Dr Jessica Taylor has been trying to pass herself off as having clinical/therapeutic experience she doesn't possess for years. Like you, I came across her when she was still a PhD student and was supportive of her initially. I bought her first book when she self-published it and this paragraph about electroconvulsive therapy jumped out at me:
"I have personally worked with children who have been subjected to ECT in the Midlands in the UK, after they were abused and raped. One girl I worked with in 2013 was severely harmed by ECT sessions on the NHS, so much so that she used to come to my sessions and fall fast asleep on the sofa for hours, and then wake up confused and upset. She was being given ECT for 'treatment resistant depression' because she had been sexually abused throughout childhood" (p.32, Why Women Are Blamed for Everything).
In 2013 Jessica wasn't even halfway through her undergraduate degree in psychology, so what were these vaguely termed "sessions" she was running? As for the scenario itself, audit data from 32 NHS mental health Trusts indicates that in 2013 only two Trusts used ECT with a young person under the age of 18, and neither of those Trusts was local to Jessica. Her local Trusts did provide data for that audit and they hadn't administered ECT to anyone under 18, so where was she meeting these children (in the plural!)? Were they travelling to the Midlands in their incredibly small numbers purely to access "sessions" with an unqualified undergraduate psychology student?
At that time Jessica's CV was still publicly available through her website (she took it down after people began to point out discrepancies) and I saw that from 2012 to 2014 she had been employed by the Sexual Abuse and Rape Crisis Centre in Burton-upon-Trent as a manager. She claimed that she had delivered "group therapy sessions to abuse survivors" as part of the role. Wondering if the job advert was still out there in the ether, I googled it and found it within seconds. It was, and it was very obviously a purely administrative role: https://www.womensgrid.org.uk/archive/2012/04/23/manager-sexual-and-domestic-abuse-and-rape-advice-centre-sarac-8th-may-2012/
I was uneasy because Jessica clearly wanted readers to believe that she was offering therapy of some kind, and she was exaggerating and fabricating experience to bolster her credibility and create the impression that her training is more extensive than it really is. Later she moved on to defensively claiming that the only reason she doesn't practice clinically is because she thinks HCPC registered psychologists are complicit in victim-blaming and her approach is more empowering. I lost all respect for her very quickly over this. She could have made legitimate solid contributions as an academic psychologist if she'd worked at it, but instead she decided to try and build a brand on spin and outright lies. "Triumph of shallow knowledge and ambition over ability" is right.
To add to what I wrote here, I wouldn't be surprised if Taylor responds to my mention of local ECT audit data with lurid claims that "professionals who hate my anti-pathology approach have doxxed the children I worked with." That's her usual playbook - someone voices doubts about her qualifications and experience, and their scepticism becomes the substrate for her latest round of preposterous lies.
Fantastic article. What a relief Dr. Jess Taylor is being exposed for the dangerous woman she is. The majority of her followers are vunreable women and she prays on their vunreabllity.
What really shocked and saddened me is how she used a clearly vunreable young girl's suicide to attack the owner of tattle life Sebastian Bond, Taylor used the child's grieving mother to seek her own twisted vengeance on Bond.
Her vendetta against the platform Tattle Life is because they expose her and her lie's. The Wiki they have created about Taylor on tattle is a harrowing read, documenting all that is seriously wrong with Taylor.
The death of this young girl is an open police investigation and coroners report. But Jess immediately said it was due to tattle as she has an axe to grind. She was trying to get all the posts on her mother deleted and these have valuable evidence. She got 20 MPs to sign a letter backing up her made up claims. I don't know the law but it seems a very shaky grounds she's on. All because she wanted to use a child's death to hide incriminating evidence on her. She was on ITV as a doctor and most viewers would assume she is medical with a regulator. Neither are true.
Its abhorrent she used the death of this child for her own personal gratification. I hope the coroner looks into this, especially as the Daily Mail published it.
Very interesting. I was made aware of her work about 4 or 5 years ago, via a friend who rated her and suggested I read a LinkedIn article.
That article used the word 'perpetrator' a lot, suggesting that this is how victims prefer to call the people who abused them. I challenged that because in my experience, someone using that term does not 'get' it, even if they are a professional, has no lived experience and is unsafe to disclose to. They are highly likely to follow up the disclosure with questions about what happened, rather than how the person in front of them is and how they are getting through the minutes of the days. This approach usually results in (re)triggering a trauma response... adding to the ffs etc load of daily life.
Naturally my lived experience was deemed to be incorrect.
And I have been a bit confused ever since because I was given the impression she was an experienced professional. Reading subsequent work has only brought more confusion and my gut wasn't comfortable with it. Not one bit.
I read this piece with growing relief and increasing faith in my judgement. And also concern because you have to wonder how such an expert has got this far...
Thank you for posting this. It takes a lot of courage to call out disingenuous and dangerous behaviours from those who weaponise stalking and bullying narratives to their platform of sycophant followers. I look forward to seeing the narrative which will be spun off the back of it, but I predict her head will be buried in the sands, much like the rest of that ilk when their behaviour is publicly displayed with receipts.
Well done for this. Something needs to be done before her dangerous advice costs someone their life. She says Jess Asato MP is her friend, says she works often with Mark Hendrick MP and is on a board with Apsana Begum MP. All three have helped promote her and give her credibility. I'm a medical professional and I wrote to all of them with my concerns and none of them replied apart from Sir Mark Hendrick who said as I wasn't in his constituency he doesn't owe me a response. These MPs should hang their head in shame.
In a constituency-based system MPs are only answerable to the residents of their constituency. Please email your own MP raising concerns about the under-regulation of the mental health sector. The Association of Clinical Psychologists has been campaigning for 'psychologist' and 'psychotherapist' to become legally protected titles for a while now, which would make it more difficult for people like Jessica Taylor to mislead the public. The problem is bigger than just her.
You're right and they're legally fine to tell me to piss off or ignore as I'm not a constituent. But they took to their own personal social media outside of their MP duties to post about it so from a personal point of view you would think they want to correct the record. But they don't want to admit they were wrong. My MP is new and wasn't interested in doing anything.
Thank you for writing this. Mental Health Professionals on twitter know what the deal is and are often aghast by the lack of ethics she displays. In my opinion, she is a dangerous mixture of credentials without ethics or clinical expertise.
Love this line: before anyone reaches for that one and causes my eyeballs to roll so far back in my head that I briefly become qualified to examine my own brainstem. That is pure gold! Glad you wrote about the false stalking claims. Over 11% that is more than 1 in 10, which is a big number if there are 100,000s claims of stalking.
I’m actually in the process of writing a piece about something similar that I experienced with a TikTok influencer. She accused a group of bartenders in her neighborhood of gang stalking her, but provided very little proof.
once I started to research the situation, and I spoke to people in the area, including the women she was claiming were harassing her, I learned that everything she was saying was a lie.
I also learned that the former roommate she said assaulted her in 2020 was actually the victim of the assault by this influencer. The roommate ended up needing surgery on her hand.
Eventually, it all came out. she once again claimed she was the victim of a smear campaign by the group of people that were harassing her.
This has been going on for five years. Once she was exposed, she never regained the amount of influence that she had. what I found so horrifying was how easy it was for her to convince thousands of people that she was a victim.
She got them to review bomb a bar where one of her alleged stalkers worked. The venue never recovered from her smear campaign and closed about two years later.
She has steadily lost followers over the last few years. whenever she sees her subscriber account dip she trots the story back out.
Thank you for writing this. I am disabled and also care for a wife and son with schizophrenia. I run a small AI safety, ethics, and literacy nonprofit, and the pattern you describe transfers into my work, albeit in a slightly different way. An organization positioning itself as advocate for people in acute psychological crisis. Real questions about how their personal data and private stories are handled since they signed a policy they didn't get presented. Corporate structure that does not match the public nonprofit framing. Donations going to a for-profit company. I have documented enough to know what I am looking at breaks civil and criminal law. I am not in a position to say more publicly without exposure I cannot currently absorb. I was threatened by this group just for asking questions of them in private.
The asymmetry at the opening of your piece is the part that has me writing this, as ambiguous as it is. The party raising concerns is small. The party being asked about is large. Both operate in overlapping professional terrain. Speaking in a comment thread is not the same as being able to act on what you know.
If anyone in this thread has weathered something structurally similar, or knows how this kind of dynamic gets navigated when one party is materially larger than the other, I would welcome a private message. I can also be found on LinkedIn.
People proclaiming to be experts with nothing but a cause and a bag of confidence …
Here’s a couple from my first-hand experience:
An old friend became enthralled by a new and exciting local ‘Life Coach’ (tm!!)
When I expressed interest and asked for details, the resultant conversation ended up something like this:
“So, if they don’t have formal medical training in - say - counselling, how do they triage new clients?’
“Pardon? What do you mean?”
“Well … how would they know if I’m just in need of re-focus / organising skills etc. or if there’s an underlying health condition that’s causing lack of focus and underachievement?”
“The fact is, they’re an inspiration to others and should be applauded!!”
(So then the shutters come down and it gets defensive)
——
Also:
While watching an animal rights protest in my local high street, a lady in a wheelchair - accompanied by her friend - came up to a protestor and asked about the slaughter house video being shown. She became upset and - after a quick chat with anonymous cow mask-wearer - gently wheeled herself away in floods of tears.
As she passed I heard her saying to her friend, “I’m never eating meat again!”
Intrigued, I went up to cow-mask and asked: “That lady you just spoke to, did you ask her why she’s in a wheelchair?”
“Eh? Why, that’s not our business is it? What’s important is the death and suffering shown on that screen! How do you feel about that?”
“It’s complex isn’t it? You’ve just given a person in a wheelchair dietary advice; what if she has a problem with something like bone density? Did you speak to her about what dietary change means to her … did you speak about supplements? Are you qualified to advise people on their dietary intake?”
“There’s loads of advice about all that online sir!”
“Right. But on the one-hand you’re saying we have a duty of care to animals, whilst at the same time leaving the welfare of another to chance?”
“ … “
“Not only that, I watched your colleague filming her, without her consent. Is that so you can show her emotional response to your cause, via some future promo vid? Hard-hitting!”
“We are legally allowed to do that!”
(And then the shutters come down and it gets defensive) …
God I hate humans 😂 Next turn of the wheel I’m asking to be a dolphin or ... maybe a species with a hard-wired sense of integrity, yet still with a sense of porpoise …
I had never heard of this woman until her crusade to bring down tattle. Some of the things she's said are so dangerous but because she holds an academic Dr title she gets media attention as if she's a medical doctor. She uses vague phrases about working with victims and police to give the impression that she spends her days working in a professional clinical capacity but it appears that her day job is memes for social media that are light on evidence, but high on gaining a reaction so they do well in the algorithm.
It says it all that she teamed up with Lauren Goodman, a woman who has relentlessly stalked and harassed Annie Kilner. The abusers are claiming to be the victims.
As for Neil and Donna Sands their clandestine court case is horrifying with how they got so far despite no checks that the writ was ever served and then denied Sebastian Bond access to his own money to fight it. There needs to be a public investigation into that.
I've been following Jessica for some time. A lot of what she says, generally, resonates, though I disagree with a lot of her views. Recently, she's been speaking about autism and I can never work out whether she is one of those people who doesn't believe it's real. Anyhow, she always sounds dismissive and clearly has no lived experience or true understanding of autism. As a mother of an autistic child, I have started to question a lot of what she says. Sometimes she needs to stay in her lane.
Dr Jessica Taylor has been trying to pass herself off as having clinical/therapeutic experience she doesn't possess for years. Like you, I came across her when she was still a PhD student and was supportive of her initially. I bought her first book when she self-published it and this paragraph about electroconvulsive therapy jumped out at me:
"I have personally worked with children who have been subjected to ECT in the Midlands in the UK, after they were abused and raped. One girl I worked with in 2013 was severely harmed by ECT sessions on the NHS, so much so that she used to come to my sessions and fall fast asleep on the sofa for hours, and then wake up confused and upset. She was being given ECT for 'treatment resistant depression' because she had been sexually abused throughout childhood" (p.32, Why Women Are Blamed for Everything).
In 2013 Jessica wasn't even halfway through her undergraduate degree in psychology, so what were these vaguely termed "sessions" she was running? As for the scenario itself, audit data from 32 NHS mental health Trusts indicates that in 2013 only two Trusts used ECT with a young person under the age of 18, and neither of those Trusts was local to Jessica. Her local Trusts did provide data for that audit and they hadn't administered ECT to anyone under 18, so where was she meeting these children (in the plural!)? Were they travelling to the Midlands in their incredibly small numbers purely to access "sessions" with an unqualified undergraduate psychology student?
At that time Jessica's CV was still publicly available through her website (she took it down after people began to point out discrepancies) and I saw that from 2012 to 2014 she had been employed by the Sexual Abuse and Rape Crisis Centre in Burton-upon-Trent as a manager. She claimed that she had delivered "group therapy sessions to abuse survivors" as part of the role. Wondering if the job advert was still out there in the ether, I googled it and found it within seconds. It was, and it was very obviously a purely administrative role: https://www.womensgrid.org.uk/archive/2012/04/23/manager-sexual-and-domestic-abuse-and-rape-advice-centre-sarac-8th-may-2012/
I was uneasy because Jessica clearly wanted readers to believe that she was offering therapy of some kind, and she was exaggerating and fabricating experience to bolster her credibility and create the impression that her training is more extensive than it really is. Later she moved on to defensively claiming that the only reason she doesn't practice clinically is because she thinks HCPC registered psychologists are complicit in victim-blaming and her approach is more empowering. I lost all respect for her very quickly over this. She could have made legitimate solid contributions as an academic psychologist if she'd worked at it, but instead she decided to try and build a brand on spin and outright lies. "Triumph of shallow knowledge and ambition over ability" is right.
Bloody hell!
Ive seen posts from her disregarding medication for mental health, she is dangerous.
To add to what I wrote here, I wouldn't be surprised if Taylor responds to my mention of local ECT audit data with lurid claims that "professionals who hate my anti-pathology approach have doxxed the children I worked with." That's her usual playbook - someone voices doubts about her qualifications and experience, and their scepticism becomes the substrate for her latest round of preposterous lies.
Yikes!
Fantastic article. What a relief Dr. Jess Taylor is being exposed for the dangerous woman she is. The majority of her followers are vunreable women and she prays on their vunreabllity.
What really shocked and saddened me is how she used a clearly vunreable young girl's suicide to attack the owner of tattle life Sebastian Bond, Taylor used the child's grieving mother to seek her own twisted vengeance on Bond.
Her vendetta against the platform Tattle Life is because they expose her and her lie's. The Wiki they have created about Taylor on tattle is a harrowing read, documenting all that is seriously wrong with Taylor.
The death of this young girl is an open police investigation and coroners report. But Jess immediately said it was due to tattle as she has an axe to grind. She was trying to get all the posts on her mother deleted and these have valuable evidence. She got 20 MPs to sign a letter backing up her made up claims. I don't know the law but it seems a very shaky grounds she's on. All because she wanted to use a child's death to hide incriminating evidence on her. She was on ITV as a doctor and most viewers would assume she is medical with a regulator. Neither are true.
Its abhorrent she used the death of this child for her own personal gratification. I hope the coroner looks into this, especially as the Daily Mail published it.
Very interesting. I was made aware of her work about 4 or 5 years ago, via a friend who rated her and suggested I read a LinkedIn article.
That article used the word 'perpetrator' a lot, suggesting that this is how victims prefer to call the people who abused them. I challenged that because in my experience, someone using that term does not 'get' it, even if they are a professional, has no lived experience and is unsafe to disclose to. They are highly likely to follow up the disclosure with questions about what happened, rather than how the person in front of them is and how they are getting through the minutes of the days. This approach usually results in (re)triggering a trauma response... adding to the ffs etc load of daily life.
Naturally my lived experience was deemed to be incorrect.
And I have been a bit confused ever since because I was given the impression she was an experienced professional. Reading subsequent work has only brought more confusion and my gut wasn't comfortable with it. Not one bit.
I read this piece with growing relief and increasing faith in my judgement. And also concern because you have to wonder how such an expert has got this far...
Thank you for posting this. It takes a lot of courage to call out disingenuous and dangerous behaviours from those who weaponise stalking and bullying narratives to their platform of sycophant followers. I look forward to seeing the narrative which will be spun off the back of it, but I predict her head will be buried in the sands, much like the rest of that ilk when their behaviour is publicly displayed with receipts.
Well done for this. Something needs to be done before her dangerous advice costs someone their life. She says Jess Asato MP is her friend, says she works often with Mark Hendrick MP and is on a board with Apsana Begum MP. All three have helped promote her and give her credibility. I'm a medical professional and I wrote to all of them with my concerns and none of them replied apart from Sir Mark Hendrick who said as I wasn't in his constituency he doesn't owe me a response. These MPs should hang their head in shame.
In a constituency-based system MPs are only answerable to the residents of their constituency. Please email your own MP raising concerns about the under-regulation of the mental health sector. The Association of Clinical Psychologists has been campaigning for 'psychologist' and 'psychotherapist' to become legally protected titles for a while now, which would make it more difficult for people like Jessica Taylor to mislead the public. The problem is bigger than just her.
You're right and they're legally fine to tell me to piss off or ignore as I'm not a constituent. But they took to their own personal social media outside of their MP duties to post about it so from a personal point of view you would think they want to correct the record. But they don't want to admit they were wrong. My MP is new and wasn't interested in doing anything.
Thank you for writing this. Mental Health Professionals on twitter know what the deal is and are often aghast by the lack of ethics she displays. In my opinion, she is a dangerous mixture of credentials without ethics or clinical expertise.
Love this line: before anyone reaches for that one and causes my eyeballs to roll so far back in my head that I briefly become qualified to examine my own brainstem. That is pure gold! Glad you wrote about the false stalking claims. Over 11% that is more than 1 in 10, which is a big number if there are 100,000s claims of stalking.
Compelling journalism from the biggest hair and tautest face on Substack
Haaa! I'll take that!
ps. someone send me a tattle invite please 🥰
Well … taut and well-taught (this response admittedly more Alliteration than Tautology, arf arf)
I’m actually in the process of writing a piece about something similar that I experienced with a TikTok influencer. She accused a group of bartenders in her neighborhood of gang stalking her, but provided very little proof.
once I started to research the situation, and I spoke to people in the area, including the women she was claiming were harassing her, I learned that everything she was saying was a lie.
I also learned that the former roommate she said assaulted her in 2020 was actually the victim of the assault by this influencer. The roommate ended up needing surgery on her hand.
Eventually, it all came out. she once again claimed she was the victim of a smear campaign by the group of people that were harassing her.
This has been going on for five years. Once she was exposed, she never regained the amount of influence that she had. what I found so horrifying was how easy it was for her to convince thousands of people that she was a victim.
She got them to review bomb a bar where one of her alleged stalkers worked. The venue never recovered from her smear campaign and closed about two years later.
She has steadily lost followers over the last few years. whenever she sees her subscriber account dip she trots the story back out.
Wow!
Fascinating article, the thoughtful and well researched evidence is really stacking up against her
Great article. A clear pattern emerges. She's destroying lives in order to portray herself as a victim. Could this be some kind of Münchausen?
"fell asleep for hours" - my late wife reported being drugged by Taylor.
RIP 🙏
Sorry!? Are we talking about the same person? Please message me direct.
Thank you for writing this. I am disabled and also care for a wife and son with schizophrenia. I run a small AI safety, ethics, and literacy nonprofit, and the pattern you describe transfers into my work, albeit in a slightly different way. An organization positioning itself as advocate for people in acute psychological crisis. Real questions about how their personal data and private stories are handled since they signed a policy they didn't get presented. Corporate structure that does not match the public nonprofit framing. Donations going to a for-profit company. I have documented enough to know what I am looking at breaks civil and criminal law. I am not in a position to say more publicly without exposure I cannot currently absorb. I was threatened by this group just for asking questions of them in private.
The asymmetry at the opening of your piece is the part that has me writing this, as ambiguous as it is. The party raising concerns is small. The party being asked about is large. Both operate in overlapping professional terrain. Speaking in a comment thread is not the same as being able to act on what you know.
If anyone in this thread has weathered something structurally similar, or knows how this kind of dynamic gets navigated when one party is materially larger than the other, I would welcome a private message. I can also be found on LinkedIn.
People proclaiming to be experts with nothing but a cause and a bag of confidence …
Here’s a couple from my first-hand experience:
An old friend became enthralled by a new and exciting local ‘Life Coach’ (tm!!)
When I expressed interest and asked for details, the resultant conversation ended up something like this:
“So, if they don’t have formal medical training in - say - counselling, how do they triage new clients?’
“Pardon? What do you mean?”
“Well … how would they know if I’m just in need of re-focus / organising skills etc. or if there’s an underlying health condition that’s causing lack of focus and underachievement?”
“The fact is, they’re an inspiration to others and should be applauded!!”
(So then the shutters come down and it gets defensive)
——
Also:
While watching an animal rights protest in my local high street, a lady in a wheelchair - accompanied by her friend - came up to a protestor and asked about the slaughter house video being shown. She became upset and - after a quick chat with anonymous cow mask-wearer - gently wheeled herself away in floods of tears.
As she passed I heard her saying to her friend, “I’m never eating meat again!”
Intrigued, I went up to cow-mask and asked: “That lady you just spoke to, did you ask her why she’s in a wheelchair?”
“Eh? Why, that’s not our business is it? What’s important is the death and suffering shown on that screen! How do you feel about that?”
“It’s complex isn’t it? You’ve just given a person in a wheelchair dietary advice; what if she has a problem with something like bone density? Did you speak to her about what dietary change means to her … did you speak about supplements? Are you qualified to advise people on their dietary intake?”
“There’s loads of advice about all that online sir!”
“Right. But on the one-hand you’re saying we have a duty of care to animals, whilst at the same time leaving the welfare of another to chance?”
“ … “
“Not only that, I watched your colleague filming her, without her consent. Is that so you can show her emotional response to your cause, via some future promo vid? Hard-hitting!”
“We are legally allowed to do that!”
(And then the shutters come down and it gets defensive) …
God I hate humans 😂 Next turn of the wheel I’m asking to be a dolphin or ... maybe a species with a hard-wired sense of integrity, yet still with a sense of porpoise …
I had never heard of this woman until her crusade to bring down tattle. Some of the things she's said are so dangerous but because she holds an academic Dr title she gets media attention as if she's a medical doctor. She uses vague phrases about working with victims and police to give the impression that she spends her days working in a professional clinical capacity but it appears that her day job is memes for social media that are light on evidence, but high on gaining a reaction so they do well in the algorithm.
It says it all that she teamed up with Lauren Goodman, a woman who has relentlessly stalked and harassed Annie Kilner. The abusers are claiming to be the victims.
As for Neil and Donna Sands their clandestine court case is horrifying with how they got so far despite no checks that the writ was ever served and then denied Sebastian Bond access to his own money to fight it. There needs to be a public investigation into that.
I've been following Jessica for some time. A lot of what she says, generally, resonates, though I disagree with a lot of her views. Recently, she's been speaking about autism and I can never work out whether she is one of those people who doesn't believe it's real. Anyhow, she always sounds dismissive and clearly has no lived experience or true understanding of autism. As a mother of an autistic child, I have started to question a lot of what she says. Sometimes she needs to stay in her lane.