The Psychologist March 2023

Matt Wall on the psychedelic revolution and Psychology

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• Making research matter

• Aversion therapy: A personal account

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The Psychologist is the magazine of The British Psychological Society

It provides a forum for communication, discussion and controversy among all members of the Society, and aims to fulfil the main object of the Royal Charter, ‘to promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied’

The Psychologist needs you!

We rely on your submissions throughout the publication, and in return we help you to get your message across to a large and diverse audience. For details of all the available options, plus our policies and what to do if you feel these have not been followed, see www.bps.org.uk/contribute-psychologist

The main message, though, is simply to engage with us. Contact the editor Dr Jon Sutton on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, or tweet us on @psychmag

Managing Editor Jon Sutton Deputy Editor Shaoni Bhattacharya, Anthony Kendrick (job share)

Production Mike Thompson Journalist Ella Rhodes

Research Digest Matthew Warren (Editor), Emily Reynolds, Emma Young

Associate Editors Articles Paul Curran, Michelle Hunter, Rebecca Knibb, Adrian Needs, Wilf Nelson, Peter Olusoga, Blanca Poveda, Paul Redford, Sophie Scott, Laura Shepherd, Mark Wetherell, Nadia Yates-Stephenson

History of Psychology Candice Whitaker Culture Kate Johnstone, Chrissie Fitch

Voices in Psychology Madeleine Pownall

Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Richard Stephens (Chair), Dawn Branley-Bell, Kimberley Hill, Sue Holttum, Laura Kilby, George Kitsaras, Deborah Husbands, Fiona Pargeter, Miles Thomas, Layne Whittaker

22 Applying the full force of research and theory to social policy

Linda Tropp with advice on ‘making research matter’

28 What’s the impact of impact?

John Drury with three ways in which achieving impact can feed back into Psychology itself

32 What journalists want… and what Psychologists need to know

Claudia Hammond with some advice

36 The dark side of impact

Emma Young

40 Shaking the kaleidoscope of the mind

Matt Wall on the psychedelic revolution and the implications for Psychology

46 Aversion therapy: A personal account

Pauline Collier looks back on her ‘treatment’, and forward to truth and reconciliation.

Plus contributions from Jim Orford, and the BPS

52 ‘The mentees we work with are stuck in their careers in different ways’

Mia Pal hears from Dawn Godsen on how Branches can support career development

56 Find peace with bodies and food

We meet Sara Dowsett

58 Jobs in psychology

Latest vacancies, featured job

60 Books

The Invention of Tomorrow; Sebastian Cordoba’s ‘books that shaped me’; and more

66 Culture

Wednesday, OCD, The Traitors, and AA

72 Your voice Letters and more

80 How do we make Psychology research matter?

We asked on Twitter

This month, marking Linda Tropp’s Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Sussex, she shares her views on how research and theory can shape social policy; and Sussex colleagues John Drury and Claudia Hammond write on impact and routes to achieving it. Emma Young, from our own Research Digest, rounds up some studies speaking to its ‘dark side’. Elsewhere, don’t miss Matt Wall’s cover feature on the psychedelic revolution; longstanding member Pauline Collier’s recollections of aversion therapy, with a response from one of the psychologists involved at the time; and much more throughout the issue.

You may notice some changes in this edition Although we are just one part of a multimedia communications strategy across the Society, we are proudly so, and kicking off the magazine with ‘Your Society’ is an explicit acknowledgement of that. Moving an adapted letters section to the back (‘Your voice’) bookends the magazine with community – so vital to all we do.

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

‘What drew me to the BPS archive was that I could see its potential’

British Psychological Society Archives Manager Sophie O’Reilly spoke to Ella Rhodes about the past, present, and future of the Society’s fascinating historical collections.

How did you first become interested in being an archivist?

I have always been fascinated by history. I went to Newcastle University for a BA in ancient history and loved that. I had volunteered at an archive in the university and later started volunteering at Woburn Abbey and went on to become an archives assistant there. I loved immersing myself in history, I loved the fascinating stories you would learn, you would find something new every day.

After that I studied Archives and Records Management at the University of Dundee while I was working as an archives assistant at the Boots UK

archives in Nottingham. Working in the Boots archives really opened my eyes to the history of science as well as the history of pharmaceuticals and the high street. As well as the standard records you would expect to find in archives they also had tincture bottles, so many bedpans, old perfume bottles, rouge, it was just fascinating. It had such a multifaceted history, so many researchers were accessing it to facilitate exciting new projects and that really opened my eyes to how archives can be used.

After Boots I came to the BPS. Being at the BPS History of Psychology Centre (HOPC) has been fascinating because the history of psychology is

so interesting and certain aspects of it are quite under-researched. For example, there isn’t enough research into the history of marginalised groups in UK psychology… a lot of what there has been on this topic has focused on America. It’s been fascinating to see what the BPS archive holds, and I think what drew me to the BPS archive was that I could see its potential. I could see it was quite an underused asset and a lot needs to be done to it. That opportunity really intrigued me – to take an archive from something which is quite underused, not reaching its potential, and building it to something where there’s really innovative research going on, where we’re using innovative software to enable access, where it’s really adding to psychology and to the Society, and to our understanding of who we are.

Can you tell me about the archive review?

As I mentioned, when I joined the BPS it was very evident that the archive was underused. To help us come up with a vision and plan for the archives, myself and the Director of Knowledge and Insight worked with independent archive consultants to conduct a review of the archives. We worked with Elizabeth OxborrowCowan Ltd, from April 2022 for around six months with a final report in September. The methodology of the review was about assessing the historical material in terms of listing it, but also in terms of preservation needs, what kind of state it was in, and reviewing the archive storage. The consultant also conducted stakeholder interviews and workshops so we could better understand what our audience wants from our services.

The key findings from that review have been that the BPS owns a very rich archive, that provides a detailed and unique narrative of the history of UK psychology, and it’s a significant collection in terms of the content, that there are a wide range of people who want to use the archives.

But another key finding was that the material is not accessible at all, and it’s been neglected. The recommendations that came out of the review have led us onto thinking about collaborative projects, research, and really opening up the archives. One of the recommendations was consolidating the historical collections and getting it into one place because it’s been held over several locations for years. We’re going to move all of the collection to the BPS Leicester office, where we’ve commissioned archival standard shelving. We can then have researchers come and visit the collection, we can start a cataloguing project, we can put together volunteer programmes with students where they can list the collection, they can learn about archives, and they can help with preservation and conservation.

The review was really successful – it’s given us a five-year plan of how we can achieve these aims for the archive. By the end of the five-year plan ideally we want to get Archive Service Accreditation which is awarded by the National Archives, that would

demonstrate that HOPC is following good practice and archival standards, that we provide an efficient service, and that we are continuously developing and improving the archives.

Tell me about some of your aims with the BPS archive following that review.

The aim of the BPS archives now is really to be the premier archive for the history of UK psychology. During my time at the BPS it’s been very apparent that we have one of the most significant archives on the history of UK psychology, and what you can do with that is limitless in terms of research. We’re hoping to do more external collaborations and have recently got funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a four-year PhD student to conduct a research doctorate looking at the archives as the primary resource. The title of the PhD is ‘A LGBTQIA+ Black and Marginalised History of the British Psychological Society 1892- 2022’. This is just an example of the research projects we want to conduct to enable new insights and open up the archives.

We also want to be leaders in the field of applying new software to archival collections. We have a new Data and Analytics team at the BPS, and we are looking at applying Artificial Intelligence and text mining to the archives. The archives we have are quite text heavy and very dense. We have a lot of minutes, meeting papers, government papers and guidelines. With something like that it would take multiple years for researchers to trawl through it and find what they’re looking for. Some organisations have started to use AI and text mining already, where AI is used to understand and organise huge amounts of data to save time and make new connections. We are scoping a pilot project to apply this to a sample area of the collection.

A lot of what we’re trying to do now is make the collection accessible – whether that means digitisation of certain aspects of the collection or a wider range of people visiting the archives. We want the archives to be accessible for there to be continuous research projects with multiple higher education institutions, but also for members to utilise the archives. There’s no point having an archive if it’s not being used and it’s not being seen.

Can you tell me about some of the gaps in the archive, and how you decide what to include in the collection?

Active archive collecting has a few different avenues. One of the main avenues is that, as we’re an archive that sits within the British Psychological Society, we get many records from the workings of the BPS. One of the things that we’re also trying to do is tighten up records management within the Society – that’s not only making sure that the Society is working in an efficient way, but that it is also GDPR compliant and that historically significant records are being transferred to the archive.

One of the other avenues is from donors – from

people outside the organisation whoever they may be – psychologists or relatives of psychologists – donating personal papers of themselves or a relative to the archives.

Another recommendation from the review was for us to tighten up our collections development policy – which refers to how we want to develop our collection in terms of content. We want to identify the gaps in the collection, we are identifying what aspects of the history of UK psychology are missing or not represented in the archive. Part of that involves doing a call out for those types of archives.

Recently we’ve done a call-out for records related to Black psychologists because we’re aware that the archives at the moment is very white and European, and we want the archives to represent all the diverse voices within psychology. We have put a call out for these records in the hope that we will get donations. We also want to record oral histories and people can suggest individuals to for us to interview. It’s about always thinking what’s an interesting and/or underrepresented story within UK psychology and what stories are important for us to preserve for future generations?

As an archives we constantly want to develop

our understanding of what we should be collecting, especially how do you convey or represent in an archives that which has been left out of history or hidden? It’s a difficult topic and it’s a difficult thing to do. We’re always interested in new suggestions of what we could be collecting and what we could be adding to the archives.

Can you tell me about some of the most interesting things you’ve come across in the BPS archives? What immediately pops to mind is the psychological test collection. People probably don’t realise that, whilst in the BPS archives we obviously collect the history of the BPS, we also collect the history of UK psychology outside of the BPS. We have a large collection of psychological tests dating back to the 1930s up until the present day. They are just amazing to look at.

There are all manner of psychological tests –developmental, IQ, personality, occupational, and they are all so different. Some of them come in huge suitcases, the developmental ones often have toys with them and illustrated cards with family members. There are intelligence tests and IQ tests, which are quite topical at the moment in terms of what IQ tests actually tell us and how the mass adoption of IQ tests has affected society – especially marginalised people. There’s been more awareness about the people who came to the UK from Caribbean countries and how the children were treated in the British educational system. For example, Caribbean children, of course, used some different words compared with British people when referring to the same thing. These IQ tests would ask children questions like ‘what is this picture’ and it would be a picture of a tap, but children from the Caribbean called taps ‘pipes’, but answering ‘pipe’ would be classed as incorrect. This story was also captured in our recent oral history with Waveney Bushell, the first Black educational psychologist in Britain. There were so many cultural misunderstandings, and you can imagine how traumatic it might have been for young children and their families coming here from the Caribbean, into schools with a predominantly white population, and coping with institutional racism. A disproportionate amount of Black children were sent to schools for the ‘Educationally Sub-normal’ where their opportunities for learning were extremely limited.

The tests show so much about what we valued as a society, what we thought was intelligence, what we thought were ‘correct’ answers. It’s just fascinating how different the tests are, how they’ve evolved since the 30s, the different stories they tell and how ideas have changed.

For more information on the BPS collections and archives see tinyurl.com/4h48hpjm

We have a large collection of psychological tests dating back to the 1930s up until the present day

To find out more about the archive appeal for records relating to Black psychologists see tinyurl.com/5n8327vr

Return to practice

Qualified practitioner psychologists have been encouraged to re-join the profession and Health and Care Professions Council register through Health Education England’s Return to Practice Programme, in collaboration with the BPS. The programme supports those who have not been on the HCPC register for more than two years. It helps them find supervised practice placements, provides expenses up to £800, and shares resources and platforms for peer support.

Natasha Pisarski, Health Education England’s Return to Practice (RTP) Programme Lead for the HCPC register, said since the programme started in 2017 more than 800 people had returned to professions covered by the HCPC register, including 17 practitioner psychologists. ‘Returners do not need to take exams or retrain – they are qualified in their profession. It is often about regaining confidence and updating their knowledge and skills… RTP is about gaining re-registration to use their protected title. Return to

practice requirements are flexible and allow professionals to update their knowledge and skills through a self-directed process. A returner can decide how to complete their period of updating in a way that best suits their personal circumstances, be that through supervised practice, private studies or formal studies. The timescale to complete the return to practice process is currently 24 months.’

Dr Katherine Peter qualified as a Clinical Psychologist in 2007, took a break in 2015 and returned to practice in 2021. She said: ‘With small children I really felt I needed some time focusing just on them. It was five years later that I looked into getting back on the HCPC register. As part of the process I contacted the last Trust I had worked for. The Trust were flexible and supported me to do two days per week on a voluntary basis to ease me back into the world of work, enabling me to prove to myself that I can juggle both work and homelife. My manager encouraged e to apply for a Band 7 job vacancy…I got the job,

Workforce transformation

The BPS is supporting the development of seven trainee health psychologists on a Health Education England (HEE) programme exploring the contribution and impact of using a health psychology approach in workforce transformation and redesign. HEE is funding the trainee health psychologist roles – one in each of the seven NHS regions in England – to deliver projects and learning as part of a two-year pilot scheme linked to wider programmes to expand psychological professions in England.

The trainees will complete the society’s Stage 2 training in health psychology as part of a wider package and will receive support from a qualified health psychologist as a coordinating supervisor, a workplace supervisor, and a national training director, as they gain experience in health and care. Trainees will be involved in work where behaviour change is vital to introduce new ways of working and support workforce transformation or redesign and will develop and conduct research projects and will also train others within the health and care system.

Professor Lucie Byrne-Davis (University of

with my notification of being back on the HCPC register coming the weekend before I started my new role! The best thing about returning to practice has been the realisation that I can strike a balance between work and homelife that works for me.’

Pisarski said organisations can reap many benefits from encouraging professionals to return to practice, and should take a flexible approach to help people do so. ‘Some ways to do this might include thinking about what you can do virtually, for example by doing online supervision sessions, looking at what your team can offer and encouraging team members to support returners.’ er

See tinyurl.com/5n8hyp5m or contact Natasha Pisarski on Twitter @NatashaPisarski, or email the Return to Practice Programme at r2pahp-hcs@hee.nhs.uk

For support in Wales see tinyurl. com/2rth3d7u

For support in Scotland email ahp.practice.ed@nes.scot.nhs.uk

Manchester), chair of the BPS Division of Health Psychology, said when she and colleagues were approached to discuss ways of supporting workforce redesign, they immediately thought of how much value health psychologists could bring to the challenge.

‘Working with Professor Angel Chater and Professor Jo Hart, as a team of current and past chairs of the Division of Health Psychology, with huge support from the national lead for psychological professions in England, Adrian Whittington, alongside the workforce transformation team, we have brought this project to fruition. We were fortunate to recruit Dr Liz Jenkinson to lead the programme and some excellent supervisors. The next two years we will closely monitor these placements and work with the commissioners of health workforce training to see how this pilot can be continued.’

For more information about the programme and trainee posts, visit www.hee.nhs.uk/our-work/workforce-transformation/healthpsychology-workforce-transformation-programme and sign up to the programme mailing list via tinyurl.com/2mzd96yy.

Natasha Pisarski

Ella Rhodes spoke to the three lead authors of British Psychological Society guidance on working with individuals who have engaged in stalking.

With poor recognition, high reoffending rates, and a lack of clear treatments, working with those who engage in stalking is a challenge for psychologists. The British Psychological Society’s Division of Forensic Psychology and Division of Clinical Psychology recently published guidance for practitioner psychologists who work with those who stalk; it outlines theories of stalking, stalking typologies, assessment and formulation, risk management and practitioner safety. We asked the authors about their work with those who stalk, and the research gaps in the area.

It is estimated that 2.5 million people in England and Wales experience stalking each year, with some studies finding that reoffending occurs in around 50 per cent of cases. Forensic Psychiatrist Paul Mullen developed a typology system for classifying the motivation of people who stalk. This includes those who stalk after a relationship breakdown; those who may be lonely and stalk strangers or acquaintances out of a desire for a relationship, sometimes believing a bond exists between themselves and their victim when it does not; or those who believe that they have been the subject of an injustice and hold a grievance. One of the lead authors of the new British Psychological Society guidance, Dr Rachael Wheatley, Forensic Psychologist and Professional Psychological Practice Programmes Manager (University of Derby), began specialising in the area around 12 years ago after working with men who had committed intimate partner violence offences. ‘What became really evident, when you looked at the case details, was that not all the men had been in an intimate relationship with the person at the time they had committed offences against, if at all… that was quite striking.’

‘Then there was a referral that came through to work with somebody with very clear stalking behaviours, and I was asked to do a risk assessment. I was offered the opportunity to do stalking risk profile training and that was when I learned a lot more about the different stalking typologies and found it all really mind blowing. I hadn’t thought about stalking in that way before. I didn’t realise there were different typologies, or that we didn’t know much about stalking.’

A great deal to learn

There is a great deal still to learn about stalking – the guidance points out several areas in need of attention including treatment effectiveness, the persistence of

stalking, desistance opportunities, and addressing the fixation and obsession seen in many offenders. Another of the document’s lead authors, Sara Henley, Consultant Clinical and Forensic Psychologist and Joint Clinical Lead of the Stalking Threat Assessment Centre and the National Stalking Clinic, said we still need to uncover what helps those who stalk to stop.

‘We would like to know, for example, what happens with individuals who end up in custody. They go into custody, they are fixated, they have a very concrete and narrow-minded way of thinking about things, and they’re left in a cell for several months, and guess what they’re thinking about? Not only has that not made things better, but there’s also every possibility that it’s made things worse. If there could be a development or an intervention that could be offered to those individuals in custody, I think that would be a really positive step.’

Wheatley pointed out that there is a need for different interventions depending on the motivational typology of individuals to stalk. ‘There’ll be people who stalk because they are seeking a relationship, they could have underlying mental health problems that might require a certain intervention. There are people that have lost a relationship and can’t bear the grief and the inevitability of what that means for them. There are others who fairly innocently just want a relationship, a friendship or sexual contact, but they’re going about it in the wrong way because of intellectual, social or personality difficulties; they’re not connecting socially in ways that are acceptable and end up stalking to attain their goals. I’d really like to see focus on early interventions and also wider societal education – what impact would it have if we got society to a point where our young adults, adolescents and children could recognise the different ways stalking can look.’

Dr Alan Underwood, a Clinical Psychologist from the Stalking Threat Assessment Centre and National Stalking Clinic, was also a lead author of the guidance. He said stalking was a relatively new research area with multiple outstanding questions. ‘The initial focus has been on describing the population, but we’ve got very little about what interventions work. From a clinical practitioner perspective I would like to understand the clinical phenomena we see and how we start to build effective interventions, what are the areas we might need to target and address, for example in areas like rumination.’

‘Working with people who stalk is about carefully coming alongside someone who has a very fixed view’

Underwood told me there was a need to explore stalking outside of adults in heterosexual relationships. ‘We need to expand our work with younger people and adolescents. From the limited research in that area stalking seems to present slightly differently in adolescents. That could be a generational thing, but the behaviours and experiences also seem to be different. A lot of the research is also based on heteronormative ideas –usually a female victim and a male perpetrator – but what if it’s a same sex couple? Are there different risks for those groups? Not assuming sameness across all groups is going to be important.’

Unique challenges

The authors pointed out some of the unique challenges of working with people who stalk, Wheatley said a lack of recognition of stalking is a huge barrier. ‘It might be totally clear that they’ve been charged with stalking but they won’t call themselves a stalker. It’s this label that is a real block given the associated stereotypes. When you do spend time with people and break it down, often their goals are normal human desires and wants, but the way they’re going about it is not workable. The hard bit is getting them to see their strategies are harmful, fruitless in achieving their goals (related to re-establishing or attaining relationships), and illegal.

‘There’s also a challenge in not having anywhere to signpost people to for help, you might do the risk assessment but where do they go for help? We don’t have many effectiveness studies yet, and we don’t really know what helps to stop people from stalking or if they’ve stopped to never stalk again.’

Wheatley said there were also many challenges for the victims of stalking. ‘We tell victims all the time to contact the police if they feel they are being stalked, but conviction rates for stalking are around 1 per cent (or even less). Recognition of what stalking is across society and criminal justice agencies is very, very important. I know there’s lots happening at the moment in terms of police training, but there’s so much more that that we need to do. It needs to involve all of us, including people in academia working with agencies to help to improve these things.’

Underwood echoed the importance of recognition, saying that individuals will often not see their behaviour as stalking. ‘Often the people we work with have been referred by the court or the Probation Service under a legal order and they don’t necessarily subscribe to idea that they have been stalking. That’s a big challenge and might be partly to do with some of the scripts in society around stalking – people don’t identify with those kinds of stereotypes and myths around stalking which we see in the media. There seems to be something about the label itself which people are very reticent to identify themselves with and there can be challenges with engaging people.’

Henley said narcissism was something she had experienced in this group. ‘There’s a real self-

referential, self-preoccupation. It’s all about me, it’s about how I’m feeling, what I’m doing, how I’ve been treated. One chap I saw was married for 20 years and his wife left him, and he pursued her and in the end he was making threats to kill her and was arrested and was in custody. He was so enraged by the wrongs that she had done and the pain that he felt – how dare she leave him? How dare she do this? It was all about how he felt about it. It was so difficult to get past that – he felt so aggrieved by what had happened. He said, “everybody’s talking about the wrong I’ve done, but nobody’s talking about the wrong she’s done”. I got a piece of paper and drew the difference between something feeling unfair and something being illegal, but to him they were the same… what she had done had broken some kind of law that was only in his head.’

The bigger picture

Henley added that it can be difficult to help those who stalk to see the bigger picture. ‘Working with people who stalk is about carefully coming alongside someone who has a very fixed view of things, isn’t really interested in the fact you might have a different opinion, is really preoccupied by what their experiences are; you have to use your skills in working with people who have that fragile, narcissistic presentation.

‘There are some people who can’t get past that at all, whatever your viewpoint is, however carefully crafted, is unacceptable – they can’t tolerate it. That can make intervention very hard, but if you could see people earlier in the process perhaps you might be able to see that. By the time we see people sometimes they have invested in this stalking behaviour for years, and sometimes it’s a big thing to say “oh I’ll just stop” – you’ve invested so much in being right that it’s hard to turn around. These are some of the challenges and we really need to think creatively about how to offer people something that is meaningful to them.’

The guidance includes several recommendations, including a need for practitioners to be aware of ongoing risks given the prevalence and persistence of stalking, the importance of using stalking-specific risk assessments, and ensuring victims of stalking are central to any risk management plans.

Diabetes, doing open research, and design

For the guidance see www.bps.org. uk/news/newguidancelaunchedsupportpsychologistsworkingpeople-whostalk

Jon Sutton reports from the Psychobiology Section Annual Scientific Meeting and Networking Event.

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/diabetes-doing-open-research-and-design

New Years Honours

Three members of the British Psychological Society have been recognised in the 2023 New Year Honours List. Among them are consultant applied psychologist, expert in psychosocial medicine, and former High Sheriff of Greater Manchester Professor Robina Shah MBE DL JP (www.bps.org.uk/volume-33/october2020/i-dont-take-roles-badge-i-just-want-makedifference).

The Director of the Doubleday Centre for Patient Experience, Shah has been awarded a DBE (Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for services to Patient Care. She said she was truly humbled, honoured and delighted by the award. ‘I am overwhelmed with humility and a myriad of emotions. I am thankful to all those people who have enriched my life’s journey. I am deeply indebted to my parents, husband Tariq and children, Zainab, Raabiyah and Sulaymaan, and all those patients, carers, families and colleagues who have supported my work. My success is theirs too, and I accept this huge honour for all of us!’

Professor of Social Psychology Dominic Abrams FBA (www.bps.org.uk/volume-34/november-2021/ one-one-dominic-abrams) (University of Kent) has been awarded an OBE (Officer of the Order of the

New chair appointed

The BPS has appointed David Crundwell as the new chair of the Society’s Board of Trustees. He has experience in international corporate affairs and has a longstanding personal interest in public health.

Crundwell is also Chair of Imperial Health Charity, a former trustee of the British Geriatrics Society and, sits on the GenitoUrinary Medicine Specialist Advisory Committee with the Royal College of Physicians. He also works on several major research projects around public and sexual health.

BPS President, Nicky Hayes, said she was delighted to welcome David to the board. ‘I am confident

British Empire) for services to the Social Sciences. He said he was delighted on behalf of the BPS, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, Academy for the Social Sciences and British Academy.

‘I have been supported by superb and committed staff and academics working tirelessly to advocate for the social and economic value of the social sciences. In my own research work I have been fortunate to work with wonderful students, collaborators and colleagues at the University of Kent and our many partner organisations, working together to combat prejudice and promote a kinder and more inclusive society. This honour reflects the value of their work as much as mine.’

Dr Atiya Kamal, Health Psychologist and Senior Lecturer (Birmingham City University), has been awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire), for services to Health Psychology during Covid-19. er

that his expertise and experience will help the Society play an ever stronger role in championing psychology, psychologists and the wider profession. As we look to the future there never has been a more important time for clear leadership and good governance.’

We intend to feature the Board, including David, once some new appointees are in place. Voting for President Elect opens on 27 February: see www.bps.org.uk for nominees and procedure.

Volunteer Hub

The BPS has launched a new Volunteer Hub which will provide resources and support. As part of a drive to better support volunteer

members and create a sense of community, the hub provides a central area for volunteers to access information on their roles and allows them to carry out training.

The hub was developed by a BPS Volunteer Resource Working group which included Society staff who work with volunteers, along with consultation from volunteers themselves. The hub aims to give volunteers a better experience in their roles and ensure information is more readily available.

If you are a BPS volunteer you can access the hub via the Society’s online learning platform BPS Learn at learn.bps.org.uk

Professor Robina Shah, MBE, DL, JP, CPychol, FRCGP(Hon)

Professor Dominc Abrams, OBE, FBA, FAcSS, FBPsS

Complexity and nuance in latest Society awards

The winners of the 2022 BPS Presidents’ Award and Book Awards have been announced – with one psychologist winning two. Dr Victoria Clarke (University of the West of England), an Associate Professor in Qualitative and Critical Psychology, has received the President’s Award and, along with co-author and collaborator Professor Virginia Braun (University of Aukland), has also won the 2022 BPS Book Award in the textbook category for their book Thematic Analysis: A practical guide

Clarke’s thesis research on the social construction of lesbian and gay parenting coincided with the founding of the Lesbian and Gay Psychology Section of the BPS (now named the Psychology of Sexualities Section), and her early career work was in the rapidly growing field of LGBTQ+ psychology. The focus of Clarke’s work shifted to qualitative methodology after a paper she wrote with Braun outlining a new approach to thematic analysis became widely cited and influential in psychology.

Clarke’s latest research is focused on physical disability in relation to sexuality, relationships and clothing, and body, prompted by her own experience of multiple sclerosis. She said she was delighted to win the Presidents’ Award and was grateful to those involved in nominating her – particularly Professor Lindsay O’Dell.

‘As a qualitative psychologist, it is particularly gratifying to receive recognition from the BPS, as a core part of my work has been promoting and developing qualitative research methods. For the last two decades, my main focus has been developing a thematic analysis method with my friend and colleague Professor Virginia Braun, as well as writing, teaching and communicating about qualitative research methods more broadly. Our mission is to demystify qualitative research, to make it accessible, and to support students and researchers in doing high quality qualitative research, and this award is a real validation for the work we have put in.’

Braun and Clarke said they were delighted to win the Book Award for their textbook – a work they described as a ‘labour of love’. ‘[The book] represents the culmination of over a decade of writing and thinking about and teaching thematic analysis. In this book, we tried to make qualitative research as accessible as possible while not sacrificing complexity and nuance. We’ve been so thrilled to hear from readers that the book has really helped them get to grips with thematic analysis. As qualitative psychologists, we are also thrilled that our corner of psychology is receiving this type of recognition from the BPS.’

David Robson’s book The Expectation Effect: How your mindset can transform your life won a BPS Book

Award in the popular science category. Robson’s writing on the psychology of misinformation and risk communication during the Covid-19 pandemic has previously won awards from the Association of British Science Writers and the UK Medical Journalists’ Association.

On winning the BPS Book Award, Robson said ‘Our mindsets can influence everything from patients’ responses to a new therapy to our experiences of exercising, dieting and coping with stress. With The Expectation Effect, my aim was to bring cutting-edge psychological research to a broad audience, while doing justice to the complexities of the science. I am delighted and immensely grateful for this recognition from the BPS.’ er

For an interview in The Psychologist with Clarke and Braun see tinyurl.com/5yucz79v

To read Robson’s award-winning feature on misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic for The Psychologist see tinyurl.com/bdfk2wm6, and for his article around The Expectation Effect see tinyurl.com/robson0122

To find out more about the Presidents’ Award see www.bps.org.uk/awards-and-grants Nominations for the 2023 BPS Book Award will open in March – you can find more information about the award and previous winners via www.bps.org.uk/book-award

Award winners: Dr Victoria Clarke (left) and collaborator Professor Virginia Braun (above) and David Robson (below)

‘The stuff that happens while we’re having CAke’

Jon Sutton with some highlights from Conversation Analysis Day at Loughborough University; serving this year as a tribute to Charles Antaki.

CA Day, held annually at Loughborough University, means Conversation Analysis Day. This time round, it also meant Charles Antaki Day – as delegates came together to celebrate the social psychologist’s ‘pivot to Emeritus Professorship’.

Expertly organised by Loughborough pair Saul Albert and Elizabeth Stokoe, the interdisciplinary and hybrid event was very much in Antaki’s image. He has noted how he ‘started out as a traditional sort of social psychologist’, earning his PhD at the MRC Social and Applied Psychology Unit at Sheffield University. ‘Something was gnawing at me even as I was plotting my experiments and shuffling through response sheets. What did people’s answers to my “response items” mean? Why was I asking people these abstract questions anyway? Why not actually go and see what they were doing?’ Hence Antaki’s decision to ‘go where the action is’: ‘Talk does things; Conversation Analysis uncovers what, and how.’

In his keynote presentation, Steven Bloch (University College London) thanked Antaki for all those ‘opportunities for collegial exploration and discussion’, noting ‘you just always seemed to have an opinion about things, whatever they may be’. So much of collaboration, Bloch noted, is ‘the stuff that happens while we’re having cake… that’s where the work gets done, that’s where interaction really happens.’ And that is CA Day (there’s even a CAke Off).

Affiliation and knowledge

The first presentation of CA Day came from Catrin Rhys, Maria Erofeeva (Ulster University), and Bethan Benwell (University of Stirling), analysing how complaints are handled on the phone. In ordinary conversation, complaints usually prompt ‘affiliative uptake’: we take a stance that matches the teller’s stance towards the event(s) they are describing. Or we might offer ‘informational uptake’, which might also serve to ‘decouple the hurt from the blaming’. If we fail to do either – for example, if a complaint is followed by a rather noticeable pause of 1.5 seconds – there can be an escalation of blame. The call handler might just be

following their own institutional goals, but not taking up that stance is likely to lead to heightened emotional valence for the caller.

Next up, Yarong Xie (University of Edinburgh) was granted permission by Mumsnet to analyse 72 posts from their discussion forum. This showed that in reporting racist incidents via Mumsnet, what counts as ‘being a good mum’ is constantly negotiated and mobilised. Complaints about child’s behaviour quickly becomes a complaint about another mum’s behaviour (‘I’m guessing that she’s heard some prejudice at home…’). The suffering of one’s hurt child becomes a license to post racist problems on Mumsnet, with educating children about race/ism and protecting children discussed as a mother’s duty.

Power

Knowledge is power, or so the saying goes, and a few of the presentations explored how that manifests in conversation. Using audio recording extracted from body-worn footage, Kate Steel (University of the West of England) studied police-victim interaction during first response callouts to domestic abuse incidents. For various reasons, she only had a 24-hour window with the footage, and her description of poring over the recordings to get as rich and multimodal transcription as possible was a vivid reminder of the value of data in this field, and the rare access to it.

Steel’s examples showed how the conversations ‘co-constructed blame and responsibility’, and also co-constructed police expertise. Phrases such as ‘are you together or not’, while aimed at establishing facts that are necessary for police procedure, can be taken as problematising a victim’s claim. The victims themselves orient to both self-blame and blame from others, and may address this in their talk (‘he just came out of nowhere’). Steel illustrated how the power relationship between speakers is ‘re-negotiated on a momentto-moment basis’, to either compound victims’ vulnerability or to encourage their confidence in police support.

Police support was starkly lacking in a conversation analysis examination of bystander interventions in the murder of George Floyd. Chris Walton (Lancaster University) explained: ‘We’ve got a lot of theories about

bystander intervention, but what we’re in search of is a good description’. So, how do you stop the police from killing someone?

One of the first interventions was from Charles McMillan, telling Floyd ‘the man he gonna win’. ‘The man’ in this situation was very much not Floyd, who responded ‘Man I know… I don’t wanna try to win’. McMillan was projecting the outcome of the interaction as already known and inevitable, yet Walton pointed out that the analysis shows that although the absence of response from the officers ‘is marked’, some – Thomas Lane in particular – were at times responsive to the interventions. ‘It could have gone different,’ Walton concluded.

“He loves to gossip, but is never cruel. Always a humanitarian. Charles has always cared about people and felt for people.”

and harsh criticism to foster the development of staff in high quality leader-member exchange LMX relationships. This was a wonderful window onto how the construction industry is managing via Zoom, with conversational extracts such as ‘consider that as a verbal slap’, ‘is that your girlfriend who’s walked in? Tell her I’ve just given you a telling off’, swearing, joking, informal language, and chatting about home and family life.

The success of any verbal bystander intervention, he said, depends upon its power to significantly reshape a wider sense of context and to effectively overcome alternatives. Walton noted that we saw examples of this, for example, Genevieve Hansen chipping in with ‘I’m a Minneapolis…’ before correcting to ‘I’m a firefighter from Minneapolis’: an ‘appeal to epistemic status’, highlighting that she has the knowledge necessary to intervene.

On a lighter note – at least as I experienced it –Cat Holt (University of Exeter) delivered the splendidly titled ‘You’re an idiot’: Using insults

Holt showed how a leader would tend to admit and explain the harshness, as ‘it’s for your own development’. She said: ‘I found evidence of “toughness” and “love” – the followers accepted the harsh criticism because they understood that the leader supported them and had their best interests at heart.’

The ordinary becomes extraordinary Doctor-patient consultations are another context where power, knowledge and morality collide, and are thrust to the surface in words as mundane as ‘So I can go to work?’ Aija Logren (Tampere) studied video data to determine who initiates talk about sick leave, what she describes as the ‘windows of opportunity to bring up sick leave’. For the patient, important ‘windows of opportunity’ are early in the consultation – around

Charles Antaki (centre) with the Loughborough Discourse and Rhetoric Group.

their reason for visiting, their history and the physical exam.

Logren concluded that the patient manages their stance to avoid social/moral inferences, saying: ‘They tend not to give the impression that getting sick leave was on their agenda. Instead, it’s a necessity, to be deduced out of the information they provide, rather than them explicitly requesting it.’

The second keynote, from Leelo Keevallik (Linköping), was a fitting closing example of the ordinary, that most people – most psychologists, even – might pass over. Have you ever noticed how people can sound empathetic in their interactions with you, even without saying words? Me neither. Keevallik has, and she has videos from infant feeding, primary care consultations and yoga instruction to unearth this.

In ‘non-lexical vocalisations in interaction’, or ‘sounding for others’, one person vocalises to enact someone else’s ongoing bodily sensation. It’s a ‘collaborative performance of sensorial experiences’: during infant feeding that might include sucking lips in, putting the tongue out, vocalising ‘mmm’. When discussing pain, a GP may use a sharp inbreath or even an empathic pain cry. These sounds may subsequently be elaborated in words, an illustration of what Keevallik called the ‘fuzzy boundary between language and non-language’.

Doing being helpful

Back to Steven Bloch, whose keynote wove together how staff on a Parkinson’s helpline do ‘being helpful’, and his personal reflections on how Antaki has done the same for him and so many other academics. Bloch recounted hearing that an acquaintance worked on a Parkinson’s helpline: ‘Data!’, he thought. ‘It’s about getting a foot in the door, and showing the value of stuff we do.’ After he was granted access to 30 calls, Bloch noticed that the way callers present problems is a socially organised practice. Stating the impact of the problem, or symptom(s), is one way to signal that a problem presentation is complete. There may be an ‘upshot (pivot-point) statement’, such as ‘it has disturbed my sleep to such an extent…’, which is calling out to be met with an affiliative response such as ‘So these symptoms are getting in the way of life, aren’t they?’

The nurses on the helpline, though, are in a tricky position. They’re not really there to give medical advice, but they tend to manage this by ‘adopting a low deontic stance’: marking their own authority as being, in some way, diminished or constrained; for example, by saying ‘I’m not a doctor, and I advise you to go and see your doctor’… but then, crucially, following this up with ‘What the doctor might tell you…’ The nurse may also try to manoeuvre an objection (to perceived advice) onto grounds where their own expertise will win the day.

Noticing the significant in the mundane

What has always pulled me to Conversation Analysis is that it’s about noticing the significant in the mundane. As Bloch said of working with Antaki, it ‘has taught me compassion in understanding how people do everyday things, and the complexities of what they are doing’. That moment of what Bloch called ‘our first noticing’ must be a magical thing, like mining precious stones.

It struck me that many of the people found in the CA data are validating, warm and kind – maybe with the exception of the ‘you’re an idiot’ guy, but even his heart was apparently in the right place – and those are terms used by Bloch about Antaki (who, in his typically humble way, was keen to ‘invert the credit’ in that ‘beautiful but largely untrue narrative’). In a parade of video messages, CA luminaries thanked Antaki for being, in the words of Barbara De Cock, ‘a man for all seasons’; and in closing, Jonathan Potter paid warm tribute, saying that Charles has always been egalitarian, never trailing behind the big stars… he is always connecting people, nurturing the marginal so that they became less marginal. ‘He loves to gossip, but is never cruel. Always a humanitarian. Charles has always cared about people and felt for people.’

Conversation Analysis is often about voice, and as Bloch noted, ‘Charles’ writing is extraordinary… it has a voice, and I now recognise that voice.’ It’s a voice that permeates an entire field, and beyond. It’s the voice of an ‘intellectual superstar’, but perhaps more importantly it’s the voice of a man who has for a long time been, in the words of Mick Finlay, ‘kind, and thoughtful, and funny’.

For the full review, and a link to watch videos from the day, see www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/stuff-happenswhile-were-having-cake

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Being around birds can boost your mental wellbeing

We already know that nature can have a positive impact on our mental health. Gardening, being in green spaces, and being around water can all improve our wellbeing. This became particularly clear during the pandemic, when many people in cities had limited access to nature.

Yet while green spaces such as parks and gardens are frequently cited as being good for our mental health, there has been little research into the impact of wildlife on our mood. A new study in Scientific Reports finds that seeing and hearing birds can have a positive impact on our wellbeing, even for people who are experiencing symptoms of depression.

The researchers, led by Ryan Hammoud from King’s College London, collected data from 1292 participants via an app, Urban Mind, which measures people’s experiences of urban or rural life. First, participants shared demographic data, sleeping patterns, and mental health diagnoses they had received. Then, three times per day for two weeks, they completed surveys asking what they were experiencing right at that moment. These included a question about whether or not they could see or hear birds in the moment, as well as whether or not they could see trees, plants, or water. Participants also rated the extent to which they agreed with ten statements – five relating to positive mental wellbeing (‘I am feeling confident/relaxed/happy/connected to others/energetic’) and five related to negative mental wellbeing (‘I am feeling anxious/stressed/down/lonely/ tired’).

The team found that seeing or hearing birds was related to more positive feelings of mental wellbeing in that moment. This was true even after the researchers took into account whether participants could see

trees, water or plants, suggesting that seeing and hearing birds played a specific role in wellbeing rather than only being part of a wider beneficial encounter with nature. There was evidence of a lasting effect too: seeing or hearing birds at one time point was associated with greater wellbeing at the next, though this effect wasn’t as strong.

The team also looked at whether or not there was a difference in the impact of encounters with birds specifically on those with a diagnosis of depression and those without any mental health diagnoses. They found no difference between the two groups, suggesting that hearing and seeing birds has a similar impact on the mental wellbeing of those with and without mental health conditions.

Overall, the results show a significant impact of birds on mental wellbeing – a fact that many of us potentially overlook or fail to acknowledge. This was the case regardless of age, gender, and ethnicity, and whether or not participants had diagnosed mental health conditions. However, the researchers didn’t record whether participants lived in an urban or rural area. It would be interesting to know whether exposure to nature has a greater impact on those living in an urban area, where green spaces are less common, than on people who live in the countryside.

The research has numerous policy implications. First, the team notes, the findings provide an additional reason for prioritising wildlife and environmental protections, especially those focused on biodiversity. Secondly, the results give more credence to so-called ‘green prescribing’, in which those with mental health diagnoses are encouraged to spend time in nature.

Test anxiety makes it harder to absorb information while preparing for an exam

Many students find taking exams stressful. ‘They worry about whether they will be able to recall their knowledge; their hearts beat faster; they sweat and they want to escape the exam room,’ write Maria Theobald at the Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Germany and colleagues in their new paper in Psychological Science. These are all symptoms of what’s known as ‘test anxiety’. Test anxiety is thought to interfere with a person’s ability to retrieve knowledge from their memory during a test, and has been widely linked to poorer exam performance.

But Theobald and her colleagues wondered whether instead test anxiety might be impairing people’s preparation for an exam, rather than affecting performance during the exam itself. To explore this, they turned to data on 309 medical students in Germany who had used a digital learning platform to prepare for their crucial final university exam. The team was able to track each student’s level of knowledge, starting 100 days before the exam itself. This was revealed in their performance on practice questions, as well as in mock exams that took place shortly before the real thing. The students also all completed a measure of their ‘trait’ (background) levels of test anxiety. And, throughout a 40-day period, they repeatedly reported on their levels of ‘state’ anxiety regarding their exam preparation.

The researchers found that greater trait test anxiety was indeed linked to a poorer performance in the final exam. However, it was also linked to poorer performance on the practice questions, and a lower percentage in the mock exam. So, students with the most test anxiety went into the final exam with less knowledge. In fact, when the researchers took into account performance on the mock exam or the pre-exam practice questions, test anxiety no longer predicted their final exam scores.

The researchers further explored why people with test anxiety might have poorer knowledge. They first looked at each student’s level of trait test anxiety and their performance on practice questions across the course of the pre-exam period. They found that students with higher trait anxiety showed a smaller increase in knowledge over time. This suggests that greater trait test anxiety makes it harder to acquire knowledge.

Finally, the team found evidence that awareness of gaps in one’s own knowledge may trigger more anxiety. During the preparation period, higher state anxiety in the morning was not linked to poorer scores on practice questions that day. However, fewer correct answers on one day was linked to greater test-related anxiety the next morning.

Earlier work has suggested that anxiety during

an exam can particularly impair the performance of students with relatively low vs high working memory capacities (worries are thought to take up some working memory, leaving less for the task at hand). The participants in this study were high-performing medical students with presumably capacious working memories. Perhaps this buffered them against any impacts of worries during the exam on performance.

It is possible that anxiety during an exam may interfere with performance in some academic scenarios, but ‘our work suggests that this interference is not as pervasive as previously believed,’ the team writes. Overall, ‘the results of the present study suggest that the reasons for the negative association between anxiety and test performance are complex and begin well before the final test situation.’

And this has important implications for testanxious students, they note. There is research suggesting that training sessions designed to improve study strategies can help students who are anxious about an exam. But, as this work found that test anxiety begins to exert its effects early on in exam preparation, these interventions would need to come early, too. (In fact, the new findings might explain why some interventions designed to relieve test anxiety right before an important exam, such as getting students to write about their worries, have not improved exam performance.)

‘Future research should focus on the development of interventions that facilitate effective knowledge acquisition during exam preparation, or even earlier, to improve the educational prospects of highly testanxious students,’ the team concludes.

Emma Young

Giving a gift, or sending a note of appreciation, is known to boost the mood and wellbeing of the giver, not just the recipient. Now a new paper finds that these kinds of prosocial acts can even reduce feelings of loneliness as well. This is significant because interventions aimed at reducing loneliness have so far had only limited success. (Emotion).

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Digest digested

Adopting a smile can make you feel happier, but the effect is small and only applies in some situations. That’s the conclusion of a large, global study into the facial feedback hypothesis, conducted by a group called the Many Smiles Collaboration. The study is noteworthy for its ‘adversarial’ nature: some researchers were against the hypothesis while others were for it. (Nature Human Behaviour).

The placebo effect is a pretty astounding thing: not only can placebo treatments relieve pain and reduce symptoms of depression, but they can even enhance creativity and boost cognitive performance. Now

research has shown that a placebo can also make us move faster. After sham electrical stimulation to the arm, participants made faster ‘goal-directed’ movements – a finding that could help develop rehabilitation strategies for people with motor impairments. (Scientific Reports).

Sharing an article makes us feel more knowledgeable – even if we haven’t actually read it. Participants who shared news articles without reading them felt they were more knowledgeable about the topic of the story than those who didn’t share them, but – unsurprisingly – didn’t show any greater knowledge on objective tests. Sharing information even influenced people’s behaviour:

participants made different financial decisions depending on whether they had shared an article on investing. (Journal of Consumer Psychology).

Much has been made of the aversiveness of effort, but according to new research, being bored is at least as unpleasant — if not more so. Across a series of studies, participants were repeatedly asked to choose between doing a specific task or doing nothing – and more often than not, they chose to do the task. This was particularly true when the task required greater cognitive effort, suggesting that we actually prefer exerting a certain amount of effort. (Journal of Experimental Psychology).

A simple reminder to mind the gap

Reminding Human Resources professionals about their role in promoting equality could help narrow the gender pay gap, according to research in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Past work on the gender pay gap has often focused on what women themselves can do to improve their chances of getting paid well, effectively putting the onus on women to combat a systemic problem.

So Carolin Schuster from Leuphana University Lüneburg and colleagues instead studied the people who actually make decisions about salaries. The team asked more than 200 HR specialists to read a CV for a job candidate. The CV was identical for all participants, except for the gender of the candidate: their title was either given as ‘Mr M’ or ‘Ms M’.

Some of the participants who were given the female candidate’s CV also read a message highlighting that it was a social norm for HR specialists to help to reduce the gender pay gap by changing their behaviour to ensure equal treatment of men and women. All participants learned that the candidate had asked for a salary of €44,000, and had to come back with a counteroffer.

Participants who had seen the man’s résumé offered a significantly higher salary than those who had seen the woman’s résumé without the message about social norms. However, participants who had seen the social norm message alongside the female candidate’s CV offered her more money, effectively eliminating the gender gap. The gender of the

participants themselves didn’t influence any of these effects.

In a second study, the researchers found that after reading the social norm message, participants felt more strongly that they were working towards a common goal of reducing the gender pay gap, and this could help to explain why they offered a female candidate more money.

It remains to be seen whether this intervention works outside of the lab, and it’s unclear when in the process HR professionals need to see these messages or how long their effects last. But if they do work in real world hiring processes, they could help narrow a gap that current estimates suggest will take more than a century to close.

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Applying the full force of research and theory to social policy

Linda

Tropp

with advice on ‘making research matter’

Since its early beginnings, the field of psychology has stressed the value of using academic research to address pressing social issues and contribute to the public good, and it enjoys a long and rich legacy in working toward these goals. As early as the 1930s, with the rise of fascism in Europe, many academic psychologists expressed ‘great interest in movement to apply psychology to political problems’ (Krechevsky, 1936) and dedicated themselves to conducting scientific research to promote positive social change (see Morawski, 1986). Often regarded as the founder of social psychology, Lewin (1947) further stressed that it is not sufficient to do research simply for the sake of academic publication, and that academic research should ideally lead to some sort of social action. Scholars like Kenneth and Mamie Clark embodied these values by researching problems faced by racial minority youth and sharing this work with U.S. policymakers and litigators in the struggle for civil rights (Clark & Clark, 1947; see also Benjamin & Crouse, 2002; Clark et al., 2004).

Yet on some level, we must acknowledge that our impact in the public sphere has remained relatively limited. Indeed, we have ‘yet to apply the full force of [psychological] research and theory to social policy’ (Pettigrew, 1988, p. 206) and research psychologists ‘are not as involved in social policy work as they once were or as they can be’ (Omoto, 2012, p.805). Why is this? Why has psychology, as a discipline, not had the level of social or policy impact that we would ideally like it to have?

From scientific enterprise to meaningful impact

Although there are surely many answers to this question, admittedly, one answer is that we have not always done the best job of making our work accessible to public audiences, or finding ways for our research to be relevant and useful to the policymakers, organisations, practitioners, and community members

we seek to reach (see Miller, 1969; Schalet et al., 2020). As academic researchers, we are trained to focus on the scientific enterprise, with greater premiums placed on new theoretical insights and novel research findings than on how userfriendly or practical those insights or findings may be. We have developed skills in framing and testing hypotheses using rigorous research methods and advanced statistical procedures, yet most of us have never received training in how to translate academic research for the public, or how to cultivate collaborations with practitioners and organisations, which are the very skills we need to enhance the broader impacts of our work (Kaslow, 2015; Lewis & Wai, 2021; Tropp, 2018).

But if we were to ask our colleagues and students –not to mention ourselves – why we decided to pursue a career dedicated to psychological research, I suspect many of us have been driven by a desire to lend our scientific expertise to social issues and public debates, to somehow contribute to making the world a better place.

Indeed, as a graduate student, I remember scanning through the curriculum vitae of one of my graduate mentors and long-time collaborators, Thomas F. Pettigrew, who served as a member of the White House Task Force on Education and as a consultant to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights back in the 1960s. Pettigrew received his PhD in 1956, and many of his colleagues and collaborators – including his own graduate advisor, Gordon W. Allport – signed on to the well-known social science statement presented in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education cases, which helped to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court of the need to desegregate American public schools (see Clark et al., 2004).

Reflecting on this legacy, I remember doubting

Within each generation of academic psychologists, perennial, soulsearching questions continue to emerge regarding whether and how we can make our research matter in the ‘real world’…

that it would ever be possible for a researcher like me to have such meaningful real-world impact. The social problems loomed so large, the people in power seemed so remote, and the standards set within our discipline offered little room for error. Though I worked on field research as a graduate student in the late 1990s, I intuited that I needed to focus on the more ‘basic’ aspects of the work to be taken seriously as an emerging researcher, and I relegated the more ‘applied’ aspects to time reserved for extracurricular activities. As an assistant professor in the early 2000s, I received the not-so-subtle message from senior colleagues that it’s ‘nice’ to engage in socially relevant work, but that type of work would certainly not earn me tenure. Especially given the stakes involved, the thought that my work could someday have real-world impact remained elusive, even though the desire for it has fueled my passion ever since.

Fortunately, the norms and values of our field appear to have started to shift in recent years. There is now more space for academic psychologists to be valued both for conducting rigorous research in pursuit of novel theoretical and empirical advancements, and for seeking to enhance the social relevance of their scholarship. Reward structures at academic institutions remain quite varied and are often lacking in demonstrating support for public impact, yet there seems to be greater appreciation for the many ways in which academic researchers can and do contribute to the public good.

I perhaps see these shifts in the values and norms of our discipline most clearly when I engage with early career scholars. More often than not, my conversations with younger generations of psychologists focus on how we can make our research matter, and what it takes to cultivate a trajectory toward having public impact. These conversations typically start with broad questions like ‘where do I begin?’ Here, I share some of the questions I tend to pose in response, for any reader

Web resources

www.lindatropp.com

Reconciliation programmes in Bosnia https://karunacenter.org/ project/bosnia and Rwanda https://karunacenter.org/project/rwanda

Cultivating Contact

American Immigration Council www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/ research/cultivating-contact

Welcoming America

https://welcomingamerica.org/resource/cultivating-contact-a-guideto-building-bridges-and-meaningful-connections-between-groups/ National Coalition on School Diversity tinyurl.com/3f66nuht

Cases concerning the use of race in university admissions Fisher v. University of Texas tinyurl.com/chdbe76r

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College tinyurl.com/55nfxb6n

who may wish to embark on their own path toward making research matter. I explore these questions in more depth in 2018’s Making Research Matter: A Psychologist’s Guide to Public Engagement

What issue do I care most about?

One of the first things I encourage people to consider is the social problem or policy issue they care most about. In other words, if you could your research to inform any issue in the world, what would it be? Here, the more precise you can be, the better – for example, if you care about the effects of troubling economic conditions, what aspects of this issue are you most passionate about? How economic resources affect access to mental health services? How economic circumstances shape people’s propensities to compete or cooperate in the larger society? Or the attributions people make for wealth or poverty?

There are numerous ways in which one’s scholarly expertise could inform an issue; part of figuring out your path to having impact involves deciding upon the issues for which you are most willing to invest your time and energy, and what you have to say about those issues. You will soon find yourself crossing paths with like-minded individuals and organisations who are committed to the same issues, and this can swiftly lead to many additional opportunities for public engagement. By reflecting on the issues you care most about, and specifying the message you have to share, you can build a foundation for sustained involvement and impact.

Whom do I most wish to reach?

When we think about having public impact, we may initially envision seeing our name or that of a colleague in the media. Clearly, this can be an effective way to broaden the reach of our work, and there are many approaches we can use to share our message through the media, such as through writing op-ed pieces or blog entries for high-profile news outlets, being interviewed for radio or television, or publishing a book for a popular audience. But there are also many other outlets through which we can share our message outside of academic circles. For instance, we might want our research to inform public policy at the local, state, or national levels, which might lead us to reach out to legislators, policy advocates, or government agencies to have impact. Alternatively, we might seek to have impact in the realm of the law, such as by serving as an expert witness, or by strategising with litigators about how scientific evidence might be used in court cases. We might also wish to have impact on community programs and social institutions through cultivating partnerships with schools, health care

“we must shift how we talk about our work and why it matters”

systems, places of worship, or other community-based organisations. Reflecting on the kinds of impact we wish to have can help us to determine the people and organisations we most wish to reach.

Who could benefit most from the expertise I have to offer?

Ask yourself: who needs to know what I know? Policymakers? practitioners? community organisers? members of the broader public? Perhaps you have come across a quote in the newspaper by a community leader or state official about the very issue you care about, or you might come across a report from a government agency or policy advocates where you can easily envision adding to the conversation they’ve already begun. There are likely to be many actors and organisations already working on the issues you care about, ranging from civic organisations at the local level, to policy organisations on the national stage, or non-governmental organisations working internationally. In my experience, individuals and organisations are usually quite open to hearing from someone with scholarly expertise who can contribute meaningfully to their ongoing efforts and goals.

How well do I know these actors and their goals? Still, before picking up the phone or sending an email, take stock of how well you do (or don’t) understand the goals and needs of the person or organisation with whom you wish to connect. How confident are you that you understand what these individuals, institutions, or communities need, from their own perspective?

I believe one of the common pitfalls we academics face in our attempts to reach non-academic audiences involves our tendency to under-estimate differences between academic and non-academic cultures and how much ‘translation’ of our research is actually necessary. To make our research matter outside of academia, we must shift how we talk about our work and why it matters. Understandably, given our disciplinary training, we are likely to have grown accustomed to talking about the value of our research in terms of what people in our discipline want to know – such as how the research extends our understanding of some aspect of human functioning, motivation, or behavior. Instead, when we seek to translate our research to non-academic audiences, we need to explain why the research matters for their specific goals, and how the research might help them to achieve these goals – such as getting a piece of legislation passed, winning a court case, publishing a front-page story, implementing a

the psychologist march 2023 making research matter

Key sources

Benjamin, L.T. & Crouse, E.M. (2002). The American Psychological Association’s response to Brown v. Board of Education: The case of Kenneth B. Clark. American Psychologist, 57, 38-50.

Clark, K.B., Chein, I. & Cook, S.W. (2004). The effects of segregation and the consequences of desegregation: A social science statement. American Psychologist, 59, 495–501. (reprint of the social science brief filed with the Supreme Court in October, 1952)

Clark, K.B. & Clark, M.P. (1947). Racial identification and preference among Negro children. In T.M. Newcomb & E.L. Hartley (Eds.) Readings in Social Psychology (pp. 169178). New York: Holt.

Kaslow, N.J. (2015). Translating psychological science to the public. American Psychologist, 70, 361-371.

Krechevsky, I. (1936, May 26). Telegram to Science Service. SPSSI Files. Archives of the History of Psychology, Akron, OH.

Lewin, K. (1947). Frontiers in group dynamics: II. Channels of group life; social planning and action research. Human Relations, 1, 143–153.

Lewis, N.A. & Wai, J. (2021). Communicating what we know and what isn’t so: Science communication in psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16, 1242-1254. Miller, G.A. (1969). Psychology as a means of promoting human welfare. American Psychologist, 24(12), 1063–1075.

Morawski, J.G. (1986). Psychologists for society and societies for psychologists: SPSSI’s place among professional organizations. Journal of Social Issues, 42, 111-126.

Omoto, A.M. (2012). Social policy: Barriers and opportunities for personality and social psychology. In K. Deaux & M. Snyder (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology (pp. 804-829). Oxford University Press.

Pettigrew, T.F. (1967). SPSSI as honest broker. SPSSI Newsletter, 117

Pettigrew, T.F. (1988). Influencing policy with social psychology. Journal of Social Issues, 44, 205-219.

Pielke, R.A. (2007). The honest broker: Making sense of science in policy and politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Schalet, A.T., Tropp, L.R. & Troy, L.M. (2020). Making research usable beyond academic circles: A relational model of public engagement. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 20, 336–356.

Tropp, L.R. (Ed.) (2018). Making research matter: A psychologist’s guide to public engagement. Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association.

policy, or changing an institutional practice. The more knowledgeable we are about our audiences’ goals and needs, the more effective and impactful we can be in sharing the expertise we have.

What kind of relationship do I wish to have with those I wish to reach?

If and when we do reach out to others, we might also consider the kind of relationship we wish to have, or the role we wish to play, as we engage with those we seek to reach (Pettigrew, 1967; Pielke, 2007). Many academic researchers see their role as one simply focused on sharing scientific knowledge with individuals and organisations who might benefit from their work. Other academic researchers may instead wish to become more directly involved in working with organisations to achieve their goals. For instance, some may use their expertise to help government agencies and non-governmental organisations consider the strengths and weaknesses of varied policy options; alternatively, others may support agencies and organisations in the design, implementation, and evaluation of their programs, or by advocating

for specific policy decisions in light of the scientific evidence.

Regardless of what we choose, we should aim to have open discussions with our non-academic colleagues about the nature and depth of our involvement, ways in which our objectives are or are not aligned, and what we are or are not willing to do as part of our collaboration, to develop a shared understanding of our respective roles and minimise potential confusion or frustration on either side later on.

What kinds of activities do I find fulfilling?

I also encourage people to consider the kinds of activities that interest them most, the skills they have to offer, and the ways in which they work best. For example, do you prefer being in the spotlight, or working behind the scenes? Working independently or on teams with others? Focusing on concrete goals in the short-term or envisioning broader goals over the long term? Providing answers to any and all of these questions can help to guide you toward making contributions that you find fulfilling, and that play to your strengths, thereby enhancing the likelihood that you’ll want to stay engaged with the issue over time. This is not to say that we shouldn’t also attempt to develop new skills, or that we’ll automatically know the activities for which we are best suited. As with many things, each of our paths may involve a process of trial and error, through which we come to recognise those activities we find most compelling and for which we are particularly well-suited, as well as those for which we may seek to develop greater skill.

Personally, I tend to I gravitate toward ‘behind the scenes’ activities that involve conversation and mutual exchanges of ideas, such as translating psychological science for policy advocates and non-governmental organisations – as compared to activities that involve ‘being in the spotlight’ and more direct confrontation and argumentation, such as delivering expert testimony in a courtroom or getting into the fray of public debates. For me, it is particularly gratifying to sit down with organisational leaders and learn about their goals and needs, to distill academic research in ways that can support them in achieving their goals, and to help them envision how they can practically incorporate new insights from the academic literature into their programs and practices.

It is this orientation that drove me to work with peacebuilding organizations to assess outcomes of reconciliation programs in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, and to develop accessible guides and tools for organisations seeking to augment their bridgebuilding programs with principles from intergroup

contact theory and research. Listening to the concerns of teachers and school administrators – and learning more about the challenges they face – led me to develop and deliver workshops on racial bias and intergroup processes for educators, and to prepare a research brief on interracial contact in schools for the U.S.-based National Coalition on School Diversity. Gaining a deeper understanding of legal and policy debates concerning how racial categories are perceived and used has helped me to communicate more effectively when speaking at briefings on racial prejudice and discrimination in the halls of the U.S. Congress, and when serving as an expert reviewer for amicus briefs submitted by civil rights litigators to the U.S. Supreme Court, in relation to past and current cases concerning the use of race in university admissions (see ‘Web resources’ box).

Through these kinds of professional experiences, I have learned more about how legislators, litigators, educators, and policy advocates think about the issues at play, which has often fueled ideas for new research directions and enhanced my ability to speak to the value of psychological research when I engage in other types of public-facing activities, such as granting media interviews or writing for popular outlets.

Is this the right time for me, or the right opportunity?

At the same time as we feel eager to make a difference and take advantage of the opportunities that come our way, we may also have some reservations about actively pursuing public impact. Given our already full schedules and long lists of academic responsibilities, concerns about the added time and energy it would take to achieve broader impact could loom large. In light of such concerns, we should set realistic expectations for ourselves and keep in mind that our professional lives can have many chapters as our work schedules ebb and flow. At any given moment, we might therefore ask ourselves: Is this really the right time for me to work toward having public impact, or do I have too much on my plate right now? How might pursuing public impact pull me away from other obligations and goals that are priorities for me?

Alternatively, we can also consider the ways in which the time and energy we invest in working toward having public impact can complement our research, teaching, or professional training, or help us to build a foundation for our future academic and professional goals. Either way, it can often be useful to take a step back and reflect on how our desire to make a difference fits within the broader constellation of our professional goals, so that we feel grounded and certain about whichever outreach activities we choose to take on.

“it can often be useful to take a step back and reflect on how our desire to make a difference fits within the broader constellation of our professional goals”

Am I sufficiently confident that the science is ready?

As academic scholars, we tend to feel more comfortable speaking in terms of generalities and probabilities rather than in terms of specifics and absolutes. As a consequence, it might feel unnerving to think that a journalist might publicise our research without revealing its nuances, or that a policymaker or community organisation might choose a particular course of action based on seemingly preliminary research findings.

Here, it can be useful for us to remember that we don’t necessarily need to have to have all the answers, and that the level of knowledge and expertise we do have can still be quite useful. Indeed, I have been reminded many times by journalists and reporters that there are many other people in the world, without any academic credentials or scientific expertise, who would be more than happy to be quoted in the media; by comparison, those of us who have dedicated many years of our lives to studying specific psychological processes and phenomena surely have some valuable insights to offer. As long as we are honest in sharing our expertise while maintaining our scientific integrity, we can simply explain what we know or don’t know, including where gaps exist between existing

knowledge in the research literature and the answers or information others might want.

Concluding thoughts

Actively working to make our research matter can be exciting and invigorating, and it can often give deeper meaning to the academic work we do. Collectively, as a discipline, we have only begun to cultivate the presence and influence we could potentially have in the public sphere, speaking to the broader relevance of psychological research for people’s lives and society at large. Growing numbers of academic psychologists now actively maintain a dual commitment to psychological science and its relevance outside of academia, at the same time as we witness greater value being granted to impactful research within the mainstream of our field. As such, the time is ripe for academic psychologists to renew our commitment to conducting rigorous scientific research and identifying ways in which we can support many segments of society in putting this research to good use.

Professor Linda R. Tropp, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Faculty Associate, School of Public Policy, University of Massachusetts Amherst. tropp@umass.edu

What’s the impact of impact?

John Drury with three ways in which achieving impact can feed back into Psychology itself

Istumbled into impact. In my research on crowd behaviour, I was interested in theory primarily, though I could see and sought to combat those theories (such as that of Gustave Le Bon’s) that weren’t just factually wrong but dangerous in practice. But my own ‘practice’ in psychology was limited to writing and speaking at conferences. With Stephen Reicher and Chris Cocking, I started research on behaviour in mass emergencies, and I found that practitioners and policymakers were interested in the practical implications of the work (see Drury, 2016).

I also found that I enjoyed sharing the research with these non-academics – crowd safety managers, fire service personnel, civil contingencies planners – and discussing with them how to solve their practical problems.

That was a bit before the ‘impact agenda’ was a thing in UK psychology. Later, my experience of impact work was useful when I took on roles as Impact lead and then Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange in my School at the University of Sussex. I have been working with colleagues to help them understand and achieve impact, and I have been lucky enough to witness some impact success stories. All of this has enabled me to see not only the way that psychology research can contribute to changes in the world outside of academic – which is the standard definition of ‘impact’ – but also the way that achieving impact can itself have consequences for the practice of psychology. Based on my experiences, here I discuss three areas where impact can impact on psychology.

Validation and theory development

Kurt Lewin’s (1945) famous phrase ‘there is nothing as practical as a good theory’ (p.129) argues for the value of theory that can solve practical problems. But

applying theory to practical problems can also provide an opportunity for the validation and development of theory.

If the practitioners are applying the theory as specified, and the outcome is as predicted, then this provides new evidence for the theory, using a method or dataset different than that of the experiments, observations or interviews that were the original evidence base for theory. An example I use in my teaching is Clifford Stott’s ‘natural experiment’ during the Euro2004 football championships (Stott et al., 2008). Based on ethnographic and observational studies and on the elaborated social identity model, Clifford and Otto Adang had developed a hypothesis that ‘disorder’ in football crowds emerges when fans perceive policing as disproportionate and when that policing relies on coercion. Fans experience this policing as illegitimate, which makes conflict more acceptable and possible to them, and indiscriminate, which makes conflictual fans (‘hooligans’) become seen as ingroup. But if policing is experienced as ‘proportionate’ and facilitative of the fans’ aims (of enjoying the game), there will be lower levels of conflict and fans will collectively self-regulate based on norms of enjoying football.

Portugal has two police forces: the GNR (responsible for policing rural areas and small towns) and the PSP (responsible for policing cities). Only the PSP accepted the model and wanted to use it to inform their practices. For the football tournament, Stott and Adang assembled a large research team to gather a wide variety of types of evidence: interview, observation, survey, ethnographic. The different sources converged in support of the hypothesis. For example, in the GNR areas there were two major riots and 52 arrests, while in PSP areas only 0.2 per cent of observations were of conflict and there were no police records of major collective disorder. This study of the application of

theory is perhaps the most powerful body of evidence in support of the hypothesis on the role of policing in football crowd conflict.

The above example relates to validation, but working with practitioners can also be a way to develop a theory. When people ask me for key advice on impact, my short answer is to develop relationships with relevant non-academics. The development of relationships with ‘end-users’ or ‘stakeholders’ (i.e. those practitioners or policymakers outside academia who might find the research / theory useful) is the essence of what is sometimes called the pathway to impact. Once a relationship has been developed, it can enable a dialogue over the implementation of the theory which can in turn be an opportunity to refine or extend the theory, or specify some of its boundary conditions.

An example is the training that Holly Carter and I provide for the UK fire and rescue service. We provide regular sessions as part of the training for fire fighters involved in mass casualty decontamination

in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear incidents. Until recently, training, exercises and guidance for mass decontamination either ignored psychology (and focused on technical aspects of the decontamination process) or drew upon a discredited psychology of automatic public panic and disorder. Holly’s research (Carter et al., 2015) showed that any such public anxiety and disengagement was not natural and inevitable, but rather was a function of the way the decontamination process was managed by responders. The alternative to shouting, attempts at coercion, and lack of information (which were the factors that people said distressed them during decontamination and led to disengagement with the process) was simple: communication. In short, explain the rationale for the process; explain how it works; explain how to remove contaminants from your body; show understanding for people’s concerns, even if you can’t meet all of them.

Presenting the research and the recommendations as part of the training sessions has been an opportunity

An example I use in my teaching is Clifford Stott’s ‘natural experiment’ during the Euro2004 football championships

for questions from practitioners, and for thinking about the gaps that could be addressed by further research. For example, some staff said they would find a script useful, so a strand of research began examining the effectiveness of different forms of words. There were also questions about how communication could work when some people would not listen to professional responders; a solution would be to get other members of the public to engage with them. This is a hypothesis derived from other contexts (crowd safety management at live events) and could be tested systematically in the mass decontamination context.

One issue to consider is whether the practitioners are really implementing your model accurately, or some simplified (even distorted) version of it. The solution here is to work closely with them (in order to observe and help in evaluation), not just leave them to get on with it.

Student interest and demand

A second way that impactful research impacts back upon the discipline of psychology is through teaching. In social psychology, in particular, students like research and theory with real-world applications. This means for those researchers involved in impact activity, examples from their own work can be included in lectures and in seminar activity. One technique I use is to structure part of a seminar around a real-world problem related to my research or impact activity, and ask the students to try to solve it.

Key sources

Carter, H., Drury, J., Rubin, G.J., Williams, R. & Amlôt, R. (2015). Applying crowd psychology to develop recommendations for the management of mass decontamination. Health Security, 13(1), 45-53. doi: 10.1089/ hs.2014.0061

Drury, J. (2016). Impact: From riots to crowd safety. The Psychologist, January. https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/ impact-riots-crowd-safety

Lewin, K. (1945). The research center for group dynamics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sociometry, 8(2), 126-136.

Stott, C., Adang, O., Livingstone, A. & Schreiber, M. (2008). Tackling football hooliganism: A quantitative study of public order, policing and crowd psychology. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 14(2), 115-141.

For example, in one seminar the task for students is to improve egress times when there is a fire alarm. If the real behavioural risk in fires is not panic but people reacting too slowly to fire alarms, how can this be addressed? What measures would the students advise in drills and preparation?

In short, impact provides an opportunity for adding value to undergraduate teaching, by providing interesting content and engaging activities. Ideally, the students not only engage with and

understand the material better, but also appreciate how they can apply psychological concepts themselves in the world outside the classroom. Being involved in impact activity can also serve to attract PhD students in the same way that a research profile does. Many students are attracted to advanced study and research in psychology are doing research because they want to make a difference. They want to work with researchers where they see real-world problems are being addressed and they develop research proposals that likewise address these problems.

Process thinking

The third way that impact outside of academic psychology can impact psychology itself is through encouraging process thinking. The context here is the impact agenda which has changed the way we think about ‘applied’ work. In my view, there are a number of limitations of the impact case study format that was part of REF2021. It led too many researchers to think that if they didn’t have enough evidence or impact to produce a 3* or 4* impact case study, then their impact activity wasn’t worth doing or documenting; and it placed too much weight on a small number of impact examples and often a relatively small number of individuals (in fact, most of the unambiguously 4* impact case studies in REF2021 were team efforts). But the impact case study format, and the sections on impact (now modified) for grant applications to UKRI councils, have helped people to understand impact as a process. Who outside of academia would find this research interesting, useful, necessary? Could you involve those stakeholders in the development of the proposal, rather than simply approach them when you have the results, to ensure that there is a connection and continuity between research and impact? How will you engage with people outside of academia – meetings, reports, videos? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each as a way of disseminating and discussion the research? What kind of language is needed to communicate the research to these non-academic audiences? Finally, how will you document and record any impacts your research achieves, particularly considering that impact might not occur until years after the original research?

Before the ‘impact agenda’ was a thing, impact was a happy accident for many of us. Now we tend to think more strategically about it. This is not (or should not be) driven just by a bureaucratic need to measure and assess. If we think our work can have positive benefits outside of academia, then this process thinking can help us maximise these benefits, as well as providing opportunities to test and develop our models and to engage our students.

John Drury is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Sussex. j.drury@sussex.ac.uk

National Trauma Conference

(TISUK and TRUK)

Trauma Informed to Trauma Recovery: Relational Skills for Transformational Change

About the event

A cutting-edge conference with practitioners and experts with lived experience who work with vulnerable people who’ve experienced trauma. They will speak about effective relational skills for trauma recovery with refugees, asylum seekers, the homeless, people in the criminal justice system, children/young people vulnerable to being permanently excluded, and/or joining gangs/gun crime, and people suffering from addictions to deal with their emotional pain.

Booking

Speakers

Dr Margot Sunderland

Trauma recovery: Relational skills for transformational change

Paul Dix

Working with vulnerable children at risk of permanent school exclusion: relational skills for all school staff

Dr Dan Hughes Trauma recovery after developmental trauma

Mark Johnson OBE

Trauma recovery from addiction and prison

James Doherty

Trauma recovery from addiction and violence

Eventbrite: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trauma-informed-to-traumarecovery-relational-skills-for-transformational-tickets-383882381537

Friday 24th February 2023

9.30am to 5.30pm

Online event: Zoom Fee: £75 Alldonatedproceeds to student bursary scheme for communityTISUK’s training

Sheetal Amin

Trauma recovery work with children and young people exposed to war, seeking asylum, who’ve been tortured, sold, or victims of sexual trafficking

Tanayah Sam

Trauma recovery work with young people vulnerable to extremist influences/part of or at risk of joining gang culture

PC Sharon Tarling

Trauma recovery: the role of the police as frontline service

Reverend Frances French

Trauma recovery in the community. Church as pastoral presence

info@traumainformedschools.co.uk tel: 01752 278477 www.traumainformedschools.co.uk

Margot Sunderland Nicky Armstrong

illustrated by

Claudia Hammond is the Presenter of All in the Mind on BBC Radio 4, author of newly published The Keys to Kindness, and Visiting Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Sussex.

What journalists want…

Claudia Hammond – broadcaster, author and Visiting Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology – with some advice

hen I started communicating psychology in the media, I used to find myself trying to convince sometimes reluctant psychologists that public engagement is worthwhile. That has changed. It’s rare now for me to meet a psychologist who doesn’t agree that if psychological research is to make a difference, it needs to be out there, in the world.

But that doesn’t mean that everyone succeeds in getting their research noticed in the same way that other disciplines do. Economists, for example, still have a lot more sway when it comes to policy, and of course it is the work of ‘behavioural economists’ that has brought some branches of psychology to the fore.

When I mention psychologists to non-psychologists, I find some now have a fairly good idea of what they do. Among others, two ideas still predominate – that psychologists are therapists, who know what you’re thinking and want to know your dreams, or that they study the science of the bleeding obvious, making up theories of the what-your-bikinisays-about-your-personality variety. (We’ve all seen features of this kind, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.)

The aim of my work in the media, whether on the radio, online or in my books, is to communicate what psychologists actually do, along with something of the range of fascinating research that’s out there. There is more room now for the nuance, for the opportunity for psychologists to be able to say that although there isn’t one cut and dried answer, the research points in a particular direction; that smacking children can be harmful, for example, or that crowds don’t on the whole run wild.

WSomething interesting, and clear

What journalists want is something original and interesting to share with their readers, viewers or listeners. That’s all. They want something that makes their editor and their audience think, ‘gosh that’s interesting’, and then ask their friends if they heard about it. Think about what is really fascinating about your new finding. It might be the implications which will grab people, rather than the results themselves.

Then they want you to explain it as well as possible. You also want your research to be accurately conveyed, so in a sense you are in it together. When a guest on my show brilliantly and fluently explains their new research, I get congratulated on a good programme. So it’s in my interests to work out what the study really means and to support my guest in explaining it well.

Journalists want to know in the clearest way possible: what did you do? What have you found? Why does it matter? They may phrase these questions differently, of course. If I asked them like that in every radio interview it would soon start to sound repetitive. But however I phrase them, these are essentially what I’m asking.

“The aim of my work in the media, whether on the radio, online or in my books, is to communicate what psychologists actually do”

Think how you would sum up your new paper or your work in a sentence. Not in a clever headline full of puns, but in a simple line. Journalism students learn about the five Ws – who, what, where, when, why. Pick up a newspaper or online news story and look at the first sentence of a story. The chances are it has at least three of these Ws in, and sometimes all five. So think in advance of any interview how you’d sum up your research with the Ws. The nuance and the caveats can come later. (It’s also particularly useful on social media, where word count can of course be very short.)

In my time I have also seen a real improvement in the media in understanding what psychologists can and can’t answer. But it’s also worth psychologists trying to understand what journalists want too.

Features in newspapers or items on the radio are presented in the opposite order to a paper in a journal. It’s not a question of the background, followed by your methods and results, then what it all means for the future. It’s the other way round. The most important thing is what your findings mean. Why you did it in the first place, and how it builds on what’s been done before, comes later.

Psychologists often worry about answering difficult questions, but these tend to be asked in the hope of

finding a way of explaining the work simply. The hardest questions are likely to be of the ‘how could this be used?’ variety, rather than about the data in table 3. It’s worth thinking in advance about the question that you’d most hate to be asked.

To understand your research

Journalists want to make sense of your research, but if they’re not a specialist this might be the first time they’ve ever covered this subject. Even a science specialist might have spent the morning on climate change or the discovery of a new species of bee before turning their mind to your study. So don’t assume they know all about it. Think in advance about what someone who has never thought about this subject before needs to know about it.

When psychologists aren’t happy with the final result, whether it’s in a magazine or online or on TV, it usually relates to what isn’t included, rather than what is. If you’re being interviewed, try not to expect too much. A short piece in a newspaper or an interview on the radio is never going to contain all the nuance and caveats of your published paper. Think of it a very brief abstract with a couple of implications for real life stuck on the end. If there is one caveat that you are desperate to have included, then simply ask. Say that there is this one thing you’d really like to get across. But don’t expect to have a whole list in there: if members of the audience want this much detail, they’ll need to turn to your paper. All journalists fear boring people.

It’s also worth remembering that like most of us, journalists are under pressure at work. The numbers of staff in newsrooms working in papers and the broadcast media has been cut in recent years, so they

rarely have as long as they’d ideally like to get across a subject. They are battling deadlines, and sometimes battling editors too. They might be longing to write a detailed feature which synthesises the latest research. I’m in the fortunate position of getting to write those longer pieces for BBC Future, but many journalists are lucky to have the space to fit in one bit of evidence, never mind several.

Timely information

When a journalist gets in touch, reply quickly. They always work to deadlines. If you can’t do it or don’t want to, then just say you can’t. Don’t muck them about or keep them waiting for the sake of it.

If your university is sending out a press release, make sure you keep some time free on that date for interviews: all that effort is wasted if you’re not available. And the faster you respond to any lastminute queries, the less likely journalists are to get something wrong because they assumed something was right but didn’t get a chance to check it with you.

To get it right

Some academics fear that journalists are out to stitch them up, all too ready to take their words out of context. This can happen of course: I can think of one occasion where a journalist made up every one of my quotes. But it really is rare, and if they do get it wrong, it’s their editor who receives the complaint and asks them to explain themselves. They don’t like that. Ultimately, journalists and broadcasters want to get it right.

…and what Psychologists need to know

Firstly, should you accept the invitation to speak with the media? There can be reticence to comment on what should happen in policy terms because the ideal research has not been done yet. The chances are that the ideal research might never get done, but in the meantime decisions about policy are being made. Surely it’s a good idea for policy makers to take into account the views of someone steeped in the subject, even when the research is not yet definitive?

Of course, if you know nothing about the topic then say no. But do remember you know your subject. Even outside the precise in-depth area you are studying at the moment, you know about research and psychology in general. Think of it as a friendly, enthusiastic chat about psychology, not a test or a fight.

So I would urge people to say yes to interviews if you can, and then to consider the following points.

What kind of interview is this?

Before the interview, there are plenty of things you should be asking. What sort of show is it? Is it TV, audio or written (good to know whether you need to brush your hair)? Some podcasts video you at the same time now, so ask if it’s just audio or if you will be seen. Is it a specialist programme or more general?

If it’s a specialist programme / correspondent who’s interviewing you, they will know more about your subject than a general interviewer who has to cover everything. But unless the audience is also specialist, you still need to explain it in a way that someone with no background in the subject would understand.

Is it an interview with just you, or a discussion with others? Or are they looking for clips to put into a ‘package’, alongside other interviewees? If there are other people, who are they?

Who is the intended audience? Is it for a local, national or global audience? If it’s a podcast, it might be aimed at one very specific kind of audience, such as people who’ve experienced a particular condition.

Examples liven up any interview and the intended audience could affect the kinds of examples you give. For example, in an interview on nostalgia, saying that you look back fondly on watching Grange Hill and eating Opal Fruits, won’t make much sense if the programme is on a global channel.

This next one is really important. Is the interview live? Many a politician has been caught out when they think they’re not on air. If it’s not live, ask beforehand if it’s OK to stop and start a sentence again if you muck it up? Ask how long they’re going to interview you for and how long the final interview might be, to give an idea of how much detail you can expect to get in. Don’t be horrified if it seems short. Even five minutes counts as long in radio terms, and eight is a positive luxury.

Some radio shows have the phone lines open all the time now, or read out texts and emails from the audience. Check whether it’s a phone-in, just to avoid being taken by surprise. Psychologists in particular need to be clear on what they are and aren’t qualified to do. I always stress that I’m not a clinical psychologist and I’m not qualified to tackle individuals’ problems, but that what I can do is to explain what the research on this topic has found.

Once you know what kind of interview you’re doing, you can start to prepare. The big advantage these days is that you can almost always go online and see or hear a previous episode, or to read features. This gives a sense of the tone and how academic it’s OK to be. You can match your tone to theirs.

It’s worth practising explaining your research to someone who doesn’t know about it: not as though you’re in a lecture, but as though a friend in the pub has asked you what you’re working on now.

You need to prepare

Try to anticipate what they might ask. What would your nosiest friend ask? If you need to explain something complex, it’s worth working out a good analogy in advance, but make sure it’s not even more complicated than what you were trying to say in the first place.

Can you put your research into a wider context? How common is the problem you are discussing? Who is affected? It’s also worth a quick Google to check the topic isn’t in the news that day. Journalists are steeped in the news and love to make connections, so

if something related has happened they might ask you about it.

This is not for your colleagues

Then it’s time for the interview itself. The most important thing to remember if you really want to engage a general audience is that this interview is not aimed at your peers. It’s tempting to picture them sneering at your over-simplification and adding in all the caveats, but your task is to make it understandable to the audience. Avoid any jargon people might not understand. Psychology students and postgrads spend years learning to phrase things in the particular way required by the subject. In a sense you need to unlearn all that.

The second most important thing to remember is to sound enthusiastic. If you don’t sound interested in the topic you’ve been studying for 20 years, then no one else will be either.

If you get your words muddled up and it’s not live, then usually it’s OK to start the sentence again. If it’s live, then say something like ‘let me put it another way’ and make your point again. And just as you might in a lecture, to make sure people are listening, signpost that your main point is coming up by saying, ‘the most important issue is’, or ‘it’s crucial to understand that…’

Don’t be rude to the interviewer. Assume that their viewers or listeners like them. If they summarise the research and don’t quite get it right, say, ‘Well let me make this clearer. What we found is…’

It’s a work in progress

Just like in job interviews, there will always be more you wish you’d said. If you can get over the two main points you want to say, then that’s good and you’ve done well. Don’t expect to be able to cram a lifetime’s research into a few minutes.

If a colleague is rude to you afterwards, it’s probably because they wish they’d been asked. Don’t take it to heart. Likewise if a viewer or reader takes issue with you on social media, that’s just one view. If millions of people listened, then even if ten complain, in percentage terms that’s miniscule. As psychologists you know that negative comments have more salience.

The more you are interviewed, the easier it gets. The main thing that people tell me is that they can’t believe how quickly it goes. The prep always takes longer than the interview.

And remember that science is a work in progress. We don’t know all the answers. It’s fine to say that no one knows yet, but that it’s something researchers would love to do more on. I do know people who’ve been offered funding as a result of an interview, so you never know, maybe you’ll discover the answer to that thorny question sooner than you think.

“The more you are interviewed, the easier it gets”

The dark side of impact

Emma Young, writer on our Research Digest, on ‘surprising’ findings, and moves towards science we can better trust

Every researcher wants their new paper to make an impact – to grab the attention of journalists as well as colleagues, and garner legions of citations. Surprising, counterintuitive, or ‘paradigm-shifting’ findings are most likely to achieve this. Unfortunately these are also the types of findings that are least likely to be confirmed in replication studies. This is the ‘dark side’ of impact. But, some argue, this isn’t necessarily as bleak as it might sound.

Even people who don’t work in academia are in fact more dubious about ‘surprising’ findings. This was shown in work published in 2019, led by Suzanne Hoogeeven (see tinyurl.com/digest161019), which found that lay people were pretty good at predicting which of 27 high-profile social science findings would replicate, and which would not. These participants’ decisions seemed to be based simply on judgements about which findings seemed more likely. For example, a study finding that people are less likely to choose to donate to one charity over another when told a significant chunk of their donation would go to administrative costs was deemed (correctly), to be much more likely to replicate than a remarkable ‘finding’, published in Science in 2012, that simply looking at an image of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ could ‘promote religious disbelief’ (this finding was not replicated).

If lay people are cautious about high tariff claims, academics should be even more so. However, work published by Marta Serra-Garcia and Uri Gneezy in Science Advances in 2021 found that papers that failed to replicate were cited more often than papers with findings that successfully replicated, even after a replication attempt had failed. When a paper that had failed to replicate was cited, this was indicated only 12 per cent of the time. As the team noted, this means that findings that are either unreliable or less likely to go on to be found to be reliable are cited more often, giving them an even bigger impact over time.

The papers considered in this 2021 research were

taken from an (enormously impactful) 2015 Science paper by the Open Science Collaboration. This multi-lab group replicated 100 psychology experiments that had been published in top journals in 2008. They found that they could replicate only between a third and a half of the original findings. ‘Scientific claims should not gain credence because of the status or authority of their originator but by the replicability of their supporting evidence,’ the group warned.

However, if a single paper that finds a surprising effect cannot be considered the final word on the subject, neither of course can a single failed replication attempt. Even the 2015 Science paper was itself challenged by a few researchers, and some authors of disputed findings have criticised individual replication studies. In 2019, for example, Carol Dweck, pioneer of the concept of the growth mindset, and co-author David Yeager at the University of Texas, published a paper arguing that a ‘simple re-analysis’ overturned a failure to replicate some key findings in the field.

All of this raises the question: what’s the best way to go about investigating the replicability of impactful findings?

Beyond ‘yes / no’

The field of social priming (the idea that subtle cues can have a big influence on behaviour) has taken some of the biggest replication hits. In 2022, a Swedish team led by Eric Mac Giolla reviewed 65 published replications of social priming studies and found that when an original author was involved, the replication was much more likely to be successful than when the team was fully independent. The Swedish researchers argued that this is bad news for social priming. They felt that only fully independent replications could be considered convincing.

Not all researchers share this view. In their 2019 paper, Dweck and Yeager argued for a collaborative approach: ‘When replicators and original authors collaborate in good faith there is a unique opportunity for potentially important new knowledge to be generated, thus furthering the goals of science,’ they

wrote. The pair also argued in favour of moving away from seeking to make a ‘yes-no’ judgement about a body of work. While some findings might not be reproducible, and may be deemed invalid, that doesn’t necessarily mean that everything about the idea is wrong.

Thanks to a huge multinational collaborative effort, this is exactly what was recently found for one controversial (or previously controversial) idea – that facial expressions can affect how you feel. The ‘Many Smiles’ Collaboration included researchers both for and against the theory (as well as researchers who had no stance on this), including some who had worked on original research that had failed to replicate. But rather than setting out to run faithful replications, they worked together to establish what they felt would be the best tests of the theory. In 2022, they published their findings (see tinyurl.com/digest161122): that there is indeed evidence for a key claim in the field – that smiling can make you feel happier – but that holding a pen between your teeth is unlikely to have any effect. This cooperative study suggested that the idea that facial movements affect how you feel isn’t entirely right or wrong; it’s more nuanced than that.

A similar argument is being made in some circles for even more controversial ideas – even power posing. The idea that how you hold your body affects how you feel and behave has a storied history, packed with claims, counter claims, viral Ted talks, and often vitriolic argument. One early reported finding – that power poses boost testosterone and reduce the stress hormone cortisol – has not replicated. But there is evidence that power poses can make people feel more confident, and this might have an effect on their interactions. In his review in our June 2021 issue, Tom Loncar concluded that with some alterations to study design, power posing might be elevated ‘from a potentially misinterpreted one-size-fits-all idea, to more specific and actionable understanding’.

Refining ideas

Even heavily disputed work suggesting that physical warmth affects feelings of warmth towards other people has been revisited recently. You’d have to have been hiding in a ditch not to know that replication studies (plural) have not supported the original findings. But in 2020, a pair of US psychologists, Adam Fay and Jon Maner, published work suggesting that the ambient temperature when this type of research is carried out matters. This wasn’t considered in the original temperature/social feelings studies, or the replications – and it’s possible that this might explain the inconsistent results.

No one is suggesting that we should not be cautious about bold claims. But it’s also worth bearing in mind that these kinds of findings do sometimes replicate – for example, the massively impactful discovery that we’d rather avoid a loss than make the equivalent gain. And, as with the facial feedback hypothesis, after a comprehensive follow-up, some controversial ideas have been refined, rather than ditched.

When the 2015 Science paper that really stimulated talk of the ‘crisis’ of replicability was published, lan Kraut, now executive director emeritus of the Association for Psychological Science, made this point to The Guardian: ‘The only finding that will replicate 100% of the time is likely to be trite, boring and probably already known’. The philosopher Alexander Bird at King’s College London has also argued that in some cases, at least, ‘bad luck’ rather than ‘bad science’ could be to blame. In fact, Bird believes that replication failures should be expected, especially in an evolving field. ‘Science in new and difficult fields is highly fallible,’ he writes.

Many studies

Multi-lab collaborations, like the ‘Many Smiles’ group, are becoming more popular, because they are seen as being more likely to give rise to less fallible findings. Though the original, influential ‘Many Labs’ replication project ceased in 2022,‘Many Babies’ (which focuses on replicating findings in developmental psychology) and ‘Many EEGs’, for example, are still hard at work. The Psychological Science Accelerator represents another major collaborative effort, with labs in 84 countries in its distributed network. Its aim is to produce reliable findings that are truly generalisable – rather than being limited to sub-groups of American students, for example.

Findings from these kinds of studies will, in general, be better trusted. And, when they are surprising, counter-intuitive or paradigm-shifting, their impact may well be more deserved.

The ‘Many Smiles’ Collaboration included researchers both for and against the theory

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Shaking the kaleidoscope of the mind

It’s been a long time coming, but the psychedelic revolution may finally be here… Matt Wall considers the implications for Psychology.

The excitement around the potential of psychedelic drugs in mental health is intense. Investors are pouring money into companies developing new treatments based on psychedelics; public interest is high; and the legal restrictions on their use are gradually being rolled back. Early clinical trials have showed powerful anti-depressant and antiaddictive effects that can persist for up to a year, after receiving only one or two doses (Gukasyan et al., 2022), and the proponents are promising nothing less than a revolution in psychiatry, neuroscience, and psychology research. Can these well-known but uniquely powerful consciousness-altering compounds really have such an impact in clinical and research settings?

Turning points

The so-called ‘classic’ psychedelic drugs are psilocybin (first derived from ‘magic’ mushrooms), N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT; found in many plant species), lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD; purely synthetic) and mescaline (derived from the peyote cactus). All these compounds can produce profound alterations in consciousness, cognition, and perception, accompanied by vivid hallucinations, and these effects are primarily due to their action at a specific brain receptor; the serotonin or 5HT 2A receptor. A number of other drugs (such as ketamine, ibogaine, and 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine or MDMA) can produce somewhat similar effects, and are also being investigated therapeutically, though they have broader and more complex effects on different brain systems and receptors.

Humans have likely been using naturally-occurring psychedelics for thousands of years, and there were important early advances in the late 19th and early 20th century (Sessa, 2016). However, the synthesis of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1943 was a crucial turning point. Originally it was thought that LSD could be useful as an experimental model of schizophrenia, and it was classed as a ‘psychotomimetic’. By the 1950s it was being widely used in the USA, UK, and several other

countries in therapeutic settings. Between 1950 and 1966 there were over 2000 published scientific papers on the therapeutic uses of psychedelics (mostly on LSD, but some were also experimenting with mescaline and psilocybin).

By the mid-1960s LSD had leaked from research laboratories, and was being used recreationally. Its perceived links with anti-Vietnam war protests and the general counter-culture movement led the establishment in the US to clamp down hard; it was banned in 1966. Most other countries quickly followed suit, encouraged by President Nixon’s regressive ‘war on drugs’ in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This effectively halted almost all research with these compounds for several decades. (For a brief but comprehensive primer on the history of this area, see Ben Sessa’s 2016 The History of Psychedelics in Medicine.)

Beginning again in the early 2000s, a steady trickle of research studies with psychedelics got underway, and by the 2010s this trickle had become a flood. Pioneered by two major research groups at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore (led by Roland Griffiths) and a UK group in Bristol, and later at Imperial College London (led by David Nutt), this research started to challenge the status quo, and the ‘war on drugs’-inspired negative rhetoric and perceptions around psychedelics. These early studies caught the mainstream media’s attention, fired the public’s imagination, proved that psychedelics should be a serious area of study for modern researchers, and provided the foundation for the explosion of research and investment in the field we see today.

Modern studies and clinical trial success

The very first contemporary studies of these drugs were largely focused on demonstrating tolerability, examining the effects on healthy subjects, and harnessing the power of modern neuroimaging technology to provide additional levels of measurement, analysis, and explanation of their effects. High-profile acute-challenge studies of this type were performed with psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA, all by the Bristol/Imperial College team (Carhart-Harris et al., 2012, 2015; Carhart-Harris, Muthukumaraswamy, et

Visualisation of the brain’s connectivity, derived from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. Each colour defines a particular brain network. With a placebo treatment (left) the brain shows a ‘normal’ pattern, with strong connections within networks and relatively weak/ few connections between them. With psilocybin (right) connections within networks are weakened, and much greater/stronger connections are present between networks. This profound breakdown of the normal pattern of brain function is thought to result in both the acute alterations of consciousness and perception, and to be the potential driver for longer-term therapeutic effects. (From Petri et al., 2014).

al., 2016).

These studies showed that tolerability of the (often very intense) drug effects is generally very good, even when subjects are in the unnatural and often anxiety-inducing confines of an MRI scanner. More importantly, these studies provided vital data on the acute brain effects of psychedelics, which have gone on to inform modern theories of both their acute and long-term effects.

At a similar time, inspired by the positive reports from the mid-20th century work on psychedelic therapy, groups were pressing ahead with clinical trials in patient groups. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) had been conducting clinical trials with MDMA and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) patients since the mid-2000s with impressive results (Mithoefer et al., 2010). At Johns Hopkins, a pilot study using psilocybin for smoking cessation showed that 80 per cent of subjects were still abstinent at six-months follow-up; strikingly good results, which demonstrated the potential for effective treatment of addiction (Johnson et al., 2014).

Starting in the mid-2010s the Imperial group conducted two clinical trials with psilocybin and depression patients, also incorporating a battery of neuroimaging measures to examine brain effects of

the treatment. The first (open-label) study showed powerful anti-depressant effects of the therapy in a treatment-resistant depression group, with strong responses in most patients, and a number of patients still in complete remission at a three-month follow-up (Carhart-Harris, Bolstridge, et al., 2016). The second (double-blind) study compared psilocybin therapy with a standard first-line depression treatment; the selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) escitalopram. Psilocybin therapy compared favourably to escitalopram on all the clinical measures used in the study, with remission rates of 57 per cent and 28 per cent, respectively (Carhart-Harris et al., 2021). All the studies so far have essentially been small-scale, proofof-concept investigations; but the results are generally very promising.

The psychology of psychedelic therapy

These clinical studies have generated a great deal of excitement and hope around psychedelic-based therapies as new treatments in psychiatry. However, the treatment paradigm is quite different to standard psychiatric pharmacotherapy. Psychedelic therapy is ‘psychopharmacological’ in a genuine sense, in that it incorporates psychological therapy with a

drug component, and the two are thought to act in a synergistic manner to produce the clinical effects. Current theories as to how these two factors interact are informed by fMRI results of both acute drug and therapy-related effects, and suggest that the radical breakdown of the standard mode of brain function (see figure 1) produced by the drug allows the brain to enter a more flexible, plastic state. This state provides the opportunity for pathological beliefs, cognitions, and responses to be revised into healthier ones (Carhart-Harris, 2019). As a simple metaphor, psychedelics shake the kaleidoscope of the mind, and allow the patient to form a new view on their trauma, addiction, or other psychopathologies.

This view of how psychedelic therapy works has two important implications. Firstly, it suggests they have transdiagnostic potential, and may be applicable to a wide range of disorders where dysfunctional beliefs and cognitions are an important factor. This clearly contrasts with standard psychiatric pharmacotherapy which tends to use specific drugs, which target specific brain receptors, thought to be dysfunctional in specific disorders. Secondly, it implies that the psychological therapy is, in a sense, the primary treatment; the drug just enables the therapy to take place.

happened during the dosing sessions, consolidate any insights gained, and may aim to incorporate key lessons into their ongoing life and any subsequent therapy.

Key sources

Carhart-Harris, R., Giribaldi, B., Watts, R., et al. (2021). Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression. New England Journal of Medicine, 384(15), 1402–1411.

Kaelen, Mendel, Giribaldi, B., Raine, J., et al. (2018). The hidden therapist: evidence for a central role of music in psychedelic therapy. Psychopharmacology, 235(2), 505–519. Sessa, B. (2016). The History of Psychedelics in Medicine. Handbuch Psychoaktive Substanzen, 1–26.

Watts, R., Day, C., Krzanowski, J., Nutt, D., & Carhart-Harris, R. (2017). Patients’ Accounts of Increased “Connectedness” and “Acceptance”

After Psilocybin for TreatmentResistant Depression. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 57(5), 520–564.

Watts, R. & Luoma, J. B. (2020). The use of the psychological flexibility model to support psychedelic assisted therapy.

Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 15(April 2019), 92–102.

Full list available in online/app version.

As such, a great deal of attention needs to be given to psychological factors when conducting psychedelic therapy, and clinical psychologists are at the forefront of this field. The standard modern approach developed over the last ten years or so (as outlined in Watts & Luoma, 2020) uses quite extensive preparation sessions, where the patient is able to get to know the therapists, any concerns are addressed, and the patient is encouraged to approach the therapy with as little resistance as possible. During the dosing sessions, two therapists (sometimes termed ‘guides’; often one psychiatrist, and one clinical psychologist) are always present for the duration of the session, which can be up to six hours. The main role of the therapists during the sessions is to provide support, encouragement, and reassurance during what can be a profoundly challenging and intense experience, often involving past trauma or other painful emotional issues. The therapists act as facilitators, but are essentially non-directive, with the only explicit instructions being to accept the difficult aspects of the experience rather than avoid them, and to ‘go wherever you need to go’. Finally, post-dosing integration sessions help patients process what

Dr Ros Watts was a guide in both of the Imperial psilocybin/depression trials, and clinical lead in the second trial. In the process of that work she has developed a new therapy model for use with psychedelic therapy, called ACE (Accept, Connect, Embody). She describes it in this way:

‘Accept, Connect, Embody is a flexible protocol which provides a framework to support the psychedelic therapy journey. Guided imagery exercises are the principal components, they form the basis of the preparation and integration sessions (that happen before and after the psychedelic sessions themselves). The psychedelic session is conceptualised as a “deep sea dive”; they will be invited to swim down beneath the waves of the busy mind, fully accept and feel any sensations and emotions arising, and then swim back up to the big sky to see themselves, their relationships, and the world around them in the light of any insights experienced.’

Other psychological factors are also extremely important, particularly ‘set’ (i.e. the patients mind-set, or their approach to the experience) and ‘setting’ (i.e. the environment in which the experience occurs). The context of drug experiences has long been known to have important effects, with traditional (e.g. ayahuasca ceremonies) and recreational (e.g. the acid-house/ rave scene in the 1980s and 1990s) uses incorporating music as a key part of the experience. Modern studies have shown that LSD can enhance a specific emotional response to music (Kaelen et al., 2015), and also that music may in turn enhance specific aspects of the drug experience, including visual hallucinations (Kaelen

Lead clinical psychologist on the Imperial psilocybin/ depression clinical trials, Dr Ros Watts, conducts a psilocybin dosing therapy session. Photo courtesy of Imperial College London

et al., 2016). This synergism between music and drug effects will perhaps be familiar to anyone with relevant experiences in nightclubs or raves.

Music also forms a crucial part of both the mid-20th century and the modern incarnations of psychedelic therapy. In contrast to popular recreational uses, a calm, quiet, comfortable environment is used, with relatively dim lighting and soft music. Great attention has been given to the appropriate selection of music to form a useful soundtrack for the psychedelic dosing sessions. In ‘The hidden therapist: evidence for a central role of music in psychedelic therapy’, Mendel Kaelen (both a psychedelic researcher and accomplished musician/composer) and colleagues (Kaelen et al., 2018) conducted semi-structured interviews with patients about their experiences with music during the dosing sessions. They found that music had both ‘welcome’ and ‘unwelcome’ influences during the sessions, with positive influences promoting calm, guidance, openness, and safety, and negative ones including feeling misguided, resistance, and the evocation of negative emotions. Crucially, they also found that the nature of the patients’ response to music predicted reduced depression scores one week after dosing, whereas the more general intensity of the drug experience did not. Recent fMRI data have identified significantly higher responses to a music stimulus in patients’ brains after therapy, and that this greater response is related to particular qualities of the drug experience during the dosing sessions (Wall et al., 2022).

In terms of the psychological effects of the therapy, several important themes have emerged. In a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews six months after treatment (Watts et al., 2017), patients reported an increased feeling of connectedness (to others, to the natural world, to their own emotions) as a result of the therapy. A second theme that emerged was specifically around emotions, and a change from avoidance to acceptance of their own feelings. Neuroimaging studies have shown increased brain responses to emotional faces following psilocybin therapy (Roseman et al., 2018); an important contrast with the ‘emotional blunting’ and reduced responses to emotional stimuli often seen with standard depression treatments such as SSRIs. Other studies have documented long-term changes in personality, particularly in trait ‘openness to experience’ (one of the Big Five personality factors) as a result of MDMA therapy (Wagner et al., 2017). Similar associations between openness and psychedelic use are also present in recreational users (Erritzoe et al., 2019) with other studies even suggesting that lifetime psychedelic use is predictive of progressive political (Nour et al., 2017) and environmental views (Forstmann & Sagioglou, 2017). These early findings on the effects of psychedelics on the structure of

personality are intriguing, especially given the general view that personality traits like openness to experience generally remain relatively fixed in adulthood.

Psychedelics as research tools

There has been a strong focus in the current ‘psychedelic renaissance’ on translation to clinical uses. This is positive in many ways; new treatments for psychopathology are badly needed, and psychedelics are a promising option for a number of common and debilitating disorders. However, in the rush to prove the viability of these new therapeutic models, there are perhaps opportunities in basic research that are being neglected. The early studies at Bristol and Imperial (e.g. Carhart-Harris et al., 2012) used healthy subjects and were focused on the acute psychological and neurological effects of psilocybin and LSD. These provided valuable and highly novel insights, but there is a great deal more ‘low-hanging-fruit’ in the research sphere. One tried-and-tested approach to studying a complex system (like the human mind) is to perturb the system in some way and document the effects. Psychedelics are the most powerful modulators of consciousness that we know of, with obvious potential in the scientific study of consciousness, personality, perception, addiction, and other fields. Currently, work like this is impeded by the tight legal restrictions on the use of these drugs. Research with psychedelics in the UK requires a Schedule 1 licence from the Home Office, which can be difficult and expensive to obtain. Given successive UK government’s unwillingness to revisit our generally regressive drug laws, it seems unlikely this will change anytime soon, despite increasing public interest and pressure. As seen previously with the medical use of cannabis, some US states are leading the way, with Oregon recently being the first to widely relax prohibitions to allow therapeutic use of psilocybin, and others of the more liberal states expected to follow. Availability of the drugs themselves has also been a severe constraint, with only a few laboratories in the world licensed to manufacture them, though as part of the current psychedelics ‘gold rush’ many specialist production companies are being founded, so this may be less of a problem in the future. Hopefully relaxation of legal restrictions and wider availability in the future will mean that more basic research can be done using these uniquely powerful drugs.

The future of psychedelics

The current status of the psychedelic revolution might be described as ‘febrile’. There are new active research groups dedicated to psychedelics at many

“Music also forms a crucial part of both the mid-20th century and the modern incarnations of psychedelic therapy”

major research institutions around the world, and (at the time of writing) around 50 publiclylisted pharmaceutical or biotech companies seeking to develop them as therapeutics, plus a great many more privately-owned companies. With only a few exceptions, these companies have all been founded in the last three years. Enthusiasm and investment is everywhere, but true expertise is somewhat lacking, with relationships between expert academics and those wanting to rapidly commercialise treatments often being somewhat prickly and suspicious.

Matt Wall, PhD., is Head of MRI Applications Invicro London; Honorary Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College, London, and Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit, University College London. mbwall@gmail.com

Many of these companies are seeking to differentiate themselves by expanding the remit of psychedelic therapeutics to different indications or conditions. Chronic pain is a particular area of interest, and small (academic) clinical trials are underway in the US and UK, with some commercial players also focusing on pain. Addiction is also a strong focus, with some companies currently developing treatments based on ibogaine for opiate addiction, and others focusing on smoking, or behavioural addictions such as gambling.

Encouraged by some positive reports from the first wave of psychedelic research in the 1950s/60s, eating disorders are also a potential area of opportunity. Hannah Douglass is the lead researcher in a current trial of psilocybin therapy for anorexia nervosa (AN), sponsored by Imperial College:

‘There is a substantial unmet need for effective treatment options for eating disorders, with high relapse rates seen in these patients. Psychedelics can potentially help with a number of pathological features associated with AN, including cognitive inflexibility, emotional or experiential avoidance, and neurobiological factors such as serotonergic dysfunction and reduced neuroplasticity. The ability of psychedelics to potentially enhance self-love, selfcompassion, and self-acceptance could also be of particular value in the treatment of AN and other eating disorders given the highly critical view these individuals tend to hold of themselves. All these effects clearly warrant the investigation of psilocybinassisted therapy as a new treatment for AN.’

Despite all the promise and excitement, there are significant hurdles to clear before we see psychedelic treatment rooms as a standard feature in psychiatric clinics. Most clinical studies have so far been quite small (in the range of 20-30 subjects), but much larger studies will be needed to definitively prove clinical efficacy and better understand the true variability in the response to treatment. Another big issue is about how to extend psychedelic treatments over the longterm. While some recent studies have shown anti-

depressant effects of treatment can extend for up to a year (Gukasyan et al., 2022), this is not the case for all patients, and the longerterm effects are generally unclear. A therapy model consisting of six-monthly or annual ‘booster’ dosing sessions in order to maintain clinical effects is one possibility, though this remains to be tested, and will need long-term commitments both in researcher time and funding to figure out.

There are also questions about the broad applicability of psychedelic therapy. Most studies so far have used carefully selected patient groups, with particular care taken to exclude patients who may be vulnerable to psychosis. The link between (recreational) psychedelic use and psychosis is currently unclear, and controversial, but even the possibility that a psychotic episode could be induced means that any attempt at broadening the use of psychedelics beyond carefully selected patients needs to proceed with extreme caution. A similar issue surfaces around drug-drug interactions in patients who may be taking other psychiatric medication, particularly 5HT-active drugs like SSRIs (Sarparast et al., 2022). There are currently only a few studies in this area, but this is an obvious issue in broadening the scope of psychedelic therapy.

Despite these issues, and the current legal restrictions on research, it’s fair to say that psychedelics represent a potentially breakthrough new treatment for a range of psychopathologies, and the possibilities for their applications in both therapy and research are exciting. Novel treatments are badly needed in psychiatry, and psychedelic therapy is perhaps the most promising new option to come along for decades. There are enormous challenges ahead, and big questions remain over how truly effective these treatments will be in larger and more diverse patient groups, their application to different disorders, and whether they can be reliably deployed at scale. But the research is moving fast, and the legal restrictions will likely be ameliorated by the combination of more positive clinical trial results, and public pressure for the availability of treatments. The true impact of these uniquely powerful compounds, first discovered in the depths of the Second World War, might be to change the way we study and treat the human mind in the 21st Century.

Aversion therapy: A personal account

Pauline Collier, a longstanding member of the British Psychological Society, looks back on her ‘treatment’, and forward to truth and reconciliation

The summer of 1965 was the end of my first year reading psychology at the University of Durham. During that year I learned what happened to rats in mazes, dogs in boxes and monkeys in cages. I was taught that the role of the psychologist was to observe behaviour, because behaviour could be seen… only that which could

be seen could be measured, and only that which could be measured could be reproduced and judged valid. Behaviour and its measurement were the order of the day in the struggle to make psychology a respectable, empirical science. Feelings, intuition and introspection were not on the agenda. To become a ‘proper’ Psychologist I had to abandon the subjectivity of feelings and emotions and become an objective observer.

I had expected so much from psychology and gained so very little. I chose it because I was interested in thoughts and emotions. I wanted to understand more about my own personal experiences as a woman and a lesbian. I wanted to understand anxiety, despair and depression. By the end of the summer of 1965, psychology had successfully constructed a behaviourist paradigm to guide my psychological conceptual development and understanding. Ironically, it was during that summer that I underwent aversion therapy.

A vital significance

Aversion therapy was a desperate attempt to change my sexual preference and end the nightmare of who I was. I thought I saw a means of ridding myself of the powerful, all-consuming lesbian feelings that I held secret inside whilst showing my family and friends a successful, heterosexual woman. I was very unhappy, very isolated and increasingly unable to see a future for myself.

It was many years later in 1985, whilst completing a Masters degree in Women’s Studies that the words of Wendy Clark in her Feminist Review article: ‘The Dyke, the Feminist and the Devil’ perfectly articulated my psychological and emotional situation as I willingly sat in a chair, looking at pictures of women and receiving electric shocks:

When one’s identity is secret and stigmatized it takes on a particular and vital significance … If there is a part of you that is hidden; if that hidden part appears to have been defined by others not privy to it; if that part of you is in direct and immediate opposition to the social and cultural mores of society, then the question of identity and self becomes much more important, if not all consuming.

Pauline Collier BA (Hons), DEP (CG), AFBPS, Chartered Ed. Psych., MA (Women’s Studies), BA (Hons.) (Eng.Lit.), MA (English)

My only lesbian experience had been with a school friend the previous year. We both applied to Durham University but she was not accepted and chose to attend the University of Manchester in the city where we lived. Our distress was compounded when our parents discovered our relationship. Her father was furious and instructed her to end it. My mother was kind and asked me if I wanted to see a psychiatrist. I went to Durham and she went to her GP who referred her to Crumpsall Hospital where Philip Feldman, a psychologist, and Malcolm MacCulloch, a psychiatrist, were working on a ‘treatment’ known as aversion therapy. She was encouraged and supported in this by a young man whom she later married. Her aversion therapy was regarded as a success but an opportunity to discuss with her the details of what she experienced at Crumpsall Hospital never occurred.

My school friend persuaded me to meet Feldman and MacCulloch at Crumpsall Hospital in North Manchester. By then I had a good idea of the behavioural principles involved and in some way their term ‘behaviour disorder’ seemed less offensive than ‘sexual perversion’ which I had previously believed. They explained to me that the ‘treatment’ was designed to make the fullest possible use of the extensive knowledge available about the psychology of learning. They seemed keen for me to be involved in their experimental ‘treatment’, offering me a job as a receptionist in the Department of Psychiatry for the summer to make it easy for me to be in the hospital and access the treatment room when necessary. They introduced me to the Clinical Director of Psychiatry, Doctor Northage J. De Ville Mather, who spoke encouragingly of Feldman and MacCulloch’s ‘treatment’.

As a working-class girl, brought up to please and seek approval, particularly male approval, I was intensely flattered by these three important doctors. In my psychological vulnerability, I willingly agreed to undergo their aversion therapy ‘treatment’ of sexual deviations in order to divert my lesbianism to heterosexuality.

I was unaware that the ‘treatment’ programme was to be the subject of a series of academic articles and in 1971, edited in a book by Feldman and MacCulloch entitled Homosexual Behaviour: Therapy and Assessment. The book was enthusiastically reviewed in the July 1972 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry by John Johnson, who began his comments with ‘Behavior therapy for the treatment of sexual deviation has been one of the therapeutic success stories of the past decade. In this volume, Feldman and MacCulloch describe their systematic development of the principle of anticipatory avoidance conditioning applied to the treatment of male homosexuality.’

Johnson either failed to notice or regarded as unimportant the inclusion of two females in the experiment. Perhaps the most chilling words in the review for me were: ‘The electrical circuitry used in applying this treatment is in itself complex and is a

credit to the ingenuity and capacity for improvisation which the authors have shown in developing the technique.’ The review concluded: ‘The authors have produced a work of considerable value and practical application. This technique for the treatment of homosexuality would have been applauded by the doyens of sexual psychopathology.’

It would seem that at the time, psychology’s contribution to the understanding of lesbian sexuality was to support and consolidate the paradigm of sickness, perversion and pathology that surrounded it.

The ‘treatment’

Several weeks after my meeting with Feldman and MacCulloch, I found myself sitting in a chair, looking at a blown-up photograph of an unknown, semiclad, sexualised female, waiting to receive an electric shock. The electric shock itself was not severe but still painful. What was more unpleasant was the anxiety and fear of waiting for the shock, the anxiety and fear that they were systematically trying to link with the female form on the screen. Their particular technique was a refinement of previous ones where the subject received a shock each time the same sex photograph appeared. For me, three things could happen; I could receive a shock immediately the photograph appeared; I could receive a shock after 30 seconds or there could be no shock at all. They had discovered that this technique created far more anxiety and fear than the original one. The final refinement was that by pressing a button I could even avoid the shock completely by replacing the female photograph with one of a man. I could avoid the physical violence of the electric shock and the emotional violence of the acute anxiety by choosing a man. Feldman and MacCulloch named this as Anticipatory Avoidance Learning.

In my feedback to Feldman and MacCulloch after the first couple of sessions, I made two points. Firstly that the photographs of the semi-clad, sexualised females that were probably straight from Page 3 of The Sun newspaper held no sexual attraction for me whatsoever. In retrospect, their use of these particular images only betrayed their ignorance of female sexuality in general and lesbian sexuality in particular. They said far more about how men have sexually objectified women than about lesbianism as a broad, all-embracing affirmation of women in an emotional as well as an erotic sense. The second point I made was that I was beginning to dislike John Pinschof, the male therapist who was administering the ‘treatment’ and giving me electric shocks. Taken aback by this experimental oversight, they allocated the remainder of my ‘treatments’ to Valerie Mellor, a probationer psychologist at Crumpsall Hospital. Mellor

‘I apologise unreservedly’

As a probationer clinical psychologist in Manchester in 196566, I took part in the aversion therapy programme described in the foregoing, moving and disturbing account of being on the receiving end of that treatment. I don’t believe we met in person, but I want to personally apologise to you, and others who shared your experience, for what went on and what I contributed to. I hope, in doing so, that I speak for all those who were part of the programme, none of whom I am now in contact with and some of whom may no longer be alive.

The following is a piece I wrote for colleagues in the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham, at the request of the Head of School, in 2021 at the time the University’s investigation was being conducted. I am pleased for it to be seen more widely now.

In the mid 1960s I was training to be a clinical psychologist and spent my final practical placement at a hospital in Manchester where there was a treatment programme using aversion therapy for homosexuality – a form of conversion therapy. I was assigned to work on the programme and I willingly did so. At the end of the placement my supervisor gave me the opportunity to be a junior author on a paper and a chapter in a book the programme directors were writing about it, and I willingly accepted. Things were changing fast, including the law about homosexuality, and within a very few years that form of treatment ceased to be practised within the NHS, by psychologists or any other profession. As time went on and the rights of gay and lesbian people, and then LGBT people generally, were fought for and became better understood and appreciated, conversion therapy was increasingly seen, not just as out of fashion, but as part of the cruel, discriminatory climate that had existed at that time. The role of psychology in aversion therapy was seen more clearly for what it was – an unethical practice, an abuse of those who were treated and the wider group they represented, a misuse of psychology. To my knowledge it has not been practised in clinical psychology for many years. The British Psychological Society has clearly ruled against its use.

After completing my final placement, I moved to London, to take up a research post in addiction, which became my main area of work for the rest of my career. It was and remains an absorbing topic and I confess that for a long time I gave little thought to the conversion therapy I had contributed to during my training. But as time went on and I saw more and more people coming out and telling us about the hurt and discrimination they had experienced, I thought more about it and felt increasingly bad about it. It became clear to me that what I had taken part in at the very beginning of my career played a part in reinforcing an abusive climate in which gay and lesbian people had felt unable to acknowledge their sexuality openly and be proud of it. Their struggle to campaign for change, to create a new climate in which they could be proud of who they are and be free to express their love and to marry if they choose, has been one of the most courageous and effective in my lifetime. I only wish that when I was enthusiastically embarking on a career in psychology, we had been part of it, supporting it rather than colluding with the climate of the times that so badly needed changing. I feel

ashamed of that aspect of 1960s clinical psychology and of the part I played in it. I apologise unreservedly.

I have given much thought to trying to understand how it was that the profession I was entering could have supported conversion therapy in those days and how it was that I could so willingly have taken part in it as a trainee. I have come to the conclusion that the answer to those questions comes in two parts. One was simply hubris. Clinical psychology was an emerging specialty in the 1960s, primitive in comparison with how it is now. The academic side of my training was dominated by behaviour modification, based to a large extent on what had been discovered about animal conditioning and learning. Our teachers imparted to us their enthusiasm, conveying the notion that behaviour was never fixed and could always be changed. In many ways this was a very positive message and the movement was an exciting one to be part of. But it over-reached itself in the form of unethical practices such as conversion therapy. I was a gullible student, caught up in and unquestioning of my teachers’ enthusiasms. There are lessons to be had there for students at all times in all places.

The second part of the answer concerns our failure to find out about and reflect on what was going on in the world outside the narrow confines of our discipline. We were willingly ignorant of the bigger picture. At least I was and I assume my supervisors must have been too. I was so wrapped up in the details of psychological theory and practice, that I didn’t know, or ask, about the law, campaigns to change the law, about social attitudes surrounding sexuality, or reflect and debate about the ethics of what was going on. I should have done.

It would be disingenuous of me to claim that I used my psychology later to campaign against conversion therapy or for sexual rights, although I have encouraged students and others to research and write on the subject. My main contribution of relevance here concerns the branch of psychology known as ‘community psychology’. I am proud of having introduced it into the clinical psychology training programmes I was responsible for at Exeter and later at Birmingham, of having for some years been editor of the first UK journal on the subject, of having been one of the pioneers of it in Britain, and taking a lead in creating the European Community Psychology Association and the Community Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society. What is distinctive about community psychology, and why the conversion therapy of the 1960s would not have been possible had community psychology been on the curriculum then, is its insistence on seeing the bigger picture. It requires its adherents to see beyond individual behaviour, to learn about the broader attitudes, norms and laws and the structures of power within which individuals live their lives, and to reflect on professional practice from that broader perspective.

I look back with shock and shame on the aversion therapy programme I took part in as a trainee in the 1960s. I apologise for my part in it. I am also pleased to say that it no longer plays any part whatever in professional psychology in the UK, nor could it.

Jim Orford, Emeritus Professor of Clinical and Community Psychology, University of Birmingham

the psychologist march 2023 looking back

had published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica with Feldman and MacCulloch, and with James Orford, on The Application of Anticipatory Avoidance Learning to the Treatment of Homosexuality-Developments in Treatment Technique and Response Recording.

Two decades later, as a qualified Educational Psychologist working for Manchester City Council, I came across Valerie Mellor professionally on a number of occasions. On one of these occasions we met to discuss a safeguarding case with which we were both involved. I reminded her where we had met before and told her I was delighted that the electric shocks she had administered had made no difference whatsoever to my sexual preference. She said that she knew and the conversation ended. Looking back, I would have liked her to tell me that she was sorry.

Healing

I received approximately 20 sessions of electric shocks as part of a ‘treatment’ designed to destroy my lesbian feelings and create heterosexual ones. Neither Feldman nor MacCulloch made any attempt to help me accept my sexual orientation. Instead they advised me to change my patterns and habits of thinking. They told me not to focus on women, not to engage with women, not to even look at them, but to turn my thoughts, both social and sexual to men, to make them the centre of my attention. There was some irony in this in that I had already achieved the outward appearance of heterosexuality with partners whose company I mainly enjoyed but towards whom I was not emotionally or sexually attracted. Behaving in a heterosexual way was something I had achieved prior to the aversion therapy. Feeling heterosexual was shockingly difficult.

Instructed not to look at women, only at men, and to consciously suppress any lesbian identity that might begin to emerge, became increasingly difficult. I suppressed my attraction towards one of my friends throughout my second and third year at Durham until the energy required for this became physically, psychologically and emotionally exhausting. Finally, in 1967, I presented myself back at Crumpsall Hospital feeling I had nowhere else to go. Feldman and MacCulloch had already moved to work at the University of Birmingham but I saw Doctor De Ville Mather who diagnosed a reactive depression and arranged for me to be admitted to the Hospital’s psychiatric ward. I was prescribed Ativan, an anti-depressant and Sodium Amytal, a sedative that is no longer prescribed. I remained there for three weeks and was discharged back to Durham, drugged and dulled by the medication.

Managing to graduate I spent the next three years in Manchester, qualifying as an Educational

Psychologist. I continued trying to behave heterosexually but my commitment had become tired and threadbare. Accidently I bumped into a woman from my College in Durham about whom it was whispered she was a lesbian. Fearful of my instructions to focus solely on men, I had ignored her whilst at Durham. She introduced me to a small lesbian community. I immediately felt more comfortable, more lively and ‘at home’. That year I met my partner, a woman with whom I was to live for the next 20 years. My memories of the electric shocks and the messages that were drummed into me about behaving heterosexually gradually receded. I felt psychologically and emotionally stronger. The despair and depression had disappeared. It was almost 20 years later during my time at Bradford University doing a Masters degree in Women’s Studies that these long-buried emotions were re-awakened. It was in the mid-80s at the height of the Second Wave Feminist Movement, a time of consciousness raising and discovery. The connections between what had happened to me at Crumpsall Hospital and my unfolding understanding were made slowly and laboriously. The exercise was mainly an intellectual one. The emotional connections, however, were made suddenly and painfully. They were made as I read the final paragraph of Judy Grahn’s poem/prose: The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke, in 1978’s The Work of the Common Woman: Edward rolled to the floor. ‘I am vile! I am vile!’ Doctor Knox flipped a switch at his elbow and immediately a picture of a beautiful woman appeared on a screen over Edward’s head. The Doctor pressed another switch and electric shocks jolted through her spine. Edward screamed. He pressed another switch, stopping the flow of electricity. Another switch and a photo of a gigantic, erect male organ flashed into view, coated in powdered sugar. Doctor Knox handed Edward a lollipop.

For the first time I saw with great clarity the meaning of the physical violence and the emotional violence that had been committed on me. The tears I wept helped to heal the damage. Other healing came from the feminist theory and knowledge that helped me to join up the fragments that until that point had not made much sense. The grounds for battle were no longer inside me, they were outside in a patriarchal and heteronormative society. At the age of 40 I was finally free from the shame and self-doubt that had hovered throughout most of my adult life.

Truth and reconciliation

In 2022, Helen Spandler and Sarah Carr published a paper in History of the Human Sciences entitled ‘Lesbian and Bisexual Women’s Experiences of Aversion Therapy in England’. The paper presents the findings

“At the age of 40 I was finally free from the shame and self-doubt that had hovered throughout most of my adult life”

of their study of the history of aversion therapy as a treatment technique used in the English mental health system to convert lesbians and bisexual women into heterosexual women. The authors carried out an intensive exploration of published psychiatric and psychological literature together with lesbian, gay and bisexual archives and anthologies. In all, they identified just 10 examples of young women who received aversion therapy in the 1960s and 1970s.

As a result of their searches they found references in the medical literature to four women being subjected to anticipatory avoidance therapy at Crumpsall Hospital in North Manchester in the mid 1960s, published in the British Medical Journal in 1967 as ‘Aversion Therapy in the Management of 42 Homosexuals’. The authors of these articles and the managers of the aversion therapy were the psychiatrist Malcolm MacCulloch and the psychologist Philip Feldman. It was unclear whether four women or two women were involved in the ‘treatment’, but what was clear was that I was one of the women referred to in their article – and referred to as a success.

The darker aspects of psychology’s past

We found Pauline’s account very moving to read. It is a poignant reminder of the regrettable role that psychology has historically played in pathologising sexual diversity, and the harm caused by the psychological mistreatment of LGBT+ people.

We are keen to better understand and uncover the role that the BPS may have played in such therapy. With that in mind, there are two recent developments to share with you.

Firstly, the BPS has a Challenging Histories group that reports to the Ethics Committee. This is an interdisciplinary group that includes BPS members, psychiatrists and historians reviewing some of the darker aspects of psychology’s past. You can expect to read more about that work in the pages of The Psychologist in due course.

Secondly, the BPS has recently been successful in getting funding for a PhD studentship to look at the history of the BPS when it comes to race and LGBT issues.

Our intention is that these activities will allow us to better understand and acknowledge the mistakes of the past and will lead to more informed statements and apologies in the spirit of truth and reconciliation.

We are also aware that whilst this account describes ‘conversion therapy’ of the 1960s and 70s, other forms of so-called ‘conversion therapy’ continue to be practiced in a range of contexts. Pauline’s experience of how psychologically and emotionally exhausting it is to suppress one’s LGBT+ identity resonates with the accounts of those who have experienced conversion therapy more recently, as outlined in a recently published government report. The British Psychological Society unequivocally opposes conversion therapy practices.

Dr Adam Jowett

Chair, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Board

Dr Debra Malpass Director of Knowledge and Insight

Some four years ago I met Helen Spandler and was able to discuss with her at length my experience of aversion therapy at Crumpsall Hospital. Details of this discussion are included in her paper. In an earlier paper, published in the Mental Health Review Journal in 2017 with M. McKeown, Spandler explores the case for a ‘truth and reconciliation’ approach to psychiatric (and psychological) harm, a process that would start by ‘acknowledging the mistakes of the past and involve carefully and truthfully documenting this history’. Such an approach, they argue, could help to prevent future wrongdoing and ‘begin to heal the harm caused by the psychiatric and psychological mistreatment of minorities’.

An example of the effectiveness of this approach can be seen in an investigation instigated by the University of Birmingham in 2021 into its involvement in the research and clinical practices that came under the heading of ‘conversion/aversion’ therapy, carried out by two members of its staff, namely M.P. Feldman and M.J. MacCulloch. The investigation was prompted by ‘Chris’ coming forward in 2020 to the BBC, reporting that he had experienced ‘conversion therapy’ in the mid 70s at the University of Birmingham. A steering group, chaired by Professor Sarah Beck in 2021 and by Professor Elaine Fulton and Doctor Mo Moulton in 2022, was established. It included representatives from the School of Psychology, the Guild of Students and the Rainbow Staff Network. The report of the research, carried out and written by Dr Rebecca Wynter, entitled ‘Conversion Therapy’ and the University of Birmingham, c 1966-1983, was published in June 2022.

The report opens with a statement from the ViceChancellor: ‘Today I formally acknowledge and apologise for the University’s role in the historical research and practices detailed in this report and the harm that they caused… We understand the impact that conversion therapy has on individuals and unreservedly condemn this practice. We are unequivocal that conversion therapy is unethical, degrading and harmful.’

One of the observations of the report is that ‘Talking with survivors in Manchester, Birmingham and beyond would help to develop knowledge of the ways in which the ‘conversion therapy’ of the 1960s and 1970s advocated by Birmingham scholars affected the lives of those with direct experience and people whose identities and activities were threatened by AA (Anticipatory Avoidance Therapy).’

My discussions with Helen Spandler, and the report from the University of Birmingham, have contributed significantly to my motivation to write this personal account of an experience that lingers with me, even after 55 years.

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mentees we work with are stuck

careers in different ways’

What attracted you to the psychology profession?

I discovered a love of learning at secondary school. Many years later, my interest in psychology was piqued whilst serving as a Police Officer. I witnessed, on a daily basis, the myriad troubles people with varying psychological problems experienced… barriers to living their best lives.

Later, I felt the need to stretch myself intellectually and decided to enrol to study with the Open University. The various modules in the first-year social science foundation course led to the desire to turn my interest in psychology into a more formal programme of psychological study. Jumping forward six years, I emerged with a First Class Honours Degree in Psychology and I built upon this success by undertaking a two-year Master’s Degree in Occupational Psychology at City University in London. Many more years, of following my passions and growing my psychology knowledge and expertise in the corporate business world, led to where I am today as a Chartered Psychologist. A combination of academic achievement and an appetite for putting myself out of comfort zone to support my development led to success that I would never have dreamt possible in those early years!

Are there any important lessons you’ve learnt that have shaped your career and practice as a psychologist?

I did not necessarily set out to reach a particular level in my career when I first started studying at the Open University. However, over the years, I explored what I was passionate about, played to my strengths and continually looked for opportunities to do what I love doing in the workplace. Through a passion for applied psychology, I literally job-crafted my career by focusing on the types of roles that helped me to grow and develop as a psychologist… particularly opportunities to provide me with high quality continued professional development.

That said, all has not been plain sailing. I have encountered a fair share of setbacks and challenges

along the way. The most important lessons I have learnt from these experiences was to build and maintain my resilience, a strength which has allowed me to bounce back quickly when things have not gone quite as planned. With an innate curiosity about people and a desire to understand others, I have shaped my career by following my interests in helping individuals to develop and unblock barriers to their success. At the same time, I focused my own development in lifelong learning, continually stretching and developing myself as a psychologist.

I have recently achieved Chartered status as a Coaching Psychologist, almost 20 years to the date that I was first awarded it as an Occupational Psychologist. I can honestly say that, from my early studies with the Open University to the present day, I have been the author of my own psychology career.

You are a passionate coach and coach supervisor. How did you get into coaching and where are you now?

My path into coaching was again inspired by a love of learning, especially the inspiration I gained from studying the career development module of my master’s degree. Although my early career started in selection and assessment, my path into coaching was forged when I secured a career development post and, encouraged by my senior managers to gain coaching qualifications, I joined the internal pool of executive coaches, coaching talented senior leaders to progress within their careers.

As my reputation as a coaching psychologist grew, I was invited to design and implement two coaching strategies. The first was a talent coaching strategy in which I included a coach supervision programme and acted as lead coach supervisor for a team of six coach supervisors. The second was a more innovative approach, encouraging everyone to adopt coaching conversations to support each other in day-to-day activities. This programme involved train-the-trainer and coach supervision programmes for a team of 40 coaching advocates, who, in turn, trained line

‘The

in their

Mia Pal hears from Dawn Gosden on how the British Psychological Society’s Branches can support career development

managers in conducting and encouraging coaching conversations with individuals and within teams. Since 2020, following an invitation from BPS South West of England Branch (SWB) Chair, Dr Angela Carter, I have designed and implemented a third strategy in my voluntary role as scheme leader of the SWB Coaching and Mentoring Scheme.

Within the psychology profession, research means our knowledge and practice are ever evolving. How have changes in coaching strategy approaches affected your work?

I became aware of a change in coaching strategy approaches between the time I designed the talent coaching strategy and when I designed the second ‘coaching for everyone’ strategy. This change expressed itself in the organisation as a call to make coaching conversations available to everyone. Coaching for everyone is underpinned by the third-generation coaching approach, where the focus is on collaborative and co-creative conversations (Stelter, 2014). Although research evidence supports the value of coaching cultures in organisations, there has been a lack of evidence, until recently, about how to embed a coaching culture to the benefit of all and not just the talented few (Passmore & Crabbe, 2021).

In addition, as there are many similarities and synergies between coaching and mentoring, and mentoring now increasingly takes place in a coaching world, I drew the evidence base for the SWB Scheme from these similarities and differences, providing the rationale for a coaching and mentoring strategic approach (Garvey, 2014).

Can you share some of the successes of the SWB Scheme?

The scheme has been regularly evaluated, providing overall evidence of its success and impact. During the most recent evaluation in May 2022, mentors and mentees equally reported having derived value and development from the scheme. Further, successfully recruiting two past mentees to train to become mentors, and their positive feedback about their experiences, demonstrated that those with no experience can quickly become effective as long as they are provided with high quality training and supervision. Additionally, one of our mentees was initially focused on pursuing a career in one domain of psychology, but following the insights they gained from the mentoring experience, changed their focus and secured a trainee place in a completely different domain. The following quote from the evaluation study indicating the success of the scheme: ‘I now have a much clearer understanding of the differences between roles in the psychological profession which has helped me to become clearer with where I am headed.’

What are the main challenges of the scheme?

Some of our mentees were not sufficiently equipped with the necessary skills to deal with any obstacles

they encountered to achieving the career aspirations they held at university. In the early days, our mentees tended to be making the transition between higher education and employment, but as the scheme has grown, we have attracted mentees who are mature students, or BPS members looking at their options for changing direction within the psychology profession. Whilst there are observed differences between these cohorts, some mentees looking for their first role in psychology have less self-belief and self-efficacy in their ability to achieve their career aspirations than their more experienced peers.

The common theme which has evolved is that the mentees we work with are stuck in their careers in different ways. Depending on the needs of the mentee, the mentoring process supports strengthening different skills and helps them make decisions they may have been putting off.

Dependency relationships can tend to form in coaching and mentoring. How have you guarded against this?

Firstly, we offer three one-to-one coach mentor sessions over a three-month period, so there is a natural cut-off point.

Also the objectives of the scheme are to provide sufficient support for the mentees to identify and make progress with their career goals, rather than the coach mentor accompanying them throughout their journey. Further, our coach mentors are trained to point out at the start of the mentoring relationship that the mentees are the authors of their own careers. It is not the coach mentors’ role to provide answers: rather, their role is to facilitate the mentee’s thinking to have the conversations they need to have with themselves, helping them to find the solutions to the problems they

For more information on the BPS Mentoring Service, contact Rachel. Scudamore@ bps.org.uk

Dawn Gosden is Scheme Leader for the South West Branch Coaching and Mentoring Programme.

Mia Pal is Chair of the British Psychological Society’s North West Branch.

face which, in turn, will inform their career decisionmaking.

You provide coach supervision for your scheme. Tell me more about your offer and the ethical challenges faced?

The regular group supervision sessions adopt an action learning set approach, providing the coach mentors with opportunities to discuss their problems and concerns, gain knowledge and receive feedback through networking with their supervisor and their peers. One of the ethical challenges I have faced as the supervisor is not only ensuring that I have put in place a process for quality assurance of the coach mentoring scheme, but also providing on-going support and development to the less experienced coach mentors, as well as stretching developmental opportunities for the more experienced. I have achieved this by offering ad hoc one-to-one supervision in addition to the group sessions. Access to this supervision proves especially valuable when ethical problems arise where the coach mentor requires support and guidance that cannot wait until the next group supervision meeting. Other ethical issues are typical of those one would expect in supervision… for example, a coach mentor’s concern that their mentee may need counselling, asking advice on operating within the clear boundaries of coaching and counselling and how to sensitively broach the subject and signpost accordingly in the eventuality that counselling would be more appropriate.

I have seen the benefits for the North West Branch through the delegate feedback from our joint event. How have you shared your work?

Key sources

British Psychological Society (2022). Coaching Community and Career Development: A North West and South West Branch Event, Online Webinar, 16th June, 2022

Garvey, B. (2014) Mentoring in a Coaching World. In Cox, E., Bachkirova, T. and Clutterbuck, D. (eds). The Complete Handbook of Coaching (2nd Ed), pp 362-374. London: SAGE

Passmore, J., & Crabbe, K. (2021). Developing a Coaching Culture in your Organisation, pp 24-35. In J. Passmore (Ed). The Coaches’ Handbook – The Complete Practitioner Guide for Professional Coaches. Abingdon: Routledge.

Stelter, R. (2014). A Guide to Third Generation Coaching NarrativeCollaborative Theory and Practice. New York: Springer.

Over the last two years, I have held a position on the BPS Mentoring Service Steering Group (MSSG). The MSSG’s responsibility is to design a new mentoring service and operating platform with a core set of standards, administrative policies and procedures and guidance materials that support multiple society mentoring schemes. As the SWB Scheme had been designed and implemented before the formation of the MSSG, I was provided with an opportunity to share our successes and lessons learned with my steering group colleagues. In this way, our scheme has informed the design of the wider programme and continues to act as a pilot by being one of the first to transition onto the new BPS Mentoring platform, when it becomes available.

What are your aspirations for next year?

My personal aspirations for next year are to pay forward my extensive experience, following my passion for coaching individuals to be the best they can be, either to gain clarity around their career interests, goals and next steps, or support individuals and leaders wishing to progress within their careers. In my role as a registered and accredited coach supervisor, my aspiration is to support coaches seeking to obtain a different perspective on their coaching, to gain BPS Chartered Coaching Psychologist status, or accreditation with other coaching accrediting bodies.

In terms of the SWB scheme, my aspirations are to effect a smooth transition onto the BPS Mentoring Service platform. Once the scheme has successfully transitioned, we can then move from a cohort approach, to year-round rolling delivery, enabling me to achieve my aspiration of significantly growing our mentor and mentee cohorts.

Also, as we have begun to develop a local coaching and mentoring community in the south west branch, I would be delighted to share our experiences with other branches interested in setting up their own mentoring schemes.

Find peace with bodies and food

Ian Florance meets counselling psychologist Dr Sara Dowsett

, founder of the Intuitive Psychology academy

The Intuitive Psychology academy delivers online training and therapy, helping clients repair their relationship with their bodies and food, focusing particularly on disordered eating behaviours such as dieting and the pressures around restrictive and harmful concepts of beauty. ‘We place eating and beauty in the context of issues such as sexism, capitalism, racism, and classism. The language of individual blame doesn’t apply; understanding wider systems of oppression does. It’s a social justice issue.’

I asked Sara how she got interested in the area. ‘I was frequently on and off diets to “manage” my weight. I experienced the impact this had on my mental and physical health, often feeling fatigued, irritable, anxious, and hungry when dieting. I had been going to see a therapist for some years and began to explore the impact of dieting on my overall sense of self. I asked my therapist why I felt I should be trying to lose weight or continuously following beauty and exercise regimes. I was keen to know if this was “normal.” My therapist answered, “I don’t know if it’s normal, but I do know it’s become normalised in a society that ties worth to appearance and weight.” My therapist suggested that I read Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach and that was like a door opening. I was finally able to put words to those nagging feelings. Dieting wasn’t about my “health”… I knew this because I always felt physically and mentally worse when dieting… but instead about obedience, fatphobia and issues such as sexism.’

Sara says Naomi Wolf’s book The Beauty Myth also influenced her thinking. ‘One of her quotes sums up the subliminal intent that kept me stuck in the dieting cycle for years: “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

Eager to learn more about the topic, Sara trained to become a certified intuitive eating practitioner in 2020. ‘Simply put, intuitive eating is a framework that promotes attunement to your internal hunger and fullness cues. This might seem blindingly obvious but years of following external food rules, set by dieting companies, means we often learn to detach from what our bodies actually want and need. Dieting has become a common method used by society to control our eating and how we look. Using ten guiding principles, the intuitive eating framework aims to support individuals to find peace with their bodies and food.’

‘People are literally dying to be thin’

Sara’s therapeutic approach integrates psychological principles with the intuitive eating framework.

‘I always start with identifying a client’s existing unique beliefs and conditioning rather than immediately applying new learning to these old wounds. Using a relational psychodynamic lens, I seek to understand an individual’s relationships with their primary caregivers and how these have contributed to their relationship with food and their body. If I am working with an individual who identifies as female, then I will be curious to know, for example, what her mother’s relationship with her own body and food is like and was like growing up. This is not intended to attribute blame towards parents. These deeper and more personal explorations promote clarity in identifying key contributors to an individual’s own body image dissatisfaction and relationship with food. If trauma is identified as a key contributor to their situation, alongside processing the trauma I explore their choice to use food and their body to bear and express their pain. This method of coping gives eating disorders the highest mortality rate out of all psychiatric disorders. People are literally dying to be thin.’

Sara’s therapeutic method moves on to an educational stage; providing the individual with psychoeducation in order to place their personal systems within wider oppressive societal systems of power. ‘Understanding Body Mass Index (BMI) is an example. It’s very widely used as a scientific term in health systems, government policies, media, and dieting programmes. How can a simple calculation of height and weight tell us anything about an individual’s internal bio-markers of health? The measuring system, originally called the Quetelet Index, was created over 200 years ago by a Belgian astronomer aiming to find the “average man”, using only White men as the research group. It was renamed the BMI in 1985 and continues to be used by health systems and insurance companies, arbitrarily applying labels such as obese and morbidly obese to permit or deny healthcare. It informs important decisions such as access to fertility treatment. Such decisions are discriminatory.’ Society’s health message – that losing weight is better for health – is often what keeps people stuck in the dieting trap, Sara says. ‘That’s ironic as weight cycling, the scientific term for dieting, is the number one predictor of weight gain. The body tries to keep a balance – homeostasis – in many areas, not least

energy and hunger. We’re also genetically predisposed to have a unique set weight point enabling us to function optimally. If you go under this set point the hypothalamus releases hormones to ensure you crave lots of high-density food. At the same time, your metabolic rate slows to reserve the energy and fat you have access to, and this is why you feel fatigued when dieting. As you lose weight the body burns less calories to conserve what you’ve got, hence weight loss always slows down after the first week or two. Once this survival mechanism wins and you finally stop the restriction (diet), your clever body increases your set weight point in case the restriction happens again in the future. Your body can’t distinguish between a genuine famine and dieting. Overwhelming research shows dieting is not good for your health. It actively increases metabolic and cardiovascular risk factors and affects areas as diverse as blood pressure, cholesterol, and insulin resistance. Low weight is much more of a health concern than higher weight, yet diet culture prioritises losing weight.’

Sara points out the dieting companies know these facts and use them to inform their business models. The weight loss industry turns over $255 billion a year. ‘Government policies have always painted what is seen as “fat” in a negative light. They have spent billions waging wars on “obesity” and are now even weighing children at school. The public shaming of fat keeps the focus of “health” on the individual, without taking into consideration wider social determinants of health.’

‘I haven’t dieted for five to six years; I feel less pressure and I am much sharper mentally. I don’t spend all my time thinking about my weight. But it’s important to make clear that I hold a lot of thin privilege recovering from diet culture into a body that, although it falls within the obese category, is still socially acceptable.’

This was a life-changing event

Sara had moved back to talking about her individual experiences which have hugely influenced her work. ‘I didn’t do that well at GCSEs and didn’t have a career in mind. I got a job in an insurance company and became their youngest manager at the age of 21. In 2005, at the age of 18, I had a life changing event when I lost a friend in a car accident. I didn’t really understand death, didn’t know how to process the loss, and particularly the anger that I felt that he had died so young. I was too proud and scared to receive therapy myself. So my idea for coping was to train to become a therapist (I was the epitome of the wounded healer in action)! However, on my first day of my Diploma in Counselling, I was told, “You alI have to get personal therapy in order to pass the course,” so my clever ploy failed!’

After her diploma Sara worked in a variety of roles. ‘When I was working for the drug and alcohol service one of my clients took his own life. Like the death of my friend, it has impacted everything I do. A lot

of my work since then has been on behalf of them, keeping in mind life’s fragility and the importance of mental health. This event was the catalyst for my pursuit of further education… I felt I could have done and known more. At the age of 25, I entered higher education and took a degree in psychology at Southampton Solent. Contextualising the academic experience really helped me, even in areas I was nervous about, such as statistics; I had found my home. I won a scholarship for my Clinical MSc at University of Southampton; I couldn’t have afforded to self-fund. Throughout my education, alongside years of therapy, I had lots of paid jobs ranging from child protection, neuro- rehabilitation and work on student well being and staff therapy. After my MSc I got a loan for my doctorate in counselling psychology which I studied at The University of the West of England – an amazing training programme where self-awareness and personal development are considered key factors in learning how to sit and work with client’s distress.’

The lockdown gave birth to the idea of the Intuitive Psychology Academy. ‘Obviously Covid had hugely negative consequences on many people, but it did give us space to think and feel about how we are spending our one wild and precious life. My experience in the NHS of dealing with as many as seven clients a day, impacted upon my mental health, and the need, to pathologise clients in order to secure treatment for them had convinced me that the NHS wasn’t where my skills were most suited. Hence the birth of the academy.’

And outside work? ‘Wholeheartedly connecting with my family and close friends is essential for me and my mental health. We are fortunate to live a few minutes from the beach and have a family beach hut where we spend a lot of time drinking tea, eating good food and collecting sea glass.’

To find out more about the academy visit www.intuitive psychology academy.com or email Sara on drsaradowsett@ gmail.com

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Grow with

Job Titles: Full Time Clinical Psychologist and Associate Clinical Psychologists

Employers: M Downs and Associates

Dr Maria Downs founded M Downs and Associates in 2012. Although she initially worked alone, growing demand for her services created the opportunity to grow the team and take on associates. Maria explains: ‘Our associates work on a self-employed basis which means they get to choose the amount of work they take on and when and where they do this. Associates tend to fit this around other commitments. Most of our associates work for the NHS and/or in education as I originally did.’

‘Growing demand for services means we need to increase our ability to respond to needs from a wider geographical area. We are therefore looking for associates both locally and nationally as well as to employ two permanent clinical psychologists to respond to existing demand in the region and to develop our services: one will provide assessments and therapeutic interventions primarily with children and families; the other will assess and work with adults.

Maria explained that the company provides court psychological reports, the majority involving families within child protection proceedings. ‘Our reports assist the court in making decisions in the best interests of children.’ Other reporting work deals with victims of torture, organised violence and trafficking and reports in relation to industrial tribunal claims.

‘Writing assessment reports is a crucial part of most clinical psychologist roles, but providing court reports requires a change of focus and approach. When I was asked to provide my first court report I didn’t know where to start and did not know whether this was beyond my professional competence. The company provides training, mentoring, and support to our associates to help them to grow their knowledge, skills and confidence and to ensure all our reports are of a high quality.’

‘We are a small company and aim to help people live better; both our clients and team members. We want our employees and associates to thrive and enjoy

www.mdownsandassociates.co.uk

developing, so rising to the many challenges faced within a growing and dynamic, successful organisation. A good work life balance is critical. We provide a comfortable, spacious working environment and flexible working. Quality administrative support and processes, including a customised software system, which allows team members to get on with what they do best. ‘

‘Other support includes clinical and peer supervision, targeted training, including one to one mentoring, and team meetings. There will be promotion opportunities promotion as we develop and grow our services. We want our staff to grow so that they can effectively meet the expectations of those positions.’

‘Our great team works well together, are supportive of each other, and are focused on organisational growth. The ideal candidate will be enthusiastic, enjoy working as part of a dynamic team, and will be keen to grow with the organisation. I would say to anyone who has questions about the roles or is interested in a permanent position even if unable to commit to full time hours, please contact us at jointheteam@ mdownsandassociates.co.uk.’

The book you’ve written with Jonathan Redshaw and Adam Bulley has an intriguing title: what do you mean by ‘The Invention of Tomorrow’?

‘The Invention of Tomorrow’ refers to the evolution of our ability to think about the future. Our book is an attempt to get to grips with the nature and origins of this ability and its role in the human story.

Why is the ability for ‘mental time travel’ or ‘foresight’ important in human evolution?

The human mind is a virtual time machine. With it you can relive past events and imagine future situations, even if you have never experienced similar situations before. Because humans are mental time travellers, we can prepare for opportunities and threats well in advance, trying to shape the future to our own design. Early humans increasingly predicted the goings-on in their environments – predators and prey, seasons and storms – until eventually they plotted their way to some level of dominance wherever they went. Arguably foresight, the ability to anticipate events and act accordingly, is the most powerful tool at our disposal, even if we often get it terribly wrong.

You highlight that psychology has traditionally focused much more on memory than foresight – why do you think that is?

Perhaps one reason is that memory is easier to study.

Experimental psychologists since the 19th century have been presenting participants with materials to then measure how well they are retained later. But ultimately the future is much more important than the past, as that is all anyone can do anything about.

The book mentions some interesting human case studies – could you tell us briefly about one that illustrates what happens when the brain loses some of this capacity?

In one of the worst cases of amnesia known to science, the English musician Clive Wearing suffered brain damage from a herpes infection that has left him unable to recall a single event from his past. Despite still being lucid and intelligent, Clive cannot form new memories and can track the flow of events only in the order of seconds. He lost not only his ability to recall ever having given a performance, but also his ability to travel mentally into the future and imagine giving a performance next week – or at any future time for that matter. Clive is in no position to plan for the weekend or look forward to a holiday. We do appear to need the same mental time machine to go both backwards and forwards.

Where in the brain does the capability for mental time travel lie, and is there a seminal experiment which shows this?

‘The human mind is a virtual time machine’

Our ability to think about the future makes humans unique. Professor Thomas Suddendorf tells Deputy Editor Shaoni Bhattacharya how this capability has shaped human psychology and evolution.

When participants in a brain scanner are asked to remember the past and imagine the future, it turns out that many of the same brain regions become active. One of these regions, the hippocampus, was severely affected in Clive Wearing’s brain. There have been many experiments demonstrating commonalities between mental time travel into the past and into the future. In one of our studies, we asked young children questions about their past and future and found a link between their ability to accurately recall what they did yesterday and to report what they would do tomorrow. Similarly, as people age the richness and accuracy of memory and foresight appear to decline in parallel.

Your book focuses on evolution, but how does our capacity for foresight relate to some mental health conditions, for example anxiety?

Problems with our virtual time machine are central to many psychological challenges and this has become a hot topic in psychopathology. Depression can involve hopelessness about the future. Anxiety involves excessive thinking about possible bad outcomes. Even worry about worrying too much. But foresight is also an avenue for intervention. We seek help because we yearn for a better future, and can plan to resolve the problems we face.

Which other animals have the ability for foresight?

Foresight is not one ability but the product of a range of capacities working in concert. Other animals have some of these capacities and can act in future-directed ways. In our book we describe curious examples of competences in crows, dolphins, chimpanzees and other animals. For example, chimpanzees may carry a rock a hundred yards to crack open nuts at another location, and in experiments we have found that crows can pick a tool for a problem they will face only a few minutes later.

Are humans unique in their capacity for imagining the future as Seneca and Schopenhauer suggested, as your book mentions? How do we differ from other species?

There appears to be something profoundly distinct about the human capacity to think about the future. Even those nonhuman animals that demonstrate some competences tend to fall short when it comes to more remote future events, and when it comes to taking multiple possibilities into account. For example, chimpanzees and crows have not been observed making even simple contingency plans.

At what point did humans or our hominin forebears evolve foresight – was it in response to anything?

The invention of tomorrow did not happen overnight, as it were. Our ancestors gradually acquired their remarkable mental time machines over millions of years, leaving clues in the archaeological record of their advancing capacities. In the book we take

the reader on a journey through some of the key milestones, such as when our ancestors began to assemble stone-tipped spears that would only later kill from a distance or when they started to craft carrying devices that enabled them to ferry provisions to points in space and time, wherever and whenever they might be needed. Although the precise forces bringing these changes about remain unknown, we discuss several plausible drivers for these advances.

What about the downsides of foresight? In your book you link this to the human propensity for war, causing extinctions and damaging the environment – could you say a little about this?

Foresight comes with many downsides. It confronts us with most unwelcome facts, such as our own mortality. It gave us more reasons to fight, and made fighting more dependent on reason – with all the horribleness this entails.

And being able to think about the future does of course not mean we are clairvoyants. We persistently predict things that do not happen and frequently fail to foresee those that do. And these failures can have treacherous consequences. For instance, to smooth the operation of car engines, the inventor Thomas Midgley Jr. introduced lead to gasoline, which he did not anticipate would turn out to produce one of the worst pollutants ever devised. Nor did he foresee that the CFC (chlorofluorocarbon) he introduced to refrigerators would be a major cause of ozone depletion.

By and large, we can no longer claim ignorance about the environmental consequences of our actions. Continuing to litter, to emit and to destroy is reckless, and often simply driven by a focus on immediate monetary gains and a wilful neglect of factors outside of market forces. In spite of our foresight, we often tend to discount the future, to prioritise short-term benefits at the expense of longterm costs. As the only animal on the planet capable of foreseeing the distant consequences of their actions, we have choices faced by no other creature. Our farsightedness burdens us, and us alone, with responsibility for the future.

Thomas Suddendorf is a professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia. The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight by Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw & Adam Bulley is published by Basic Books (£25), and is available now.

How can we humans use our mental time-travelling abilities for good?

Foresight confronts us with many conundrums, and we incessantly debate what should be done to create a better future. On an individual level, we can

Dame Deborah James Vermillion

make better decisions when we are aware about the many shortcomings and biases that affect our thoughts about the future. Throughout the book we find that – somewhat paradoxically – some of the most remarkable powers of foresight can be derived from awareness of its limits.

On a global scale, we can now foresee many devastating possibilities in terms of pollution, climate

The brevity and beauty of each day

Dame Deborah James received much attention and praise for her tireless campaigning on bowel cancer, particularly in the last months of her life. Her blog ‘BowelBabe’ which I, along with thousands of others followed on Instagram, documented her journey with incurable cancer – detailing the realities of being a patient, but also demonstrating Deborah’s infectious positivity. Her book, How to live when you could be dead, was completed towards the end of her life and captures what I imagined Deborah to be like as a person. Littered with anecdotes, evidence-based approaches to support living through adversity, and her lived experience, the reader goes on an incredible journey with her.

Early on, Deborah acknowledges that her approach to adversity is her ‘greatest weapon’. When we consider the factors that facilitate resilience, we can see that Deborah’s rebellious hope, passion for life and drive to make the world a better place enabled her to make sense of, and even be positive about, possibly the hardest thing a human must endure: living every day with their mortality thrust in their face.

We learn more about Deborah before cancer too; her struggles with anxiety, her career, beloved family, and passions including fashion and makeup. I really enjoyed these parts of the book, as I was able to imagine who she was, and relate to her as a young, passionate woman. When people are given a diagnosis such as incurable cancer, often others can lose sight of the entire person, instead focusing on the illness and its impact on the person and their family. What Deborah does really well in her book is ensure that the reader holds on to who she was: flawless lipstick, fabulous dance moves and floral dresses, with and without cancer.

A key concept through the book is hope, which for many Deborah embodied. Hope can be infectious, and as I read on, I noticed the hope mindset becoming more ingrained in my own mind. Deborah helps us to understand how our mindset can have an impact on our mood and overall wellbeing. She gently embeds psychological concepts and explanations in an accessible way, including principles from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Compassion Focused Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. In doing so, this book becomes a useful toolkit for living, which I believe makes this a valuable read for all.

Deborah recognises that we often don’t stop,

change, or mass extinctions. To plot our way out of our troubles we will need to harness our tremendous capacities to predict, plan, and prepare, to strategise, simulate, and scientifically assess. With the right balance of confidence and humility we hope humanity can steer the ship into a brighter tomorrow. Future generations may hold us morally responsible for our choices.

pause, and reflect. We live on a treadmill of constant deadlines and life moves quickly. As a result, it is often when one is floored due to a lifechanging event, that we stop to take stock. She urges us to stop and reflect on what’s important before then, so that when life gets difficult we can look back and feel that we made the most of our circumstances.

Working at the Royal Marsden cancer hospital during my final year of clinical training, I recognised how much hope and optimism people living with cancer can possess, and how much effort they make to live every day. Seeing this first hand prompted me to reframe my understanding of what cancer, or any incurable condition must mean. Stepping away from the prescribed social narrative, I became aware of the brevity and thus beauty of each day, the 86,400 seconds we each have every day, as Deborah puts it. As a society, we tend to shy away from discussions around illness and death. These topics can evoke a range of difficult emotions, understandably. Deborah has created a space in our society to address topics such as cancer and death, without the familiar doom and gloom being attached to it.

This is a book written by someone who had incurable cancer, yes, but it is so much more than what happened to Deborah after her diagnosis. It is a lifetime of her personal learning and growth, and a gift to us. Whilst Deborah is tragically no longer with us, her spirit and wisdom shine on in this book and her BowelBabe legacy. She may never see the impact she has had, but you as a reader can have a little slice of her rebellious hope through her writing. I laughed, smiled, and cried whilst devouring this brilliant book and I hope you may take the time to feel those emotions and more as you read Deborah’s brilliant closing thoughts.

Reviewed by Dr Talia Drew, Clinical Psychologist

How to live when you could be dead

Books that shaped me…

Dr Sebastian Cordoba (he/him) told us about the books that informed, inspired and delighted him.

The first book I loved…

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. As a child growing up in Colombia, it was impossible to escape the magical – and often political – world of Macondo, an isolated, fictional city that represents the struggles and hopes of Latin American people. I read this book several times as a child, charting the multi-generational family tree of the Buendías, and attempting to understand the use of magical realism to tell complicated stories relating to colonialism, war, and generational trauma. Writing this is making me want to read it again, as I’m sure my lens will be very different now!

Favourite book now…

I find All About Love by bell hooks quite comforting. I love her writing style, her honesty, and her way of connecting personal stories with high level concepts relating to the philosophy and psychology of love, community, and affection. I read it during one of the most difficult times of the pandemic, when things felt hopeless. I have returned to this book during happy times as well. It taught me that love is not just a noun, but a verb – and that ‘to love’ is one of the most powerful tools to build meaningful connections and to a happier, more accepting society.

The key ingredients of a good book…

I love when books strike an emotional chord while simultaneously teaching a valuable lesson. I have devoured the Heartstopper graphic novels (Volumes 1-4) by Alice Oseman. These books have all the things I need: beautiful illustrations, queer representation, emotional rollercoasters, life lessons, and the promise of more books!

The role of books in our psychological growth… Books allow us to grow our imaginations and to perceive the world in ways that challenge our preconceived notions. For me, it’s always felt great to feel represented. I consumed every single book I could that included queer characters or was written by queer people. This representation allowed me to come to terms with my own sexual and gender identities, providing me with a great deal of self-esteem and self-acceptance. Anything by Alison Bechdel (Fun Home), Kate Bornstein (Gender Outlaw), Leslie Feinberg (Stone Butch Blues), Virginia Woolf (Orlando), and James Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room) made me feel at home. It’s disheartening to hear that books on LGBTQ+ issues are being banned in places like Texas, as this will only limit people’s understandings of themselves and others, leading to stigma, discrimination, and internalised homophobia/transphobia.

A book which changed the way I think Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble changed the way I understood gender and sex. Butler’s key argument is that these concepts are socially constructed and in constant motion, as they are

affected by culture, history, class, sexuality etc. This book allowed me to see that sex is as multi-dimensional and complex as gender is, and that reducing it to a binary is reductive and, in many ways, irresponsible. The labels that we attach to our bodies/identities are contingent upon our culture, which is constantly changing.

One book that all psychologists should read…

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker is a must-read for any psychologist looking to understand what queer is all about. It’s illustrated by cartoonist Jules Scheele, making it not only an accessible read, but an entertaining one. I have recommended it to students, colleagues, friends, and family members, and I still read it from time to time when I want to revisit a key concept in queer theory.

A ‘desert island’ book…

Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar has been on my reading list for –and I hate to admit it – decades. It’s long, complex, and it can be read in different ways, allowing for multiple endings. I’ve always wanted to read it, so I would probably have the time to do so in a deserted island. I would most likely read it several times, following all the variations.

A book I find therapeutic to read…

Last Christmas, my husband gifted me No Straight Lines, an anthology of queer comics covering a 40-year period from the late 1960s to the late 2000s. I read the whole thing over the break, and I found it extremely therapeutic – it was entertaining, enlightening, funny and inspiring.

Bookshelves should be: in alphabetical order/free range

Alphabetical! How would you find the book otherwise? There is aesthetic value in organising by colour or height, but it is less practical when your home library grows.

Last pages: sneak a peek or never look?

I peek, but only to the last sentence. There’s something poetic about knowing something about the ending, even if the context is missing.

Sebastian Cordoba is a senior lecturer in social psychology at London Metropolitan University. His book Non-binary gender identities: The language of becoming is published by Routledge. It examines how non-binary people discover, adopt, and negotiate language in a variety of social settings, both offline and online. It considers how language (including gender-neutral pronouns, names and labels) is a central aspect of identity and the subject of much debate in recent years.

The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and our Quest for an Inspired Life

Lisa Miller

Allen Lane

Where spirituality meets psychology

The Awakened Brain is an inspiring book, showing just how much can be gained when the boundaries of scientific inquiry are pushed to their limits.

The book follows the author Lisa Miller on her journey from a young psychologist discontented with the treatment models of her time, to a pioneering scientist working to bring spirituality into the realm of science and psychology.

The story begins in the autumn of 1994, with Dr Miller working her first graduate job at a cold and impersonal psychiatric unit in Manhattan. It is at a Yom Kippur ceremony in the ward’s kitchenette, organised by herself, that she will witness an immense transformation take place in her patients following the religious celebration. Left with burning questions on the relationship between spirituality and mental health, this ignited curiosity marks the beginning of Dr Miller’s fruitful career investigating this intersection.

The book covers the astonishing discoveries which have emerged from this extensive investigation: from the protective power of

spirituality against depression, to the biological mechanisms underlying spiritual capacities. These are seen through the lens of Miller’s own personal journey. We see the dedication and courage which she needed on the winding road to these findings, sometimes facing disapproval. It is also touching to hear how spirituality added to Dr Miller’s own life, helping her through difficult years of being unable to conceive a child, as well as in the stories of some of her patients.

The combination of these stories of personal growth, and the expansion of psychology as a field, makes this book profound and relatable, as well academically interesting. For me, the book reignited an excitement around where the field of psychology could be heading. As well as implications for the future of treatment models, on an individual level we can perhaps see that making space for spirituality in our lives could completely change the way we see the world.

Reviewed by Rose de Castellane is a Psychology graduate based in London

Navigating the complexities of teens on screens

Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (and Adults Are Missing)

Emily Weinstein & Carrie James

The MIT Press

Part of ‘growing up’ as parents involves learning to deal with tenacious teens who simultaneously inhabit two spheres: the real and virtual. As adults we may be dismissive of teenage troubles that stem from the online world. But as Emily Weinstein and Carrie James, point out, what happens in the virtual world has real implications, especially for youngsters whose online life often determines the quality of their offline one. So if a teenager is experiencing angst due to social media posts, just telling them to disconnect isn’t necessarily the best solution. For most teens, their social lives in the real world depend on being connected virtually as well.

The authors, who are Harvard researchers, draw on a survey of 3500 teens across the United

States. They also relied on an advisory council of young people when examining and interpreting the data to ensure that adult assumptions didn’t cloud the findings. The goal was to provide a ‘more textured, authentic understanding of teens’ worries and experiences’. The authors contend that media coverage regarding teens’ device usage tends to be ‘alarmist’ and doesn’t provide a balanced, nuanced perspective that can inform parents and educators on how best to support teens in the digital world.

They advise that we adopt an empathetic rather than a judgmental stance if we want to help teens develop healthy digital habits. Black-and-white diktats issued by parents are less impactful than recognising the numerous complexities involved in various social media decisions.

say. While it encourages ‘creative expression and social interactions’, on the flipside it may promote ‘toxic comparison’ and fuel mental health problems. How an individual engages with social media is more important than drawing sweeping generalisations.

The authors examine teens’ social media usage from a trio of lenses – developmental, ecological and digital – to provide a more rounded view. When parents and educators understand the dilemmas and difficulties that teens face with screens, we may have more meaningful discussions with them, with the ultimate aim of promoting digital agency.

More online:

Harriet Conniff with an adapted extract from Psychological Staff Support in Healthcare: Thinking & Practice, which she edited. www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/changing-profilestaff-support

As the effects of social media usage on teens is mediated by both individual and contextual factors, blanket recommendations aren’t necessarily useful. We need to refrain from seeing social media in black and white terms, they

Overall, this is a comprehensive guide regarding teens’ digital lives. One limitation, which the authors acknowledge, is their US-centric sample. Including voices from all over the world would have helped unearth specific cultural trends in addition to more universal ones.

Reviewed by Aruna Sankaranarayanan, author of Zero Limits: Things Every 20-Something Should Know

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Authenticity and shadow

‘The only person who gets to torture my brother is me’, Wednesday informs Pugsley’s bullies from the side of the pool, while coolly dropping piranhas into the water. Subsequent expulsion, and the need to avoid charges, sees Wednesday reluctantly join a new school, Nevermore Academy, a kind of Hogwarts for ‘outcasts’… gothic-tinged, elegantly creepy, housing an array of teen creatures from vampires and werewolves to sirens, mermen and gorgons. The show’s take on the Addams Family character weaves together tropes from fairy tales, murder mystery, the YA genre and high school coming of age movies.

In a twist on Red Riding Hood, Wednesday sets about solving a string of murders to catch a supernatural serial-killing beast lurking in the woods. Wednesday exemplifies Rogerian and Jungian themes of living as your authentic self and integrating shadow elements of the psyche. We are unsure who is secretly the murderous monster, but we have a sense many of the characters have secrets or a shadow side. Everyone is hiding something. The students have

secret societies, while the headmistress exudes a chillingly incongruent charm. Wednesday’s (courtmandated) therapist is impossibly nice, the nearby ‘normie’ town’s mayor and sheriff hide information about the killings and Wednesday’s parents have a secret. Even the local town shrouds its colonialist, witch-hunting past in a saccharine persona for tourists.

Wednesday stands out as a staunchly authentic, truth-seeking detective figure, guided by powerful visions that reveal past events. She appears to be always herself, needing no one, nor caring what anyone thinks (‘Honestly I wish I cared a little more’). As the show progresses Wednesday reluctantly gains friends and allies, much to her bemusement. Her unwavering indifference to werewolf roomie Enid, who has a date, begins to falter, with a promise, ‘if he breaks your heart, I’ll nail gun his’.

Wednesday’s coming of age struggle explores tensions between individual authenticity and relationships, a dynamic central to Carl Rogers

seminal body of work in humanistic psychology. For Rogers, acknowledging, feeling and authentically expressing our real experience of the world enables us to be psychologically healthy and self-actualise, or fully develop our potential. Paradoxically, our own potential unfolds best when we have accepting and caring relationships with others. Wednesday’s struggle exemplifies this ongoing challenge, to fulfil one’s potential through integrating individual and relational growth.

For psychologist Carl Jung, monsters present archetypal representations of our shadow side, symbolising unwanted feelings and desires that we disown as socially unacceptable. At first glance, this does not appear to be a problem for Wednesday, as she seems to fully embrace her own darkness. Yet her archetypal hero’s journey to face the shadow by slaying the monster – for Jung, a rite of passage into psychological maturity – plays out in her hunt for the murderous creature in the woods. In conversation with Thing, Wednesday reflects that her single-minded obsessiveness is typical of great writers, ‘yes, and serial killers, what’s your point?’ Perhaps the serial-killing creature symbolically embodies the darker potential of her nature.

For Jung, the shadow also holds disowned lighter elements of our personality. Wednesday’s journey uncovers her potential for friendship. Psychologists may consider the appeal of the show to a generation journeying into adulthood during an age of social media, pandemic, war and fake news, where determining what is true and who can be trusted seems increasingly difficult. Themes of authenticity and relationship, truth, persona and shadow, all feel increasingly pertinent in the modern social and psychological landscape.

Reviewed by Jenny Hamilton, a Senior Lecturer in Counselling/ Psychological Therapies at the University of Lincoln and a counsellor and mindfulness teacher in private practice.

Given my background and experiences in child and educational psychology, the effects of the pandemic and lockdown heightened my interests in the ethos of counselling psychology, drawing me to be more proactive in my goal to specialise in helping young people with mental health issues. So, I was eager to see this interactive play on obsessivecompulsive disorder (OCD), taking place at the very intimate The Little of the Southwark Playhouse – only 100 seats and a small stage.

Upon entering, there were two cards on each seat. The first card was an information sheet on OCD. OCD is a serious and debilitating psychiatric condition which seems to affect men more so during childhood but women during adolescence and adulthood, so it was poignant that the play had an all-female cast. The second card was a Likert scale style survey entitled ‘How OCD Are You?’

In classic ‘breaking-of-thefirst-wall’ style, we are first introduced to Matilda (Catarina Thane) who acts as both OCD sufferer and host of the fictional podcast, I’m Just A Little Bit OCD Matilda returns at various points throughout for comedic effect, in an attempt to ease the tension of such an evocative topic. Many did not laugh, for example, at Matilda having to switch off a light 3, 6 or 9 times as it signified ‘saving her mum’s life and avoiding her dying in a car crash’. There were also some light-hearted interactions that settled better with the audience; for example, at the time of a would-be intermission, she tells the audience to complete the survey and high scorers (supposedly those more likely to have symptoms) ‘won prizes’ of, for instance, hand sanitiser –particularly useful now with the easing of pandemic restrictions!

The play centres on the introverted Tilly (Sarah Eakin) who can’t stop opening and shutting kitchen drawers as it soothes her intrusive thoughts of harming

I’m just a little bit OCD

The Little, Southwark Playhouse

younger children, and her little sister Grace (Jasmine Hodgson) who is a bit of a social butterfly, and at the beginning of the play, returns from the final year of her Art degree, and wonders why her sister is ‘being weird’. Is it because she is annoyed at Grace for leaving her home alone with their overbearing mother to pursue her dreams of being an artist? Or is it more complicated than that? Indeed, at first, Tilly herself thinks that the cause of her thoughts and actions are the stress of being cooped up at home and having to look after her mum by herself. We never meet Tilly and Grace’s mum though, and I felt that if there was funding for more time (the play was only an hour long), it would have been interesting to see the mum’s interactions with her two very different daughters.

Inevitably of course, Tilly comes across Matilda’s podcast, and with the eventual help of Grace, applies for a therapy referral. The therapy room is created whilst we hear an exaggerated voiceover by Matilda. Having only attended therapy online myself, this brought home the stigma surrounding attending in-person therapy. The therapy room is morbidly empty save for just three items: a tissue box, a plant and a very big white clock. Some therapists don’t have a tissue box in the session, fearing a space for negative transference, but for others it’s an important signal of authenticity and empathy.

Actress Ria Fay directs the play, which made its debut at the Brighton Fringe Festival four years ago. She self-diagnosed at the age of 17 by researching OCD on Wikipedia; she doesn’t recommend this! The play was followed by an enlightening Q+A session with the cast members. I was amazed to realise that Ria

herself, like the others in the cast, is a sufferer of OCD and is undertaking, and benefitting from, a course of exposure and relapse prevention (ERP) therapy (a form of cognitive behavioural therapy).

I was particularly inspired by how, despite her struggles, Ria produces a first-rate performance in the character of the therapist.

‘I’m A Little Bit OCD’ is a phrase that’s bandied around in today’s society, and often stigmatised and trivialised. People tend to reference OCD as a desire for order and/ or excessive cleaning habits. The take-home message of this play is that OCD (and of course, any mental health disorder) is so much more nuanced than this.

I took my phone out so quickly after leaving the theatre that night, eager to tell others about it. There

have been a limited number of theatre shows, both on and off the West End, showing such real portrayals of mental health. When theatre engages the mind and emotions like I’m Just A Little Bit OCD did with me, it truly is doing its job. More is needed.

Reviewed by Chrissie Fitch BSc (Hons) MSc PgCert; Visiting Research Associate at Nutrition and Behaviour Unit; Freelance Editorial Assistant for Good Thinking Psychological Services and Associate Editor (Culture); Twitter: fitchyc_psych

Alcoholics Anonymous saves lives – but alcoholism language can also be harmful

The airing of the recent BBC documentary I’m an alcoholic: inside recovery prompted a number of interesting talking points. For one, an important tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is its principle of anonymity, so broadcasting real AA meetings and its members to the outside world in this way is rarely seen. The hyper-real facial modification technology used to protect the identities of members was striking in itself.

Importantly, the documentary revealed much about AA and how it works – valuable given the myths and speculation that often surrounds it. And AA does certainly work for many; the testimonies of those on the programme are supported by robust evidence that long term engagement in AA really does help abstinence-based ‘recovery’. It also revealed how many aspects of AA like the role of spirituality are flexible – members can interpret of use it in ways that works for them, rather than as a rigid doctrine. Most of all, seeing the people behind the stories is valuable as it humanises people with alcohol problems, a group subject to punishingly high levels of stigma.

However, it’s no secret that AA does attract a range of criticism. One paradox of its strength as an autonomous self-help group is the potential for individuals to go beyond the parameters of the meetings and its traditions. Perhaps inevitably then, cases of predatory (sometimes called ‘13th stepping’) or other harmful behaviours are something that can exist within any kind of social networks which are ultimately dependent on the individuals that make them up.

Another complex issue though relates to the way in which AA sees alcohol problems and the language that surrounds it. Whilst a disease model of alcoholism also originates from a medical model of alcohol problems (and in many ways AA’s texts refer to alcoholism as an ‘illness’ in a more metaphorical

sense), AA has undoubtedly become synonymous with the idea of alcoholism as a ‘disease’. This reflects part of its value to those who benefit from it. AA members learn to understand their alcohol problem as a something that cannot be cured, only managed through AA. As such, the line is always clear –abstinence is essential because ‘one drink is too many, and a thousand isn’t enough’. In turn, whilst the only requirement to attend AA is a desire to stop drinking, self-identification as an ‘alcoholic’ is a non-negotiable aspect of an AA identity.

One consequence of the huge success of AA is that ‘alcoholism’ has become the dominant model for understanding for alcohol problems. The obvious question this raises for any person contemplating their alcohol use as problematic then becomes ‘am I an alcoholic?’. Unfortunately, for many, this framing is unhelpful. Not only do the significant majority of people who experience harms from drinking not fit even a loose idea of an ‘alcoholic’, many will also be acutely aware of the heavy stigma embedded within the term. As such, a clear evidence base shows how the ‘alcoholic’ label can prevent problem recognition and help-seeking due to its stigma.

From a broader perspective then, the issue is not whether or not AA works for some, but what the broader consequences of ‘alcoholism’ language are. Alcohol problems are undeniably broad, and exist on a continuum of severity. That is, problems are not only to be found in a distinct population of ‘alcoholics’, but exist in many different ways across many different groups. The vast majority with alcohol dependence sit within the ‘mild’ or ‘moderate’ zone of the dependence spectrum, are in work, and still functioning in ways incompatible with public stereotypes of ‘alcoholics’. The ubiquity of the alcoholism concept therefore unintentionally obscures the many other ways in which alcohol problems can exist.

Whilst there are no single word replacements for ‘alcoholism’ (i.e., alcohol dependence), positive examples to build on exist. In professional contexts, models of ‘alcohol use disorder’ highlight degrees of severity. In real world terms, we’ve seen increasing numbers of people embracing ‘positive sobriety’, taking part in Dry January, or identifying as ‘soberistas’ or ‘mindful drinkers’.

The broadcaster Adrian Chiles has also shown what else ‘recovery’ can look like, including in his new book The good drinker: how I learned to love drinking less. Chiles has demonstrated that for him, moderation is an achievable goal, and has realised many benefits from reducing his consumption.

Publicly sharing these lesser known ‘recovery’

A masterclass in human manipulation

In December 2022, a TV gameshow, The Traitors, gripped the nation. A modern twist on wink murder, 22 strangers arrived at a Scottish castle for two weeks of fun and games to build up a cash prize, with three of the players being secretly chosen as Traitors. Their role? Simple – murder (eliminate) their fellow game players who were not Traitors – the Faithfuls. The Faithfuls’ role was to identify and eliminate traitors from the game, at the end of which, either surviving Traitors or surviving Faithfuls win the accumulated cash prize. Over 12 episodes, players offered a masterclass in behavioural manipulation, social dynamics, and many psychological phenomena. In an interesting twist, players were introduced to each other (and viewers) before being labelled as a Faithful or a Traitor, allowing viewers to make first impressions and players to form connections with each other before the game truly began. Rapidly, viewers witnessed a series of psychological phenomena play out, one of the most obvious being players’ adoption of the characteristics they associated with their labelled roles. They also formed trust circles based on stereotypes and subsequently looked for behavioural signs to justify their beliefs in another player as a Faithful or Traitor. For example, the youngest and most energetic of the group were perceived by other

journeys show how alcohol problems and their resolution extend well beyond the walls of AA. Calling for a more nuanced and careful language of alcohol problems is not a call to curb AA, or those who selflabel as alcoholics. It is a call to understand that by preventing alcoholism language from ‘spilling over’, we can enable more people to recognise and change other forms of alcohol ‘problems’ that are more prevalent, yet much less recognised.

Reviewed by Dr James Morris, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Addictive Behaviours Research at London South Bank University and host of The Alcohol ‘Problem’ Podcast tv The Traitors BBC

players to be strong and physically able, whilst a 54-year-old female was viewed as a trustworthy mother figure. Agility and ability were quickly characterised as Traitor characteristics, whilst being trustworthy was associated with being a Faithful – the words chosen as labels (traitors and faithfuls) also likely carrying preconceived notions of how those characters would behave. This was also illustrated by a 73-yearold female being seen as a grandmother who just couldn’t be a Traitor, regardless of her demonstrations of physical strength, a trait initially associated with Traitors. These notions of stereotyping, along with changing responses to situational demands, played out in challenges, within armoury tasks where challenge winners further competed for a protective shield of immunity, and most evidently at the daily elimination round table.

It was during discussions at this table that social psychological and cognitive biases came to the fore. One player, Maddy, provided repeated examples of a confirmation bias by focusing others’ Traitor suspicions on a given player and then evoking conformity by showing others how to interpret everything the suspect did as evidence of traitor-ness.

The benefit of strong leadership styles was clear to see, especially

for those labelled trustworthy, when they were afforded blind trust, which led to them verbally coercing other players to a) believe they were Faithfuls, and b) accuse players of being Traitors. In doing so, they provided a demonstration of cognitive and behavioural shifts through classic layers of obedience, compliance, and, ultimately behavioural, if not internalised conformity in the hope of eliminating traitors. A rare opportunity to witness this coerciveness being championed in the name of entertainment, when these behaviours would typically be viewed harshly in real world settings and relationships.

Sitting on the edge of your seat, possibly shouting at the TV, and engrossing yourself in social media debates during and after watching the Traitors, one thing is a given: Even those without a psychology background will analyse and question players’ behaviour, trying to guess their next moves by employing predictable psychological principles, leading themselves to wonder just how far the average human being would go in the name of financial gain.

Reviewed by Dr Ashleigh Johnstone, Arden University Dr Alison Attrill-Smith, University of Wolverhampton

More online… including Babylon, reviewed by Marine Vernet

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Neurodiversity-affirmative education: why and how?

In a recent article for The Psychologist website we describe the ‘coke bottle effect’ – the myriad of small things in a school day that can cause overload for neurodivergent students, each one ‘a shake of the bottle’, leading to an eruption of emotions at home at the end of the day. This phenomenon is at the sharp end of neurodiversity but, despite being central to the delivery of inclusion in schools, the term neurodiversity is widely misunderstood and misapplied. We argue that now is the time for education to become neurodiversity affirmative, and suggest ways to demystify and embrace neurodiversity to the benefit of the whole school community.

It is important to begin by recognising that neurodiversity is a basic scientific truth in that people vary in the way their brains take in, process and respond to information. Sometimes this variation attracts a diagnostic label such as autism, ADHD, DCD, fragile X syndrome, Tourette syndrome and so on. The biggest group of people are ‘neurotypical’ and our education system is built to cater for this majority. It’s not surprising, then, that neurodivergent people can and do struggle within a system that wasn’t designed for their needs.

It’s also important to note that this definition of neurodiversity should steer us away from using the term as merely a stand-in for any one neurodevelopmental condition. For example, neurodiversity is not an alternative way of talking about autism or dyslexia. It’s broader and more inclusive than that, and schools that can adapt to this inclusivity will be the richer for it.

What, why and how Scholars of neurodiversity talk about the neurodiversity paradigm. It’s not just an academic idea – it’s a concept that has policy and practical implications, and these apply as much to education as to other aspects of society.

One absolutely core principle of neurodiversity is that there is no one better or right way to be. All people have equal value, regardless of their talents, needs, or diagnostic status. Our article quotes Jim Sinclair, an autistic scholar, who said ‘Grant me the dignity of meeting me on my own terms – recognize that we are all equally alien to each other and that my ways of being are not merely damaged versions of yours’.

Just like other aspects of diversity, neurodiversity needs to be understood in the context of social and interpersonal dynamics: stigma, prejudice, discrimination and ignorance have an enormous impact upon the lives of neurodivergent people.

Neurodivergent young people at school expend a lot of energy trying to cope and fit in – effectively masking their neurodivergence. Unsurprisingly, this can lead to high levels of anxiety and mental illhealth. It can also lead to bullying and isolation, and even unwarranted exclusion when neurodivergence is mistakenly interpreted as wilful misbehaviour or refusal to follow rules and instructions.

By adopting a neurodiversity affirmative approach, schools can avoid these risks to the wellbeing of individuals, by baking in an expectation of varying needs and resources. Adopting the principles of universal design will help to ensure the school environment is neurodiversity informed at the outset. Some practical examples include:

• Every classroom equipped with accessories to support neurodivergent students, such as cushions, noise-cancelling headphones, stim toys, egg timers

• Classrooms fitted with dimmer switches as standard

• Visual timetables for the whole class

• Flexible seating arrangements, for example standing options, beanbags, yoga balls

Tim Sanders

• Provision of tablets/laptops for all

• Relaxing or scrapping uniform policies

• Eliminating school bells between classes

This approach allows undiagnosed pupils to benefit, too, thereby avoiding singling out individual pupils. In fact, many of these recommendations have the potential to benefit all students, including those who are neurotypical.

Behaviour change

We advocate behaviour change for schools – not individual learners – in order to align with the neurodiversity paradigm. For example, trying to correct atypical development to resemble a neurotypical pathway is not the right approach. This sends the strong message that the child is not OK as they are – that it is their personal responsibility to ‘overcome’ their diagnosis or need. It’s key to also understand that children may not only be following their own paths, but the outcomes they will achieve may be different, too, and that’s OK. For example, perhaps not all children will learn to write legibly by hand, and might instead benefit from the chance to become efficient typists.

It is also unjust and inadvisable to focus on teaching social skills based on neurotypical norms to, for example, autistic children. This is a common practice, and at its worst when schools respond to bullying with a focus on the behaviour of the victim, instead of changing the behaviour of the bullies.

Similarly, the use of behaviour contracts as a pre-condition for returning to school after a period of exclusion isn’t appropriate or acceptable. Instead, schools should be asking what facets of the school environment or day meant that young person was not able to stay happy, engaged and calm.

Importantly, schools should embrace the views and experience of neurodivergent children, young people and staff in developing an inclusive environment. That’s not to exclude the expertise of neurotypical professionals, rather its about equalising the process and putting lived experience at its heart.

Risks and myths

With the best of intentions, the neurodiversity paradigm can be misapplied. In our article we highlight and de-bunk some of the myths, including the idea that neurodiversity denies the reality of disability, or that everyone who is neurodivergent has a special talent.

One risk we have observed in schools is an over-

reliance on diagnosis before support is put in place. We argue that teachers should be empowered by their schools to adopt a child-centred and needs-led approach based on their own professional observation. Conversations with families should be central to this approach, too.

By adopting a more nuanced approach to neurodiversity it is possible to remain inclusive yet also alert to individual support needs. We also recognise that neurodiversity means different things to different people, so our recipe for a neurodiversity affirmative approach is not the only version possible. However, the broad understanding of neurodiversity and the impetus to combat stigma and ensure that everyone has the possibility to flourish remain central to success.

Realism – the challenges

When we write about neurodiversity affirmative classrooms, we aren’t blind to the realities of the challenges. It would take a leap of faith to allow children to self-advocate and exercise more choice about their preferred way to learn, and trial and error may be the only way to find out how best to achieve this. Many schools are struggling to cope with reduced resources and increasing workloads, too, and that can make radical change seem overwhelming. We recommend checking out the It Takes All Kinds Of Minds conference (March 2023: see itakom.org) for more insights into neurodiversity and how to implement the idea in school.

For now, we remain of the view that with greater understanding of, and confidence about, neurodiversity, school staff can implement changes within classrooms and whole schools that will bring benefits to all. It will enable a shift away from a focus on individual achievement measured against narrow standards. The result will be pupils who can advocate on their own behalf and will feel no shame in asking for help when they need it. Ultimately these gains will benefit everyone in and around the school community: engagement with the neurodiversity paradigm provides a pathway to realise the long-held ambitions of inclusive education, fostering an environment where each pupil can thrive on their own terms.

Professor Sue Fletcher-Watson Chair of Developmental Psychology and Director of the Salvesen Mindroom Research Centre, The University of Edinburgh. Sue.Fletcher-Watson@ed.ac.uk

Dr Dinah Aitken Head of Outreach at the Salvesen Mindroom Centre.

Read the full article at www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/ neurodiversity-affirmative-education-why-and-how

In the moment with horses

I was so pleased to read Roberta Caiazza’s ‘personal journey through equine therapy’, in the December issue.

I am a consultant counselling psychologist and an equine therapist, and I wrote my doctoral thesis on why equine therapy works so well. I was able to use these theories in my NHS practice, where I won a research grant to use it with my clients. The success of this therapy has not been noted nearly enough in our field. I appreciate the importance of testing out and working with theoretical models of therapy, for NICE guidelines etc… but every once in a while it’s so important to put our heads above the parapet and try something new. Without meaning making and alliance with our clients, we are nothing and therapy becomes a futile attempt. In equine therapy, the horse is the therapist, and I have countless examples of horses engaging extraordinarily well with clients. Even where clients are terrified of horses, this too can be brought into the therapeutic space to be explored. Equines are gentle giants, curious about us but also needing to make meaning from their perspective, continually assessing whether someone is a threat to them. They do not judge, they are simply in the moment,

reading our energy and continually assessing but also with a desire to ‘be with us’.

I have worked with incredibly challenging and difficult to reach clients who have had many years of unsuccessful therapy, being sent from one service to another with little or no success. Equine therapy has allowed clients to be with horses in a non-threatening space: no need to act out, just to be with. To help empower the disempowered by giving them an

alternative voice. To explore the pureness of this relationship and how the growth and healing of clients is central to the process. The creativity and meaning that comes from working with an equine is a truly innocent space where we can be vulnerable but also at one with a sentient being. Surely this is and should be at the heart of what we do as therapists and psychologists?

Dr Julie Scheiner CPsychol., CSci., AFBPS

Compassionless politics?

In the light of the Kings Fund report about the serious underfunding of services over the last 10 years and damage done to the NHS, a key question is how far psychologists should be involved in political debate and campaigning.

We need to highlight that economic policies should not be pursued that have clear scientific evidence for causing damage, harm, fear and suffering. There is overwhelming evidence that the politics of austerity was and still is very harmful to those least able to defend themselves, and there is considerable evidence that living in poverty and fear has major impacts on a whole range of developmental processes including epigenetics (Raffington et al., 2022). We have to find

a way to liaise better with the media to constantly highlight the fact that humans are social, and the way they are embedded in social supportive contexts is hugely important for physical and mental health and prosociality (Abel & Clarke, 2020).

The intensity of strikes and unrest is testament to the fact that we have created a frightening society, frightened to get ill, frightened to get old; frightened of the cold, frightened of the future. Economic and political decisions that are callous to the consequences on human psychology need to be significantly challenged on all fronts. At the moment there seems to be no mechanism to feed into public debate the psychosocial consequences of

Klaus Wedell HonFBPsS CBE 1931-2022

Klaus Wedell was a major innovator of national and international importance in educational psychology and in special educational needs (SEN), with respect to theoretical and conceptual developments, professional practice and policy. Klaus will be remembered fondly, not only for his impressive achievements in these fields, but also for his humanity, integrity, kindness, and untiring industry.

Born in Dusseldorf, Germany a major influence in Klaus’s life was his coming with his family to England, aged seven, as a refugee from Nazi Germany. The Church of England Committee who sponsored his family ensured that Klaus had an education that enabled him to fulfil his potential. His experience of being an ‘enemy alien’ and a very unsettled life as a refugee contributed to Klaus’s empathy for children with special educational needs. From this background also came Klaus’s need to work out practical and bespoke solutions to life’s problems. As a student without a home base, he converted the back of a bread delivery van into a caravan for which he built his own bed.

Klaus studied psychology and philosophy at Kings College Cambridge (1950-53). During his National Service (1953-55) he served in the British Army in Germany; he wasn’t much good as a tank unit leader due to his disinclination to give orders, but his bilingual skills were put to good use at brigade headquarters.

Klaus married Nina in 1956 when both were postgraduate students at Bristol University. Both were emigres – Nina was American – and they shared the experience of being outsiders looking in on British ways of life. Klaus and Nina were committed to a stable family life for their children, Stephen (born 1962) and Katherine (born 1964).

Klaus undertook his PhD at the University of

Bristol supported by a Spastics Society Studentship on the perceptuo-motor problems of children with cerebral palsy. He became a practitioner educational psychologist (EP) for the City of Bristol (1960-64), where he set up specialist services for children with hearing impairment and language and communication difficulties; and the City of Hull, where he was the lone psychologist (1964-65). As the City would not provide additional staff, Klaus resigned – Nina notes, ‘the City fathers were hopping mad’ – and he moved to the University of Birmingham (1965- 79), where he was appointed head of the M.Ed (Ed. Psych) professional training course for educational psychologists in 1970.

This highly innovative and influential course represented a major change in EP training and practice, away from the existing child guidance clinic focus to one firmly focused on schools, early years settings, and the community. His influence on the development of EP training and practice were fundamental to the reconstruction of EP practice in the 1970s. Over this period Klaus was also in high demand internationally, contributing as visiting Professor to conceptual and practice developments across Europe, Canada and the USA as well as India. Within the BPS, Klaus was Chair of the Division of Educational and Child Psychology (DECP) and its Training Committee of Tutors in Educational Psychology; he also led the DECP Inquiry into Psychological Services for Children (1977).

harmful ‘compassionless’ politics. If we are to build a compassionate future, we have to see major changes in the way we govern ourselves, share resources and allocate resources to the supportive infrastructures of our societies.

Professor Paul Gilbert PhD, FBPsS, OBE Centre for Compassion Research and Training University of Derby

Abel, J. & Clarke, L. (2020). The Compassion Project: A case for hope and human kindness from the town that beat loneliness. Aster. Raffington, L. A. S., Tanksley, P., Sabhlok, A., et al. (2021). Socially stratified epigenetic profiles are associated with cognitive functioning in children and adolescents. Psychological Science, 1-12.

To widespread surprise Klaus was not appointed to a chair in Birmingham so he applied to the Institute of Education (IOE) in London (now part of UCL), where his qualities and achievements were recognised. He was Inaugural Chair in Educational Psychology (Children with Special Educational Needs), until his retirement (1979-95). In addition to his continuing importance in educational psychology, he shifted focus to SEN curriculum development, teacher training and to policy. These coincided with the national developments following the Warnock Report (1978), the first comprehensive government review of the whole of SEN, and the subsequent Education Act 1981. Klaus was commissioned by the UK Department of Education and Science as co-director of the evaluation of the new legislation.

This was followed by a period of major research studies and engagement with government and nongovernmental organisations on the development of policy and practice for SEN: national (e.g. House of

Commons Education Select Committee, ILEA) and international (e.g. British Council in India, OECD in Europe, and the National Council on Disability in the USA). For example, Klaus contributed over 15 years to UNESCO to a review of teacher education curricula across Member States. Which was the basis of one of UNESCO’s most important projects, the Teacher Education Resource Pack. He also contributed to the landmark Salamanca World Conference on Special Needs Education in 1994.

After his retirement in 1995 Klaus was appointed Emeritus Professor at the IOE. Those who knew him were not surprised that Klaus hardly stopped contributing voluntarily for the next 27 years. He chaired many research steering groups and contributed to SEN organisations. He contributed extensively to his local community in Herefordshire and was particularly pleased to volunteer for many

Morris Nitsun

What a sad irony that Morris’s article

‘A Psychotherapist Paints’ was published in the December issue of The Psychologist, just a few weeks before he suddenly and tragically died. In the piece Morris had discussed the tension within him between his ‘Psychologist’ self and his ‘Artist’ self – he had a special talent for both, and perhaps somewhat prophetically at the end of the article he concluded that at last ‘the artist and the psychologist in me had come together’.

Morris profoundly changed the course of my life in 1978 by offering me a training post in his department at Goodmayes Hospital, recognising something in me, from a business background, against fierce competition. I later came to see that Morris, immensely talented and creative himself, had a knack for spotting potential in others. Goodmayes turned out to be a breeding ground for Clinical Psychologists who all went on to achieve great things in their respective fields. The appreciation and generosity of spirit that he recalled from his mother, he gave to those in his employ, fostering a capacity for growth in all of us.

Morris was one of those people who made an immense and immediate impression on all who came into his orbit. Obviously highly intelligent, erudite and creative, it was perhaps his capacity to see the humour in all of life that was so endearing. We will all remember his head slightly tilted to the side with a wry smile as he reflected on something slightly ridiculous in a situation – but there was a warmth always there that deflected any potential for slight.

Although Morris’s orientation was primarily psychoanalytic, he had a deep respect and openness for other orientations and this was reflected both in the nature of the department he built at Goodmayes and in the network of colleagues and friends he stayed close to throughout his working life. His work as an

years as a part-time learning support assistant at his local primary school.

A Quaker attender for over 50 years, Klaus was outstanding in his innovative ideas and intellectual rigour, and also much admired as a person. As past student, PhD supervisee, colleague and collaborator for up to 50 years, we are each immensely grateful for Klaus’s huge impact on our own professional careers. He was generous with his time; contributing so much wisdom and support to students, colleagues and many organisations. In recognition of his contributions to educational psychology and to special needs education Klaus was made an Honorary Fellow of the Society (1993) and was awarded the CBE in 1995.

Professor Geoff Lindsay

University of Warwick

Professor Brahm Norwich

University of Exeter

Artist also grew through his working life as manifested by the growing maturity and popularity of his exhibitions, and I do believe his latest work, in his late 70s, was his finest, and some of that immense artistic talent was available for all to see in The Psychologist. He will be missed and remembered with fondness by all who knew him.

John Spector Consultant Clinical Psychologist London

I read ‘A psychotherapist paints’ with very mixed emotions. Firstly, it was a reminder of the creative and articulate mind of a man who had been my personal mentor during the first years of the new millennium. I am also one of the lucky few to have an original Nitsun painting on my wall at home (a still life with flowers in a vase on a dark background).

Morris taught me so much about the tensions between the darker, anti-life side of the human condition alongside the love and the creative forces that shape us. I had the good fortune in 2002 to take over his old job as the head of psychological services in the Redbridge borough of Northeast London, and

then had the unique opportunity to work with my predecessor as he remained part-time with us as a group analyst and supervisor. We were very conscious of the potential for father-son tensions and rivalries in our relationship, but this awareness actually only further enriched our creativity and friendship.

The sadness comes from the fact that only just before reading this illuminating biographical piece from Morris based on his new book, I had learned from a colleague that he had died. Especially as we had not

the psychologist march 2023 your voice

been in touch for a few years, I felt compelled to write this brief homage to show my gratitude to Morris as a mentor, psychological practitioner, artist, and observer of the human condition. His last book makes clear the links between art and psychology that we all have felt but have not so wisely articulated. His influence will certainly live on in me and so many others.

Martin Seager Consultant Clinical Psychologist / Adult Psychotherapist

Crisis in the family court

Every day, approximately 240 children in England are adjoined to the caseload of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service. For 15,000 children their lives have been in the limbo of ongoing proceedings for more than a year. The President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, has acknowledged the family court process itself is likely to further the harm endured by these children, leading to ‘long-term adverse emotional and relational damage’.

Increasingly, these cases involve allegations of domestic abuse, yet these are rarely a stand-alone factor in the lives of the children I work with. Other factors included substance misuse, parental mental health, high conflict, child abuse, neglect, exploitation and abduction, and implacable hostility. In my own work, there are also neurodevelopmental considerations, family crises and transitions – such as bereavements, serious ill health, changing family structures and relocation. There are also parents who seem to be discouraging or preventing their child from a continued relationship with their other parent – often called parental alienation.

Given this complexity, practitioner psychologists who work with adults, children and families, are likely to be well placed to offer general, and family specific, expertise on how to improve outcomes for children.

Yet the limited availability of psychologist experts is one of those factors contributing to delay in family court.

Earlier this year, the BPS in collaboration with the Family Justice Council (FJC), updated their guidelines Psychologists as Expert Witnesses in the family courts in England and Wales: Standards, competencies and expectations (FJC & BPS, 2022). This guidance clearly states (as did the 2016 version) that courts should expect all psychologists providing evidence to family proceedings to be regulated by the HCPC or Chartered with the BPS. However, the court remains at liberty to approve the instruction of any individual it deems appropriate. Statutory regulation provides the public with some protection in terms of minimum standards, and an avenue to raise concerns. The quality of expert reports, however, may well be a matter we need to revisit, again, as a profession. More than half of the 294 legal professionals surveyed by Mr Justice Williams in 2020 reported a decline in the quality of reports, with more concern being raised about psychologists than any other medical or health expert.

In my opinion, minimum standards are not enough in these complex family cases. Registration with the HCPC is not sufficient. The BPS/FJC guidance is clear –psychologist experts should be able to demonstrate specialist psychological knowledge and experience appropriate to the case.

Psychologists as Expert Witnesses in the family courts in England and Wales: competenciesStandards, and expectations

The guidance further recommends practice outside a solely family court context. When considering these complex cases, my view is that there needs to be a sound grounding in child and adult mental health, psychological functioning and attachment; current, or very recent, experience of integrated family assessments, systemic practice and family dynamics; and up to date knowledge around domestic abuse and safeguarding.

I know of many excellent HCPC registered colleagues who are already engaged in this complex work within and outside the family court. The majority prefer to stay under the radar, quietly working away, bringing their expertise to these children and families so much in need. Many of us share anxieties of working with those

whose psychological functioning means that complaints are not just a possibility, but a probability. It provides an added impetus (not that one is needed!) to ensure that we work ethically, exercising our duty of care alongside our duty to the court.

Will the new guidelines from the FJC, the increasingly toxic, politicised landscape and heightened scrutiny which will inevitably accompany the proposed

Working lives

lifting of reporting restrictions in the family court encourage more of our practitioner psychologist colleagues to embark upon this expert witness work? Or do we need a more radical re-think on how we, as psychologists, can better meet the needs of these families in crisis?

(Dr) Sue Whitcombe is a counselling psychologist who works with children and families.

‘The decade before the pandemic saw a drastic decline in the number of part-time Higher Education students. According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, the number of part-time undergraduates has fallen by almost 50 per cent since 2008/09. However, psychology has defied this trend: over the same period, part-time psychology student numbers rose by 62 per cent.’

Katherine Langford, a postgraduate research student at the Open University, on her own journey and why Psychology might be a popular option for part-time study.

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/studying-psychologypart-time

‘Joining a new team is a daunting experience for anyone, but to do so during a global pandemic, where meeting people face-to-face was prohibited, made it even harder. Working from home made us all feel quite disconnected and we didn’t get a proper sense of the job role. We were all sometimes left wondering “am I doing this right?”.’

Luckily, senior management recognised our concerns, and encouraged us to create Peer Supervision Sessions. Throughout these sessions we identified themes of difference of power, competitiveness, wellbeing, continuing professional development (CPD) and relational safety. Now, 18 months into our peer supervision journey, we have been able to reflect on the positive and negative elements of our experiences so far.’

Assistant Psychologists Amy Yuill, Charlotte Ellis, Hannah Tait and Jess Bradley discuss the value of peer supervision.

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/peersonal-growth

‘Our multi-disciplinary team consists of a mixture of clinical psychologists, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, specialist nurses, social workers, assistant psychologists and our admin team. Working with so many professions provides plenty of opportunities for learning from one another

She sits on the BPS Expert Witness Advisory Group and contributed to the updated BPS/FJC guidelines Psychologists as Expert Witnesses in the family courts in England and Wales. Her comments here are her own professional opinion, and should not be considered representative of EWAG.

Read the full article: www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/ crisis-family-court

and case discussions are always very interesting to hear different perspectives.

There are many positives to working within a neurodiversity service; the most important being the people that we get to work with. The families and young people have often waited a somewhat lengthy period for an assessment and are so appreciative when they reach the top of the list, and we admire all of them for different reasons. As advocates for their young people, all parents/carers want what is best for them and most have been able to access services that have supported them during the wait. The young people themselves have been navigating a world and education system that is harder for them to access, without having a ‘why’. Being able to meet, talk and listen to them at the assessment is always very rewarding.

As a service, we understand the importance of early intervention and support. However, with long waiting times, we know that families can find this challenging. The system can be complex and unknown to many, and our service aims to make the process and organisations available to them as clear as possible. At this early stage, we would encourage families to access autism friendly approaches and strategies and provide signposting to our local partners. To support our young people to feel listened to and validated, we discuss the positives of autism at the point of assessment and ascertain what the young person already knows. We hope that this open conversation will support them to understand themselves better and provide support for parents who chose to have this conversation with their young people at home. We want to understand what our families think of this process and are taking steps to design and facilitate focus groups with a range of people involved, so that we can further improve our service.’

Laurie McLellan and Ellen Sallis, Assistant Psychologists, on challenges in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/working-camhs-

neurodiversity-service

Katherine Langford

Laurie McLellan

Ellen Sallis

The whole @psychmag issue is so amazing, informative, and insightful. An educational resource in and of itself, focused on contributions of ECRs.

- @FORRTProject

Really enjoyed reading this issue having just completed my MSc conversion degree and thinking about next steps. Not sure the perspectives of the contributors

Towards

A late afternoon in October 2020, I recalled the neurologist’s utterance, ‘You have Motor Neurone Disease, Mrs Sundin… Are you sure you don’t know what it is?’. I had been in a happy mood before the appointment, but that all changed when I understood that I have a life shortening illness. Eva Sundin, Cathy Ellis, Lorraine Haye, Masuma Rahim and Emily Richardson write at www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/towards-life-worth-living-motor-neuronedisease

- @GreatNorthMum

So excited to finally have my hands on the beautiful ECR special issue…

This idea was a year or two in the making and it is a *joy*. The list of contributors also reads like my dream dinner party guest list…

- @maddi_pow

How do we make Psychology research matter?

We asked on Twitter…

Mina @MinaBakhtiariEn

By relating the academic research to the individual everyday life and setting. By answering the most important issues of people’s real life that they mentally struggling with. By linking human-behaviourenvironment more in our research.

Alvin Ng Lai Oon @owlvin_ng

Make it so relevant to school children that they pester their parents to know more, and wanna study psychology in college if not high school.

Liz Hather @liz_hather

Strong visual communications and accessible language outlining the outcomes/implications in applied applications helps to improve the reach of research. Increased reach provides opportunities to engage a wider audience in sharing the learned knowledge to support making change.

Dr Liza Morton, Healing Hearts & Minds @DrLizaMorton

Impactful research informed by lived and clinical experience to produce meaningful outcomes which are disseminated, in an accessible way, widely to inform real change.

Dr Hunter (psychologist) @realhuntermmm

Have clinicians be more involved in research, less career only researchers. A lot of smart people are in academia but lack the clinical finesse. Also use non academic ways of communicating research, eg. podcasts like @twoshrinkspod (which I co-host).

Krupa @Krupa_ITS

See how researchers are applying their degree & research methods to research roles outside of uni/traditional settings! So many brilliant researchers working in applied, non clinical settings who would love to share what they do & the work is amazing!

Lucie BD @luciebd

Two ways: it matters to answer scientific questions even if there’s no clear application; it matters to do applied research that is

accountable to the communities who need the answers.

Dr Mary Stanley-Duke @DrMarySD

Help non researchers to evaluate both research and their findings that way everyone can tease out high quality findings of relevance to them in their lives and work. Primary school children should be taught the basics that are then added to in secondary. Happening a bit now...

Roseanna Brady @Roseanna_PfH

Address the questions of most importance to communities, ‘patients’, practitioners. Involve ‘everyone’ in research design. Move out of academic buildings and into community spaces.

Liz Jenkinson @DrLizJenkinson

Co- produce our research and communicate our findings outside of academia and in ways that can be widely understood and applied

Dr Dan O’Hare @edpsydan

Accessible language and key take-aways are essential. This is particularly the case for research that aims to ‘make a difference’ or change things ie. policy. In @jessphillips words – ‘Don’t bury the lead’. Tell us the implication up front.

Hyun Ko @HyunKoMD

Report on failures and successes of research with impact statements. Apply easy to understand language aimed at (non-) academics/(non-)psychologists.

addie - mental health matters @addiebabe Research needs to be participatory as far as possible, we must do no harm #NothingAboutMeWithoutMe

Alexandra Negoita @Alex_Negoita_ Engaging with the communities our research is intended to support directly (through partnerships) and indirectly (social media/ press communications).

coming soon… media production; contemplation; Dad Jokes; plus all our usual news, views, reviews, interviews, and much more... contribute… reach 50,000 colleagues, with something to suit all. See www.bps.org.uk/contributepsychologist or talk to the editor, Dr Jon Sutton, jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, +44 116 252 9573

comment…

email the editor, the Leicester office, or tweet @psychmag

to advertise…

reach a large and professional audience of over 50,000 BPS members: see details on inside front cover maybe you missed…

…March 2018, ‘Placing mind in the metropolis’

…Search it and so much more via www.bps.org.uk/thepsychologist

Deb Gavan @deb_gavan

Psychology research is best when it informs and incorporates practical, evidence aligned strategies which support helping professionals to expand their practice.

Michelle Tytherleigh @ DrMTytherleigh

By highlighting all the bad that could have happened if it hadn’t have been for psychology. Or if the rigour we have today hadn’t been there.

The Psychologist is one part of the British Psychological Society’s communications, centred on being a magazine about psychology and psychologists. See also the society website, member emails and more… including for news on elections, the launch of BPS Explore, consultations, this summer’s European Congress in Brighton, and much more…

www.bps.org.uk/who-we-are

President

Dr Nicky Hayes

President Elect

Vacant

Vice President

Katherine Carpenter

Chair, Board of Trustees

David Crundwell

Chair, Senate

Dr Natalie Lancer

Chair, Education and Training Board

Vacant

Chair, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Board

Dr Adam Jowett

Chair, Practice Board

Alison Clarke

Chair, Member Board

Professor Carol McGuinness

Chair, Research Board

Professor Andrew Tolmie

Elected Trustees

Dr Peter Branney

Julia Faulconbridge

Trustees

Christina Buxton

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Director of Communications and Engagement Rachel Dufton

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Phil Hodgett

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Dr Debra Malpass

Director of Membership, Professional Development and Standards

Dan O’Keefe

The Society has offices in Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow and London, as well as the main office in Leicester (St Andrews House, 48 Princess Road East, Leicester, LE1 7DR).

June 2023

andSAVE.

Theyarealsoavailableforteamswhowanttobe trainedin-house.