this is my critique of the IAPT paper published in the current issue of the British Journal of Clinical Psychology, and the Editor has just accepted it for publication. Wakefield et al (2020) will be invited to respond.
Not quite sure when it will see the light of day, but hopefully it is at least the beginnings of open discussion.
An area I’ve not touched on, in my paper is the effect of IAPT on its staff. Some are taking legal action against IAPT for bullying and have highlighted massive staff turnover. But it is very difficult for them to go into detail with litigation pending. Others are suffering in silence to become financially secure enough to leave. Staff are in an invidious position, at best they might hope for an out of Court settlement. But unsurprisingly there is no great Organisational demand for whistleblowers. Gagging clauses it appears are still about and I heard of one being used recently by an employer against a victim of the Manchester Arena bombing.
We need a national independent inquiry not only about the speed with which lockdown was imposed, but also about what has been happening in IAPT. But today I was talking with a survivor of the 1989 Hillsborough Football disaster, that I’ve kept in touch with since shortly afterwards, and we reflected on how long it has taken to get anywhere. He was too exhausted to follow through on the Statement he gave that was doctored by the police.
Bullying tends to centre on what the Organisations contend are ‘one or two bad apples’, which at a push they might make some compensation for, to avoid adverse publicity, and without admitting liability. But I think there is a bigger phenomenon of Organisational Abuse that operates in an insidious way akin to racism, that needs to be called out.
Dr Mike Scott