The broom cupboard | The Tavistock Ep 2

The Walkers: The real Salt Path | Tortoise Investigates

The Observer

Society & Culture, True Crime, Documentary

4.6 • 5.8K Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2023

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Polly Carmichael became the director of the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock in 2009. “I remember our office was literally a room that had probably been a broom cupboard at one stage”, she recalls. But the decision in 2011 to start offering puberty blockers to under-16s, and in 2016 to widen the professionals who could refer a child to GIDS had a major impact. The numbers of people on the waiting list ticked inexorably up, until the clinic felt it could barely cope.

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Transcript

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1:19.0	journalism in print. Head to observer.com.uk forward slash print and you can find out more.
1:43.6	Hi, hi, hello, just to say me and Katie are outside.
2:04.6	Okay, I'll come grab you. All right, thanks, Mike. See you and lovely. I'm in North London, about to meet Polly Carmichael inside the Tavistock Centre, and I've been told to call in advance because we're arriving with our recording kit. They're wary of journalists here. The centre is in a purpose-built 1960s concrete building. It has that multi-storey car park sort of vibe and it looks a little bit out of place here.
2:10.6	This is Belsais Park and it's definitely what you call a desirable area.
2:15.6	Leafy, quiet and full of grand white stucco houses and nice little cafes.
2:21.9	In some ways, it's the home of psychotherapy in the UK.
2:26.1	Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, lived just around the corner.
2:30.6	His house is now a museum and he's immortalised in a large bronze statue just to the left of the Tavi's entrance.
	...

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