This is a short post about professional labels, clinical expertise and epistemic authority. I start with a person who has attracted attention recently for bizarre social media posts in response to Qantas airline’s decision to make vaccinations a legal requirement for passengers boarding their flights. The core of her argument is simple: ‘will someone please think about the kids??’, with baseless claims about vaccinations being harmful to child development (no evidence is presented that the airline is actually demanding that children be vaccinated). She joins a chorus of conservative voices disguising anti-vax dogma through claims that measures like these are discriminatory and authoritarian. So far so 2021.
The person behind these allegations labels herself a ‘media psychologist’. She also runs a ‘well-being’ app that from its Twitter page looks innocuously anti-septic. Her tweets have attracted the attention of psychology twitter and Private Eye mag – the former calling her a charlatan and the latter pointing out that British laws and the membership rules of the British Psychological Society are sufficiently wide to create loopholes that allow pretty much anyone to call themselves a psychologist.
So I ‘m writing this blog as a historian who has done a bit of research on the history of who can call themselves a psychologist (or in other words, the history of membership of the British Psychological Society). It’s really interesting stuff once you disappear down the wormhole – I hope below to summarise the essentials. My own run-in recently with a mental health well-being organisation that had similar dark stuff going on beneath an anti-septic wellness facade spurred me into making some of the connections here.
To begin with… whilst researching the history of psychology and social work a few years ago in the Wellcome archive, I found references to correspondence I couldn’t find in the catalogue. After a few enquiries, I was told that a substantial set of letters and correspondence on ‘medical psychology’ had been lost when the BPS bestowed their archives to the Wellcome sometime around the turn of the millennium. Being a relatively junior historical researcher, I was excited at the prospect of opening up an archive that would not have been viewed for twenty or so years. Although at first glance its contents didn’t look earth shatteringly revelatory, my relative naivety made me find worth in material that may well have been dismissed by a more seasoned researcher.
It quickly became apparent that the contents of this ‘lost’ archive documented an interesting nugget of history: the dissolving of the ‘Medical Section’ of the BPS, which had been in existence since its early years, had broader implications for the relationship between psychology, psychiatry and medicine. In brief, the medical section had been a motley crew of doctors, physicians and psychoanalysts, principally those of a Jungian inclination who had been largely ostracised by the Freudian dominated British Psychoanalytic Association. The section acted as an intermediary between psychiatrists and asylum managers of the Medico-Psychological Association (the precursor of the Royal College of Psychiatrists), emerging clinical psychologists, and general medicine.
Members of the Medical Section included H.V. Dicks, the interviewer of Rudolph Hess, and Tavistock Clinic founder Hugh Crichton Miller. Many beyond the section considered its membership criteria more stringent than the rest of the BPS, primarily because they viewed membership criteria of the rest of the British Psychological Society as being too liberal, with loop holes that could be exploited by shysters and frauds. This was partly because the society had loosened criteria during the 1920s to help expand the society to bring in membership revenue. In response, the Medical Section had engineered a membership process whereby new applicants needed to gain a recommendation from an existing member and receive the majority of votes of the eight members of the section’s council. Those in charge of the medical section had gamed this system to ensure the most of its members were medically trained or had significant clinical experience.
This move became a bone of contention during the 1950s with accusations that the medical section were elitist and clique-y. Emerging figures in clinical psychology, like Eysenck, saw the section as a professional interloper that had carved out a little niche within the principle representative organisation for psychologists. Pressure was put on the Medical Section to loosen their membership criteria, but the council resisted, which spurred debate on what the need was for the Section in the first place. Ultimately, this lead to end of medical psychology by the end of the decade (an article with more on this was published in the History and Philosophy Section of the British Journal of Psychology, you can read it here).
As the Private Eye snippet also points out, anxieties about who could call themselves a psychologist are then nothing new. The medical section’s drive to reserve its own status was in the face of anxieties that anyone could call themselves a psychologist. They sought to reserve the status of medical psychology, and in the face of challenges to membership procedures, preferred to let the section wither rather than admit anyone into their club. The problems with membership of the society also have a long history that go all the way back to its origins and its switch from a learned society of few members – interestingly enough including Wittgenstein, the Hegelian F.H. Bradley, and the neurologist Henry Head (Lovie, 2001) – to one with broader appeal and membership. As those familiar with the history of psychology will note, the origins of the discipline mirror that of the early membership of the society, with philosophers, anthropologists, physicians and writers being influential in its development.
At the same time, there are those within the profession and beyond who are concerned about the profession’s label being abused. ‘Psychology’ and ‘psychologist’ bring respect and authority – I guess that’s part of the allure of it being used by people like at the centre of this Twitterstorm that inspired this post. As mentioned, she describes herself as a media psychologist: until recently she appeared on a daytime television programme and writes for Closer mag, providing inoffensive self help gems and tips. The well-being app also appears inoffensive – promising increased ‘productivity’ and stuff like that, so far so bland. Her videos on true crime perhaps give better clues into the reactionary anti-vaxxing stuff – they promise a forensic dissection of the psychology of murderers, but in reality don’t seem to do much more than reinforce some misleading stereotypes on criminal behaviour and provoke the viewer with graphic details designed to shock. But it is on her twitter feed that the anti-vaxxing stuff appears, for instance this video.
This chimes with a recent experience that I will end with. This organisation tweeted at me asking if I would interested in writing for them. As in other blog articles, academia is often a depressing and thankless line of work, so it is flattering when someone (anyone, please!) takes interest in your work, but you always need to be a bit careful, so I took a bit of a look over their website. They seemed to be a sort of mental wellness promotion agency, but something seemed weird – like the app, the website was plastic and squeaky clean, and promised to ’empower people by publishing mental health stories and hosting events’. After reading on their site that they didn’t seek to empower people by actually paying them for their labour, I had more or less drafted my reply, but thought I would check out who ran the agency – if the people who ran it were doing interesting work then maybe it would be worth it. Now I don’t want to go into too much detail, but I quickly noticed that the founder had been banned from Twitter so decided that this was reason enough to not have my stuff posted on their website. After taking a closer look at the sort of stuff they published, I noticed that there was some weird stuff in there, with articles like ‘Rampant Liberalism Among Universities Causes Psychological Distress‘ and ‘Stop Celebrating Obesity‘, with others complaining about no platforming – beneath the shiny veneer, there is seemed to be a politically right-wing editorial in operation.
I decided to pitch something anyway just to make sure I was right: I had nothing to lose and being naturally inclined to self doubt, I wanted to make sure this was an editorial decision and not an oversight. Anyway, it would chime with work I’m doing on the history of universal psychopathology and cross-cultural understandings of mental disorders. Since they had expressed interest in one of my blog posts that discussed psychiatry and film, I thought I would pitch that through a discussion of the recent film His House, which I think does a great job of articulating complex issues surrounding cross-cultural mental disorders. Immediately they replied saying they were not interested, confirming my suspicions (see appendix!). For all the statements on freedom of speech and providing an open platform, they shied away from an article that mentioned decolonising the literature, labelling it too ‘political’, a typical and not so new ploy of a ruling class, with examples coming from repressive governments on both side of the Iron Curtain.
I do not mean to make generalisations on a whole profession based on two admittedly cherry picked examples. At the same time, psychology cannot enjoy the prestige it has without some kind of quality control – it seems duplicitous to receive the adulation and then allow people with an undergrad degree to build careers calling themselves something that in many people’s eyes is equivalent to a doctor. Professional membership of the BPS has, as research demonstrates, a long history, with anxieties about shysters and frauds arising as the profession came to maturity. In the historical case I examine, clinical authority, membership regulation, exclusivity and epistemic authority clash with desires for psychology to be a broad church, like its early days. In both of these cases, publicity material carefully uses ‘psychology’ in meandering and manipulative ways to infer a false authority, and it is up to the law and organisations like the BPS to step in to regulate this more carefully.
Appendix (I realise that this is a private conversation but quite frankly I think I am doing a public service for ECRs whose time is already scarce):
Kevin Matthew Jones 