Bruce Russell

@TimNichollsMP Along with many (most?) sensible clinicians, there are many mainstream, senior psychiatrists, who have never had anything to do with health politics in their lives, who are deeply concerned about the direction of ‘gender care’, and the role of @ahpra. Most of us have never gotten off the sidelines for anything or anyone. We’ve sat back and tut-tutted the NDIS pathologising of dorky boys, the psycho-stimulant epidemic and other cultural contagions because, well … for all the reasons sensible people get on with their lives and livelihoods. Eye-rolling seemed enough. But I’ve never seen such reluctance to speak out on any issue as I've seen on this one. Maybe we’re afraid that gender ideologues and their allies are the most persistent, organised and aggressive complainants we’ve ever encountered and the most likely to succeed before the regulator. No one's career is worth an AHPRA sanction or the relentless punishment-by-process that is the reflexive starting point of an AHPRA complaint. AHPRA have terrifying powers that are properly exercised to stop incompetent doctors, impaired doctors and doctors who exploit or mutilate their patients, but are now used to intimidate and silence doctors under an elastic code of conduct. AHPRA's scope, conduct and manner is now so broad and frankly flamboyant, it resembles, and perhaps it sees itself, as a cultural institution. The excesses of AHPRA's language in its recent response to the Australian Newspaper contain all the modish buzzwords of psychological and cultural comforting and nothing about, for instance, drunk GPs or mutilating surgeons, which most doctors think is its job, and it's only job. As it stands, kids are in agony, parents are in agony, and very few competent people are able to stare down the threats of suicide and allegations of psychological and cultural torture that go along with holding what were, until a few years ago, mainstream opinions. Mainstream opinions about child safety are now 'unsafe', a word thrown around like Minties at a kid's birthday party. Allegations, or even the possibility that someone may be made to feel psychologically 'unsafe' are paralysing clinicians into silence and inaction. The issue of 'gender care' has alarmed some of us like never before. We have never seen our colleagues lose their way so badly. Actually, like us, our errant colleagues are increasingly irrelevant because junior and unskilled practitioners, making up things as they go, have joined the cultural zeitgeist, and the issue has well and truly escaped medical care, other than prescribing medication and surgery. The Minister needs to get out in front here, somehow.

@Writer_rom27 Buckingham Palace's media team published a post wishing Muslims well on their holiest religious festival, as they do for all religious groups, and this was most assuredly the case under the late Queen. More than a third of the Commonwealth's population is Muslim.

@GrayConnolly @UpdatingOnRome @cdrsalamander Rewatching HBO's Rome. Just finished the Thapsus episode, and Cato did himself in.