Month: September 2016

Exploiting the ignorant: From quack cures to the rise of Trump

I was reading today about a man called Braco (pronounced Bratzoh) who is the centre of a personality cult that believes his “gaze” (looking out into a crowd and not speaking for 5-7 minutes) can heal health problems and have a positive impact on people’s lives and the lives of their loved ones. He does free online gaze sessions, and cheap or free local events all around the world in order to market books, DVDs and items of jewellery containing his golden “sun symbol” (many for $500+ each). I see nothing more than a man who learnt how profitable it was to be a fake healer from a mentor in a similar line of work, and took on his audience and methodologies (but without the stress of having to give any advice, or the risks of making any claims about himself that could be proven false).

Yet, nonetheless he has a plentiful audience of believers. People claim remarkably diverse experiences and attribute all kinds of random positive events in their lives to his gaze. One contributor believes that Braco cured the hearing loss of a newborn whose parent and grandparents went and gazed (and bought the $500+ trinket). Unknown to them, 13% of children identified with newborn hearing loss spontaneously recover, without any superstitious interventions. It reminds me of Tim Minchin’s fantastic song Thank You God [link contains swearing] that describes alternative explanations for a “miracle” in which a lady’s cataracts are “cured by prayer”. These include spontaneous remission, misdiagnosis, a record-keeping glitch, a lie or misunderstanding. He mentions the power of confirmation bias, groupthink, and simplistic ideas of causality based on temporal correlation (as was the case with autism and MMR). On the internet there is also the significant possibility that the review is fabricated.

The same story repeats all over the world. People are paying something for nothing more than woo in numerous seances, palm readings, psychics, mediums, crystal therapies, quack nutritionists, chiropractors, reiki, all energy therapies, coffee enemas, homeopathy, reflexology, magical weight loss products, Bach flower remedies, most vitamin supplements, magnetic items making health claims and anything that promises to “detox”. In fact, any one of us could invent our own snake-oil or novel form of quackery. And then we could invent some titles and qualifications and go on TV as an “expert” to promote them. The trade is worth in excess of £500 million per year in the UK alone. Quackwatch is a good reference point – I check doubtful health claims there, just as I check doubtful internet stories on Snopes.

We are 250 years past the enlightenment in which the ideas of reason and science supposedly gained supremacy over superstition and liberty progress and tolerance gained traction over dogma. Yet here we are in so many ways believing in magic and witch hunts. The public doesn’t understand science, is wedded to superstition, or simply has overwhelming credulity and a lack of critical thinking. This is the same culture that created plausibility for Andrew Wakefield’s weird “measles immunisation” recipe that contained his own blood and goat colostrum and that pushed an appropriately skeptical professor of complimentary and alternative medicine into early retirement because he wouldn’t endorse homeopathy and reflexology on the NHS.

No wonder in the Brexit campaign and in Trump’s electoral campaign there has been such wide deviation from the facts. The public have been told to disregard experts and go with their gut feelings, or with the guy who they could imagine meeting in the pub. That is a very poor way to judge the evidence base, and (as we have discovered with Brexit) a very easy way to be sold a pup. I can’t understand why it is not a crime, or even a disgrace, to lie to the public. Why were there not enquiries and reprimands for people who knowingly lied about the £350 million pounds a week extra that was supposed to go to the NHS if we left Europe? The answer is because we have better protections against a drink being sold with false weight loss claims than we do over vote-changing political claims.

It is interesting to explore why people don’t trust experts, and here it seems that there are a few dimensions that are important. Knowledge is only trusted if it is coupled with a perception of benevolence, and presented in words that people understand and don’t feel patronised by. It is all too easy for people with expertise to use jargon or technical terminology that makes sense in their field, for readers of the journals they publish in or in conversation with their peers, but that makes the content inaccessible to lay people, who then think of the expert as being part of an intellectual elite who are sneering down at them from a position of superiority.

And some people seem to deliberately manipulate any show of expertise to make it seem that particular commentators are not connected with the experience of ‘the man on the street’. Michael Gove (linked above) was probably the pinnacle of this, but Trump also directly appeals to this distrust of experts, and seems to bank on his audience not caring about his content being proved to be factually incorrect later down the line. Tim Minchin captured my feelings and frustrations about this rising anti-intellectualism (and Brexit and even Donald Trump in passing) here [contains swearing, I’d recommend watching from 24 to 35 mins in].

But it is becoming more and more common. I was listening to the radio earlier this week and flicked over from Radio 4 to Radio 2 to hear the host Vanessa Feltz tell a labour party spokesman that the word “narrative” when used in context, with four repetitions of the word “story”, was jargon that was beyond her and her listeners and proudly proclaimed that it was similar to the teaching that went over her head at university (listen at 15:00 for just over a minute). She seemed to want him to pitch his vocabulary lower, whilst showing her own insecurity about wanting to be clever by using the word “elucidate” herself in her instruction to him to do so! It was particularly notable in contrast to Radio 4, where the words that she criticised, such as “managerial”, “technocratic” and “narrative” would not stand out in the discussion or require definition. Maybe it is just a mark of my age and changing listening preferences, but I would always prefer to have conversation pitched at the level that I learn from, than patronisingly dumbed down.

It is also a reminder that, despite a natural tendency to consider ourselves pretty much average at everything, very often we fail to recognise our own levels of skew within the population. My politics are left of average, my income and intellect above average, just as my physical fitness is below average. But this deviation from the norm does not stand out to me as I have sought out a peer group of other professional, intellectual lefties. In my peer group, the remain preference was so strong that the vote to leave the EU was quite a shock!

Similarly, despite having written a book to try to make the scientific knowledge around attachment and developmental trauma accessible to care givers and professionals from other fields, and working hard to make psychological knowledge available through this blog and various forum posts, not everyone finds my writing accessible. For every ten positive views of the book there is one person who feels I pitched it too high. I’m sure I’m as guilty as the next person of knowing the meaning I intend to convey, and therefore not always recognising when I have not communicated this effectively. So please do point it out to me!

 

 

Starting over: Selecting offices and staffing

After the stress of my last blog about problems with the offices we were leaving in Milton Keynes*, I was keen to make sure that we set up a base I felt really comfortable with up in Derbyshire, and gather a great team up here. I viewed a lot of potential offices and tried to really get a good gut feeling about where we would belong. The plan is to rent an office or set of offices that has scope to expand if we secure the grant we have applied for, or other external funding that lets us expand more quickly.

The first place I viewed was a serviced office centre. The rooms were pleasant and good value (less than half the price per square foot that I had been paying further south) but the site was quite generic and a looked a bit warehouse-like. More importantly it was on the far side of a market town with quite a lot of traffic, and further from the motorway. I then viewed an office suite in a pretty restored station building on a quiet branch line. Despite this being my favourite option, it turned out only a single room was available there, and the tenants who had the rest of the building were spilling out into all the public areas, which were filled with their storage and materials. Plus the room didn’t have an individual lock – and I’ve learnt to be wary of that!

The next two places advertised were full, despite having road signage, listings on Rightmove and vacancies marked on their websites. The next place was a dilapidated shop with offices above, but transpired to be under offer, and to need a lot more work than would be possible in our timescales. The next a single room retail space, with no sink or loo unless you went into the next door building, that was quite a walk from the nearest parking. A small office building for sale, but cramped in a back street in a town slightly further from my preferred areas. Then a lovely large set of rooms in a very smart building with dedicated parking and reception facilities, that became less attractive as the already high rent then gained a service charge, and charges for the phone/broadband and was then ruled out by access only being permitted when members of staff from the main business were present, and the building being locked up at 3.30pm on a Friday!

Then a small set of offices that were a bit too far away and had a contract with an excessive notice period. Next was a bright but slightly run down set of rooms over a letting agent, at a good value inclusive price, but with slightly dingy rear access. Then we viewed another office building that was for sale, but was too big, over priced and came with only a single parking space. Then another serviced office building in a massive complex that contained function rooms and all sorts of entertainment facilities, but had limited parking and was rather dirty and dated looking. Again there were all sorts of extra charges for phone/internet, insurance and a per person charge per month for furniture. However, some of the rooms were nice, and they did come with two parking spaces right outside. Whilst viewing we also met a potential business advisor and heard about the exciting collaborations within the complex, but somehow it just didn’t feel right.

It is always very interesting when your head and your guts give you different messages. Logically the last place had the most to offer, yet it was the rooms above the letting agent that gave me the best feeling, and the owner talked the least and was the most straightforward. A bit of negotiation later, and he had agreed to redecorate the rooms, provide some furniture and jet-wash the rear access, as well as hanging a door so that we could still access the toilets and kitchen, but other staff and customers could not come up to our offices uninvited. Having learnt my lesson, this time the repairs will be specified on the contract as being completed before rent is due!

I also interviewed for a new assistant psychologist for our Liverpool contract. The project is going to be in collaboration with my peer supervisor, so that feels like an extra benefit to me, as I get to spend more time with him. We even had fun interviewing, in the lovely Quaker building in the town centre, and ate delicious food at Mowglis. When it came to the applicants we interviewed, we were really pleased to be spoilt for choice. We felt that three of the candidates would have been great for the job, and were able to select someone we are really comfortable to add to the team.

I have also put up an advert for a new administrator. Having had both brilliant and awful experience of non-clinical staff in the past, I wanted to make sure we recruit the former. This person will be the hub in the centre of the business, around which the rest of us rotate, and they need a mixture of administrative, financial and interpersonal skill, with the ability to keep me and the business organised! So I put a lot of effort into the job description and person specification. It is the first time I have used online recruitment advertising, so fingers crossed we find the right person. The applications seem to be numerous and impressive, so we are off to a good start.

Also during the summer I met an inspirational potential collaborator, so I am hopeful that I can negotiate a productive way we can work together, whether he joins us as a part time COO, or whether we make a service level agreement between our two organisations. I only hope that I can find a few more clinical psychologists to join the team, as we continue to have more requests for our input than we can fulfil.

Finally, keep your fingers crossed for me, as I will hopefully hear back soon about the DfE grant that I applied for to expand our pilot of outcome measurement and our psychologically informed care pathway!

*Thankfully I have now resolved the issues with Regus, so I have edited the previous blog to reflect this. I don’t normally edit things I have posted, because I prefer to write honestly and leave what I say on the record. However, it was a condition of the resolution that I did so. I thought long and hard about it and concluded that this blog and my social media is not the right place for making an angry noise, and that I could tell the story equally accurately in a slightly less detailed and more dispassionate way.

Reflections on renting an office from Regus

Regus rent serviced office buildings. If you want the short version of this blog it is this: I had a really bad experience and it took far too long for them to resolve it, so I would never use them again. I therefore recommend that you think very hard before you sign up with them, and ensure anyone you know who ever considers renting an office in a serviced office building does likewise.

However, they have now resolved my complaint, thanks to their head of customer service, Suzanne Jackson. So if you aren’t getting anywhere with anyone else, I’d drop her a note instead. Unfortunately it was a condition of the resolution we agreed that I would remove the majority of this blog and my other negative social media comments about them. But I’ve left the gist of the story below.

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At the time of viewing, the room offered to us was being used as a sales area and opened onto the reception with glass doors (transparent, with no lock, and a foot wide gap from floor to ceiling where a glass panel was missing). It was also full of Regus sales materials (they filled the only storage cupboard in the room, and were also in several boxes on the floor and piles on the desks). I explained we needed a room immediately in which to base some of my staff, that was suitable for conducting psychological therapy and specialist parenting assessments for the family courts (ie highly confidential work). I was told that the room would be perfect for this use. We even discussed how my administrator could move out to use the work pods during therapy sessions, so there is no doubt the sales person knew the nature of the work we undertake.

I was told that the room would be properly boxed in and secured and emptied within a fortnight, and then I’d get the first month rent free to settle in, if I signed for a year. All wifi use was included, even during the free period until the office was complete and the “moving in month”. The salesman told us to store our furniture, computers and files in a cupboard in the building from that day, as the office would be available imminently.

Unfortunately it was not. It was left open with no visual or auditory barrier to the reception and no lock. And they started to bill us for rent, and wifi, and late fees even though the work was not done and we were promised free wifi, and had never had prior invoices to make the later ones “late”. So I complained repeatedly. Still, none of the required work was done for the whole of May and the whole of June and most of July.

In total Regus took 11 weeks and 17 complaints from me to put a lock on the door and seal up the gap, but over the whole 16 weeks before we gave up on it and rented rooms elsewhere the office was never made confidential (even by something as simple as opaque sticky-back-plastic on the glass) so my business was unable to deliver an essential component of our work and we had to move out before they completed the promised repairs. They threatened to lock in my notes and materials, and sent threatening letters and emails about unpaid bills, despite the fact that no money was ever due and they had failed to live up to the contract we agreed of the work to be completed before any rent was due.

Over time the lack of access to a suitable office became a critical issue for the company, and as this coincided with me moving to a different area of the UK I was forced to conclude it was no longer viable for my business to continue to work in Milton Keynes and I had to restructure the company. Thankfully I have a trusted colleague to pass therapy cases onto, so no clients will be left without a service, but for the business it has been nothing short of catastrophic.

Regus made it very difficult to leave, and tried to say that we not only owed rent but were bound in contract for 12 months. Invoices were never amended. Complaints were not responded to, or maintained the same unreasonable position. However, after I wrote this blog, became noisy on social media and contacted the head of customer services, things were finally resolved to my satisfaction at the end of September. They accept that the room was not ready for use quickly enough, and have confirmed in writing that I am no longer in contract with them and no rent is outstanding.

There is more to the story (and a whole other story about the first time I rented a room there and was subject to a sophisticated robbery and fraud scam) and I am far from alone in having negative experiences (check their twitter feed and google for reviews). However, although I might be stubborn I try not to hold grudges and at least it has a happy ending now. Hopefully I will never have to deal with them again.

Update: They continued to try to chase “unpaid rent” for several months after we left, despite me referring them back to their own decision that nothing was due. They even referred the matter to a debt collection agency. However, Suzanne Jackson did eventually resolve this, and as of Feb 2017, I think this whole episode has been closed.