Psychiatrist George Hibbert has been conning Stafford taxpayers out of fortunes for years. But more Slog research reveals how he did it…and why others also had their doubts.

In a fascinating follow-up to last week’s expose of Staffordshire Social Services ‘consultant’ George Hibbert, The Slog is in a position to reveal a classic example of how mothers are incarcerated and children snatched from parental care by manipulative psychiatrists.

Last year, mother-site nby covered the issue of so-called ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome'(PAS), a paedophiles’ charter invented by disgraced American child psychiatrist Richard Gardner. The Slog has now discovered the equivalent drivel employed by Hibbert: ‘Attachment Problems'(AP).

The scam with AP – a real enough condition in its own right – was to use it as a means of shutting anyone up who opposed Hibbert’s opinion. Thus, if a solicitor acting for one of his ‘patients’ disagreed with the diagnosis, that solicitor was himself suffering from AP vis-a-vis his client.

As we’ve already seen, Hibbert himself had something of a AP situation with Jill Canvin, his partner who allegedly posed as an ‘objective’ childcare solicitor. But to solidify his perceived judgement still further, George Hibbert began writing about AP (and taking it to extremes) in eminent professional magazines.

But the equally eminent legal blog Pink Tape took exception to this in 2008 as follows:

‘…Where I begin to disagree with Dr Hibbert’s article is this: he says that a professional who is seriously affected by the client’s attachment behaviour ‘will no longer be able to assist the court in finding a good solution for the children because he / she has become an extension of the dysfunctional client..the article appears to suggest that in doing our job properly and with equal vigour for the sensible and the misguided, the balanced and the dysfunctional, we should be criticised as complicit with child abuse…’

The Blog concluded (not unnaturally) that this was dubious bordering on bonkers.

In another development over the weekend, The Slog discovered that Hibbert has a relatively brief ‘experience’ in childcare psychiatry.

“When he worked here” said a tentative official in Oxford University Hospital, “he ran an adult addiction unit”. The impression we gained was that George Hibbert left his employ there in an even greater hurry than the shares in his abortive company collapsed in 2001.

We await any sign that Stafford social services boss Peter Traves will act upon this (and previous) information…without holding our collective breath.