Elizabeth Nugent

Reflections on Grooming Gangs, Gender Identity Services and Mid Staffordshire NHS. Three Institutional Failures, One Psychological Pattern One of the questions that has occupied me for years is deceptively simple. How do good people end up participating in institutions that, looking back, seem incapable of recognising what was happening in front of them? We usually answer this question by looking for villains. We search for bad leaders, corrupt cultures or ideological movements. Sometimes...

For most of my life I believed that if something mattered enough, I should be able to learn it more quickly. Read another book. Work harder. Stay later. Find a better teacher. Become more disciplined. Speed felt like virtue. Then I trained as a group analyst. The training lasted nearly a decade. It unfolded alongside work, family life and clinical practice, yet somehow never seemed to move at the pace I wanted. Whenever I thought I was finally getting ahead, something would happen to slow me...

What happens when symbolic language is mistaken for instruction When I was a teenager studying Macbeth in the mid-1990s, our class travelled to Theatr Clwyd in North Wales to see a production that was stark and minimalist. I remember a black box on the stage and dry ice drifting across the floor. It appealed to my teenage wish to be sophisticated; it felt like "real theatre." The atmosphere was dreamlike, as though the play were unfolding somewhere between waking life and nightmare. The...