No longer part of institutional psychiatry

Following my voluntary erasure from the GMC register (see previous post) I have cancelled my membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych). I first expressed an interest in wanting to be a psychiatrist when asked what I wanted to do at University. In my naivety, I didn’t even know that I would need to train in medicine. Despite a medical student essay arguing that psychiatry should be non-medical, I came to accept that psychiatry is a medical speciality, a view with which not all members of the Critical Psychiatry Network (CPN) agree. 

Still, as a founding member of CPN, I’ve had my problems with institutional psychiatry. As I wrote in my first book chapter, “[T]here is an orthodox medical approach to the problems of interpreting and treating mental disorders”. I have been seen as unorthodox and in need of retraining. My efforts to change psychiatry have not been successful (see eg. previous post). The College controls training and fails to deal with its institutional corruption (see eg. post on my Thinking Differently About Mental Health blog). No longer needing to be a RCPsych member as I’m now retired clinically,  I can manage without the connection to the College. If the College ever genuinely becomes interested in reform I may rejoin.