, and every single time, I’ve rebuilt myself in ways that I could never have imagined.

I’ve been to the bottom of what is humanly possible for me. I’ve wished it could end many times. I’ve been terrified of life.

🧵 I’ve been tired of life. I’ve flinched at my own shadow. I’ve developed fears and phobias that I couldn’t get control of. I’ve had nightmares that have ruled my life for months. I’ve cut people off. I’ve ran away. I’ve reinvented myself. I’ve been lost.

It’s Mother’s Day.

And whilst the supermarkets cash in on the flowers and the chocolates, I want to acknowledge that motherhood is not easy at all.

In fact, I want to acknowledge how many women actually regret and resent motherhood.

🧵 When they had children, they certainly didn’t plan on becoming everyone’s live-in slave, cook, cleaner, secretary, referee, alarm clock, laundrette, shopper, counsellor, nurse, and emotional punch bag.

We have medicalised every normal emotion to the point where people don’t even use words anymore.

People say ‘my anxiety is playing up’ when they mean ‘I am scared’.

People say ‘I’m so depressed’ when they mean ‘I am very sad/low’.

🧵 One of the ways you can influence change in your own life is to mind your language. And I don’t mean swearing! Swearing is 100% fine. The world is a mess. We need something. Anyway, I digress.

Just mind how you describe yourself and others.

If you ever wonder why I fight so hard against pathologisation, it’s because I refuse to live the rest of my life as a psychologist listening to people frame people who have been abused, oppressed, marginalised, harmed, neglected and violated as:

🧵 Delusional
Attention seekers
Mentally ill
BPD
Bipolar
Psycho
OCD
Hysterical
Mental
Crazy
Histrionic
Borderline
Narcissistic
Self-obsessed
Emotionally unstable
Manic
Unreliable
Aggressive
Naive
Problematic

📣Do you feel your achievements are always an anti-climax? 📣

In some people who have been subjected to trauma, abuse, distress and control, they might seek out achievements, projects, goals and accolades that they feel will fulfil them.

🧵 During the process of striving for these positive rewards for hard work, they may imagine that when they come to the end, they will feel accomplished, complete, whole, fixed, satisfied, validated, or content.

Update on the deliberate public pathologisation of Harry - just listened to radio interview in which they said he’s ‘delusional’ and ‘paranoid’ because he ‘takes drugs’ ‘smoked some weed’ and there’s ‘evidence that people who take drugs have mental health issues.’ He is unfortunately, the next famous person to be publicly positioned as mentally ill in order to silence/discredit/humiliate them.

This pattern is becoming incredibly & unashamedly obvious.

I know it annoys people, but this is why I talk so much about pathologisation.

Let’s talk about one of the trauma processing techniques that changed my life, and has been helpful to many women and girls I’ve known:

Exception seeking.

🧵 ‘Exception seeking’ is pretty self explanatory - you are seeking the exception to the rule in your trauma responses or your coping mechanisms. When do they NOT happen?

I see after the public smear campaign of Ngozi, the racism, abuse, and disgusting comments (even from other feminists), @Sistah_Space have been found to have done absolutely nothing wrong, & the Charity Commission found zero violations.

People can only lie & smear for so long. Several women have been targeted with exactly the same tactics, found to have done nothing wrong - and women who call themselves ‘feminist’ have joined in and fuelled the hatred online and IRL.

Often, women don’t stand up for the women being abused but they’ll watch on.

Since I wrote my books, I have done lots of TV work. This is something I never expected to do.

I love it. I love meeting the teams, presenting, narrating & explaining concepts of abuse & violence to millions of viewers who may blame a victim, or misunderstand their experiences. I’ve appeared on:

- My Lover My Killer (Series 1) Ch5 and Netflix
- My Lover My Killer (Series 2) Netflix
- Celebrity Health Stories: Hannah Spearritt (ITV)
- Womanhood (BBC2)
- True Life Crime (MTV)
- When Nudes are Stolen (BBC THREE)

Did you know that the way a woman looks will impact whether her rapist or abuser is found guilty in a courtroom?

This was one of the most depressing findings of my PhD years ago.

Here’s what I learned:

🧵 time If a woman is raped or abused, and she is seen as unattractive, overweight, Black, disabled, or in some other way ‘unconventional’, she is more likely for her case to be found not guilty or to be dropped.

If someone is suddenly in your ear, trying to poison you against someone you know well, respect or love - and the things they are saying are shocking or out of character, take my advice and go straight to that person, tell them, and ask them/talk to them about it. Second, ask yourself what does the person gain by telling you all these things? Is there a connection? Motive? Jealousy? Family issue? Resentment?

What is really going on there?

Take your time, and go to the person you love/respect and talk to them openly about it.

We should stop and take a moment to consider how medicalising language traps women into lifelong ‘diagnoses’ of ‘personality disorder’.

A thread We should stop, and take a moment to consider how significant medicalising language is.

Once diagnosed with a ‘personality disorder’, you can only ever be in ‘remission’ – but never ‘cured’.

When and if you struggle again, it is seen as evidence that you have ‘relapsed’.