The Doctor's "God Complex" ~ and How the NHS Defends Them as Infallible 'Gods'
So who are the two apparently top notch psychiatrists who failed to diagnose my Asperger's syndrome? And why did Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust not want to admit they could have got it wrong, even in the face of cast iron proof that they had? Were they so infallible and expert that it was impossible? Did they really have a 100% success rate and never get it wrong? Was their autism training so 'gold standard' and their years of autism experience so vast, that the very idea simply couldn't be entertained? Or is it that NHS PALS will always defer to a doctor, just because they are a doctor? Or just that the NHS will always defend their failures no matter what? Because the PALS reply to me, repeated the content of Critchley's letter - a letter which I have already shown to contain evidence of utter lies (Critchley incredibly claiming that clinical tools are "chiefly used for research"! This false claim was clearly to defend their failure to use a single test in my ASD assessments, the only other option is incompetence, if that is what he really believed) and wilful misleading. Mind you, if PHSO did their job properly they would have identified this fact. In just the same way PHSO blindly repeated the content of Simon Street's deliberately misleading letter, (the highlighted parts are because SPFT breached NICE guidance many times over - not complying with it at all - and didn't use clinical tools or interview anyone that knew me) no matter the amount of falsehoods it contained. And what's even more unbelievable about PHSO's cover-up of my complaint, is that Rob Behrens himself said this in an interview:
Behrens himself personally reviewed my case and rubber-stamped his staff's blatantly erroneous (or should I say dishonest) decision, in favour of a Trust who had done exactly what Mr Behrens criticised in this interview! What utter hypocrisy.
Let's have a look at the autism credentials of Dr Nick Medford and Prof Hugo Critchley, shall we, but first take a look at this 2017 SPFT "Partnership Matters" newsletter in which their Worthing clinic lead Bettina Stott (the person who they told me would reassess me in 2014, before they reneged and lied to me) says: "At the moment I think staff are a little bit scared of autism and I want to change that." (P21). I don't know about scared of it, in my experience they are incompetent at it.Interestingly, the newsletter also says: "That’s where Bettina Stott comes in. She is the Trust’s only Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) specialist practitioner." (P20). So as that's the case, they are admitting the Brighton Neurobehavioural Clinic where they send so many adults to be assessed (and who failed to diagnose me - twice), is not ASD specialist!
Dr Nick Medford's Google scholar citations:
Precisely zero autism research articles out of 84.
I couldn't find a Wikipedia page on Dr Nick Medford, nor a CV (I will update if I do). But his research history makes it clear, that autism spectrum disorders are not on his radar at all. He clearly was employed at the Neurobehavioural Clinic, solely on the basis of being a psychiatrist and not whether he'd had any ASD training or not, it's simply that being a psychiatrist, he was legally qualified to assess and diagnose autism! Yet psychiatrists in training don't have to even take a module on autism (and if they do, it's about children!). He and Critchley focus on brain imaging most of the time. Running the Neurobehavioural Clinic is just an income for them.
Medford's areas of interest focus heavily on dissociative episodes and depersonalisation/derealisation, with some work on psychosis, schizophrenia, brain injury and anxiety - not autism.
So what about the colleague who ratified Dr Medford's opinion, (with Medford sitting alongside - which they all later denied) at my sham 'second opinion' at the Neurobehavioural Clinic (yes - you read that correctly, I wasn't sent to an independent clinic as I should have been)?
Professor Hugo Critchley's Google scholar citations:
Only 3.19% out of 501 research articles are related to autism and only 3 of that 3.19%, aren't on brain imaging, and of those, precisely nothing to do with the psychiatric side and zero on autism assessment and diagnosis.
Critchley's areas of interest focus a lot on tic disorders, Tourettes and anxiety. So it's highly notable therefore, that in my assessment report, he labelled my autistic stimming as more akin to a tic disorder and labelled my sensory processing disorder symptoms as anxiety!
"Critchley went to the University of Liverpool, attaining degrees in Physiology (BSc 1987) and Medicine (MB ChB 1990). After a period as a junior doctor in Walton and Fazakerley Hospitals, he pursued doctorate training, studying cross-modal sensory processing in the prefrontal cortex at the Department of Experimental Psychology University of Oxford(DPhil 1996).
In 1995, Critchley entered training in psychiatry at St George's Hospital and then Kings College Institute of Psychiatry (now IoPPN), where he began using neuroimaging methods. In 1998, he moved to UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology to pursue research on mind-brain-body interactions, working between the Functional Imaging Laboratory (Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience) and the clinical Autonomic Unit at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. He completed his general training as a neuropsychiatrist in 2003 and gained a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship in Clinical Science in 2004.
Critchley was a principal at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience and group leader at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, before he was appointed Foundation Chair in Psychiatry at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in 2006. Critchley is Co-Director (with Anil Seth) of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, and heads the Brighton and Sussex Medical School Department of Neuroscience. In 2013, Critchley was the recipient of an Advance Grant from the European Research Council.[3] Clinically, Critchley helped established a service for adult neurodevelopmental conditions at the Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, where he works as a psychiatrist."
Note: the Neurobehaviour Clinic was started in 2007. So had been running for two years when I was assessed there.
"Hugo trained in Physiology and Medicine in the University of Liverpool. After internship in medicine and surgery, Hugo undertook a research doctorate degree in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford."
So, as you can see, no training in autism, a heavy focus on neuroimaging (which has remained throughout his research career), yet despite this he was allowed to set up an NHS neurobehavioural clinic, for assessing and diagnosing ADHD and ASD, purely on the basis of being a psychiatrist.
YET BOTH HE AND HIS PSYCHIATRIST COLLEAGUE DR NICK MEDFORD, FAILED TO DIAGNOSE BOTH MY (SUBSEQUENTLY DIAGNOSED) AUTISM AND MY ADHD DESPITE CONDUCTING TWO ASD ASSESSMENTS (WHICH ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DIFFERENTIAL TO IDENTIFY ANY OTHER CONDITIONS AT THE SAME TIME)!!!
Read more about their research interests on my Twitter thread here:
Proof that psychiatrists don't all train in autism, as detailed on this page and even where they do, it's in children!
Search on the Royal College of Psychiatrists for yourself: https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/search?indexCatalogue=search&searchQuery=autism&wordsMode=AllWords If psychiatrists all trained in autism by default there wouldn't training courses for them in it.
This post may be updated as I get more information.
