Dr Jessica Taylor #7 Unexpected ITIM in the Bragging Area

[umnothatsnotokay]

"Why don't other women like me when I imply they are ugly and sexually predatory and I'm the TALL POPPY that is superior to them?"

There are no tall poppies in sisterhood. It’s about collective liberation, not idolisation. We don’t want to emulate the patriarchy with its hierarchies and leadership models, we want to revolutionise it.

She wants to be treated like an important man because that’s ‘equality’ to her. No accountability, no challenge, no supporting the other poppies to grow as tall as her. Lots of individual status and financial gain for her.

Jfc she’s a shit feminist.

 

[AccidentalAcademic]

And people think this is fair and interesting commentary on celeb mental health because she is in the mental health field...she is someone with a tenuous connection to academia and no clinical experience.

Interesting how she frames it as clinical "concern" when it is just gossip and bit her place in any ay to comment.

If anyone is interested in a genuinely respectful and empathic take on Lewis Capaldi's disability, please read this Twitter thread by Dr Frances Ryan. She's a physically disabled academic who writes a lot on the sociology and politics of disability.

Notice the difference between Jess and Frances's tweets. Jess is framing Capaldi's difficulties as psychological distress that should invite pity. The focus on distress fits her 'brand' around trauma, and once again she is piggybacking on a celebrity story to try and get her own face in the news.

Frances, by contrast, understands that Tourette's syndrome is first and foremost a neurological disorder and that Lewis Capaldi will always have it. She talks about the small things that we can all do to craft a more welcoming and accessible world for people with all kinds of disabilities, a world where disabled artists can confidently appear onstage without having to worry how anyone might react if they run into difficulty. She points out that pityingly suggesting Capaldi takes some time to "get well" is not the appropriate reaction: it reinforces the message that disability is something too awful and uncomfortable to be seen in public, and it feeds into the harmful belief that if you have a visible problem, you aren't fit to do your job.

The two biggest differences between Frances and Jess are the obvious knowledge and expertise that Frances has on disability rights and accessibility issues, and the fact that she hasn't tried to make this about her. "Not the first time I've brought this up..." is what Jess says whenever there is a nice juicy headline that could bring her a few TV appearances. She likes to promote the idea that she has special original insights that other people don't stumble on until much later. Frances just gets on with it, because her main priority is improving accessibility, not being famous.

 

[umnothatsnotokay]

True class: quoting a famous misogynist who's encouraging threatening people with guns, and turning this into a joke about her sex life also Jaimi is her only lesbian relationship (she says she slept with girls on her council estate growing up but they weren't relationships)

So many levels of inappropriate here I’m not sure where to start. Light heartedly sharing Andrew Tate’s tweet - disgusting. Banging on again about her sex life - tacky as hell, 13 year old level stuff. Offending the many lesbians who have real issues with penetrative forms of sex, showing she has zero recognition of that and revealing she is not a part of feminist lesbian communities.

And to me, the absolute worst - referring to dildos / penetrative sex to her audience of thousands of female survivors. Many of whom also have many issues with this topic. Survivors of pornography, prostitution, rape, male sexual abuse.

I’m really shocked she is not aware of or ignores this for the fleeting glee of sharing her sexual preferences online. I’m not judging her choices in the bedroom, but seriously questioning her giddy posts about it given her profession and background, and her supposed ‘care’ for victims.

 

[Boogs]

For someone that spends so much time on social media her engagement is very poor. Her wife usually responds though.

Someone just asked her and Jaimi did they not have WhatsApp

 

[AccidentalAcademic]

Virtually everything she writes is further proof that she has never worked in healthcare, nor even spent that much time as a patient. The idea that 'psychological' distress can cause 'physical' health problems (in quotation marks because it's a false dichotomy - the brain doesn't live in its own magic vacuum-packed compartment, it's part of the body too) is not new, radical, or rare. The most basic example out there: hypothalamus-pituitary axis (brain!) regulates the adrenal synthesis of cortisol, and when we're stressed our cortisol levels rise. One thing cortisol does is to increase our blood glucose levels, which is just what we need if we're having to sprint away from an attacker, but which becomes significantly less helpful if we're exposed to very frequent threats and are in a constant state of anxiety. Simply put, this puts people living in that state at a greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes mellitus. Here is a pretty comprehensive literature review on that (and before Jessica tweets the link with the caption, "I'm so glad people are finally listening to what we've been saying all along", it was published in 2016 and it cites research that came out eight years before Jessica was even born). This is just one example. I could cite so much research about the impact of psychological trauma on various body systems off the top of my head. Doctors know this stuff. Clinical and health psychologists know this stuff. If Jessica actually did some serious work as an academic, she'd know it too, but she doesn't want to carry out and publish research, she wants to publish rants about how radically insightful she is compared to health professionals - headed with the obligatory selfie, of course, which seems to be her version of an abstract.

The spiel about how people prefer to believe they have diseases rather than face up to the fact that they're traumatised makes me quite angry in this context. Diabetes, osteoporosis, and rheumatoid arthritis are diseases, Jessica, diseases that can be precipitated or exacerbated by psychological trauma. You know what? It's OK to admit that, because there's actually nothing to admit! It's not a crime, a character flaw, or a moral or political failing to develop a health condition, and saying, "I have XYZ condition" is not a denial of psychosocial factors. It's just a statement of fact.

She really needs to stop priming women to think that it reflects badly on them to get ill, or that illness and personal strength are somehow mutually exclusive. This itself is pretty patriarchal thinking.

 

[witchofwestbyfleet]

"Desperate for our attention!" - he sent you one reply on Twitter
"replied with the pic below" - a picture of you and your wife smirking in a bar, exactly what we do when feeling intimidated cuz someone "trolled" and is "obsessed" with you
"personal comments about my life, my work, my appearance" - deflection/distraction
"why don't I get recognition like Jess does?" - I can't find any such tweet
"why is she surviving outside academia?" - couldn't cut it in academia to start with, now effectively running an MLM
"why can't I do that with my career?" - a moral compass maybe?
"I came into forensic settings when I was 19 years old and it's all I've ever worked in" - by your own admission you worked in B&Q when you were 19. You have never worked in forensic psychology
"I have a PhD in this topic" - a regular PhD in psychology, not a forensic psychologist, not a clinical psychologist
"I work all over the world" - you're going on a short tour of Australia and New Zealand and you've flown out to Ireland a few times
"I own a company, I'm a bestselling author, I've personally trained and taught over 40,000 people" - you're a saleswoman
"I'm young!!" - you're early to mid 30s, not that young, not the same age as your wife and certainly not a teenager
"I was abused!" - get behind a whole crowd of people working in VAWG and/or mental health
"They're not better than me!" - might have a bit more integrity though

 

[Jessterday]

She literally took my name off everything I designed for the business.

Did me a favour tho, happy to remove my association with her. Cheers, Jess.

 

[SavannahS]

Shes been counselling and providing therapy since she was 19 and is out there working with people from all walks of life...literally never listened to or sat with a person in a therapy role ever...and i know the masses think she is a clinician because of her unethical use of the term psychologist...

So now she's insulted academics, feminists who aren't her, psychiatrists and the peer review process...while answering in some vague ways when recently questioned on Twitter about how she selects independent reviewers. She was dodging the question and it kept being asked more clearly and assertively.

 

[witchofwestbyfleet]

New title by @Dike Themis

Recap:
Jess released the ITIM (Indicative Trauma Impact Manual) to much fanfare. Supposed peer reviewers include her personal friend Sarah McGrath, who is not a psychologist or doctor, and who had gone on a night out with Jess around the time of the review. Jess also manipulated the Amazon review system, encouraging her fans to leave positive reviews, and getting negative ones removed as supposed TOS violations.

She also released another season of her shitty podcast, including an episode where she made very offensive remarks about lesbians and said that certain RADFEMS - you know who, tee hee, she can't name them but look at who's been criticising her! - are harassing her because she refused to sleep with them.

She used Nicola Bulley's disappearance for publicity, implying that "something was wrong" with the case and that she thought Nicola had been murdered by her husband. When it turned out that wasn't the case, she changed tack to, "I was just talking about the way the police tried to pathologise her as a menopausal alcoholic!" And plugging her appearance on GB News. When Nicola was found, her family made a public statement criticising "so-called experts" who had suggested her husband was involved in her death. Jess didn't take the hint at all and instead promoted an article she had written for the Guardian about how the family needed closure.

She is planning a "tour" of Australia, New Zealand, and the USA because she's not going down so well at home. Wonder why that is? Once again she has been reading Tattle and got a bit upset that we don't think she's an expert, so she made a big Facebook post with a long list of her supposed accomplishments (you know the ones: Sunday Times bestseller, AWARDED fellowships that anyone can pay for ...)

Currently she is on a rant about how academic journals are exploitative and it's not fair that they take money while she has to pay for independent peer review. You guessed it: if she's paying, it ain't independent!

 

[wendyg13]

Are we going to hear anything from Jess about Phil Schofield? About power imbalances and an impressionable young person, known when younger, being taken under the wing, then employed by the older, influential person and developing a relationship with them? Oops, That sounds a bit familiar?

 

[ZiggyStardust68]

Isn't in interesting what you can glean from the shortest of exchanges??? So Jaimie, like half the country, is excitedly cheering because England equalised, then gets all her happiness snapped away from her with one text. Then the great almighty realises she's missing a trick and comes out with some bullshit about being an early pioneer of women's football and then claims to find it all so emotional that she cries. But she wasn't watching it. Controlling, narcissistic bullshit. You can just imagining how boring and draining it must be to have to listen to the constant 'me me me...'

 

[SavannahS]

And lol



"Netflix psychologist"

In many countries u would not be considered a psychologist, u are not a practising one, and netflix is a streaming service. But i guess lean into all u have....

 

[AccidentalAcademic]

All she does on her socials is bite bite bite it must get so boring for any followers who actually were interested in her

It exhausted me in the early days. I made excuses for it at first: "OK, so her communication style might not be my cup of tea, but she still says worthwhile things", "Would the bull-headedness bother me so much if she were a man?", and "She's probably so abrasive because she had to fight to get to where she is, and she's still finding her feet professionally - she'll change as her confidence grows." The idea that my discomfort was rooted in internalised misogyny was something I balked at even as I suggested it to myself - I knew perfectly well that if it were a man constantly speaking to people like this I'd think he was just an aggressive arsehole, and I certainly wouldn't keep making allowances for him. The other excuses took time to shift.

The idea that she was saying anything worthwhile began to disintegrate when I read Why Women Are Blamed for Everything and realised I was holding a poorly edited copy of her PhD thesis, most of which I'd already read online, with blog posts added. Now, when I was working on my first academic book I had two very eminent professors as mentors, whose distinction in their field was matched by how incredibly kind and supportive they were to early career researchers like me. They told me not to worry about getting it perfect, that no one's first book should be their best book, it's a launchpad for a research career rather than the final destination, etc. I remembered their words and asked myself if I was being unfair to Jessica. I reminded myself that she was the ECR now while I was a more established researcher, and perhaps I'd lost sight of what a daunting project a first book is. But my brain would not buy its own excuses this time, firstly because she'd been talking about this book as if it were the most revolutionary thing ever and suggesting it contained a decade's worth of material from her "practice", which meant I was hardly unreasonable for expecting something special (or at least something better than what turned up); and secondly because there is a significant difference between "not your best work" and work that's just...mediocre. I really wanted to believe the best of her because of my own politics - victim-blaming is the scourge of the criminal justice system, and I'd support anyone trying to bring about meaningful change - but I basically read books for a living and I just couldn't kid myself that this was a good one.

Even when I gave up trying to excuse the poor quality, but I still didn't lose my sympathy for her, not at first. I thought she might be a little embarrassed by the book's standard later in life, and I felt bad for her that she hadn't had the benefit of a skilled editor and thoughtful peer reviewers to give her a more solid start. Then it all came tumbling down. She was acting as if she had nothing left to learn now, as if receiving her PhD and self-publishing her manuscript had been a moment of anointing: all hail Jessica Taylor, the Greatest Psychology Expert of Them All! Any critique (a staple of academic life) was met with yet more hostility and aggression. I ended up muting her for a while because I couldn't cope with the relentless onslaught of angsty tweets that were clogging up my entire timeline. Then two women stepped forward to say their painful trauma stories had been quoted in her books without full informed consent, and that fact and how Jessica handled it was the point of no return for me. My undergraduate students would have known better. They'd face disciplinary proceedings for doing far less than she did. There was no way to explain it, no way to excuse it.

Ultimately I think it's the lack of originality that will be her undoing. You're right, it's just boring now - the same thing like a broken record on repeat. She will get aggressive online to try and stir up some clicks and controversy whenever she senses the attention waning, but at this point it's like a tadpole thrashing about in the hope of launching a wave. She's burnt her bridges with the academic psychology world. Large swathes of the feminist community are wary of her. All she has is social media, and her engagement there has dwindled.

 

[nothanksbabes]

2 rep

Two replies to her tweet and neither positive…..

99k followers and SEVEN LIKES. She's an absolute embarrassment. I assume that's 80k followers she's bought and 19k (a generous guess) following to watch her make a tit of herself.

I'd get more likes from my 350 followers on a post about my cat (to be fair though he's a really good cat).

 

[Boogs]

Using a post by Andrew Tate to make a puerile sex joke???

Surely she has to be a parody account. How can anyone be so tone deaf. Trauma informed my arse

 

[Boogs]

It pisses me off that she has had 1 same sex relationship (with someone who she groomed since she was a teenager so she was able to mould her to be exactly what she wants her to be) and she thinks she’s the expert on lesbianism and can sit around slagging off other lesbians who don’t conform to the way she thinks they should act. Of course it’s because they all want to sleep with her

 

[witchofwestbyfleet]

'Allo 'Allo - it's the tall poppy with the big boobies

Bit early for a thread tile nomination but ...

 

[witchofwestbyfleet]

The whole "I'm just a Stokie chav!" thing is just another way she's stuck in the past/ thinks she's still a teenager. She often shares pictures of herself as a teenager with captions like "look how far this bolshy little chav came!" Being working class isn't the reason people dislike you, Jess. The reason is you're a vain, arrogant, bullying, lying narcissist

 

[ZiggyStardust68]

And yet you don't bother coming down to check, just conduct the whole conversation by text? And don't you think the tone is very controlling? Jaimi apologising twice just sounds like she'll be sitting there on pins because she's upset the almighty.

 

[witchofwestbyfleet]

Someone gave Honduras as an example in the comments of a country that has low suicide rates because psychiatry isn't influential - you realise Honduras is a heavily Catholic country where suicide is considered sinful and anyone who commits suicide can't be buried within the church. Might that not have an impact on suicide rates and reporting?