The Psychologist March 2021 by The Psychologist

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contact The British Psychological Society 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR 0116 254 9568 info@bps.org.uk www.bps.org.uk the psychologist and research digest www.thepsychologist.org.uk www.bps.org.uk/digest www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk psychologist@bps.org.uk

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The Psychologist is the magazine of The British Psychological Society

Twitter: @psychmag Download our iOS/Android apps advertising Reach 50,000+ psychologists at very reasonable rates. CPL, 1 Cambridge Technopark Newmarket Road Cambridge CB5 8PB contact Krishan Parmar 01223 378051 krishan.parmar@cpl.co.uk february 2021 issue 58,763 dispatched environment Printed by Warners Midlands plc on 100 per cent recycled paper. Please re-use and recycle. Mailing bag is potato starch-based and fully compostable.

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.thepsychologist.org.uk/contribute 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.

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Managing Editor Jon Sutton Deputy Editor Annie Brookman-Byrne Production Mike Thompson Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Matthew Warren (Editor), Emily Reynolds, Emma Young © Copyright for all published material is held by the British Psychological Society unless speciﬁcally stated otherwise. As the Society is a party to the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) agreement, articles in The Psychologist may be copied by libraries and other organisations under the terms of their own CLA licences (www.cla.co.uk). Permission must be obtained for any other use beyond fair dealing authorised by copyright legislation. For further information about copyright and obtaining permissions, e-mail permissions@bps.org.uk.

Associate Editors Articles Paul Curran, Harriet Gross, Michelle Hunter, Rebecca Knibb, Adrian Needs, Paul Redford, Sophie Scott, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson History of Psychology Alison Torn Culture Kate Johnstone, Chrissie Fitch Books Emily Hutchinson Voices in Psychology Madeleine Pownall Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Richard Stephens (Chair), Emma Beard, Harriet Gross, Kimberley Hill, Deborah Husbands, Peter Olusoga, Miles Thomas

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psychologist march 2021

Letters Veganism; ed psych; Zangwill; from the President; and more

Find the river: On loss, living, and love Nick Little on a year of national tragedy, played out in small, personal vignettes [Find much more Covid-19 related coverage via thepsychologist.bps.org.uk]

Lost Hugo Spiers introduces interviews with ﬁve authors of popular books on the topic of ﬁnding and losing your way

Obituaries Chris Mawson News Covid; awards; careers event; and more Digest Flexibility, change, podcast and more

What Very Important thing have you lost or found on your Psychology journey? The winning answers to our latest Voices In Psychology question

Dropping the mask Eloise Stark experiments with mindfulness to ﬁnd her authentic, autistic self

‘The aim of the game is to support kids’ Rob Webster on working with Teaching Assistants

Joining the dance Lucie Clements wonders why there aren’t more applied psychologists working with dancers

Pathways to Psychology, part 1 Our interviewers ask the next generation, ‘Why Psychology?’

‘We’ve got high vacancy rates, and we’re missing out on the right people’ Guidelines on Psychology recruitment

Jobs in psychology Including featured job

Books Frances L. Vaughan on writing with stroke survivor Jody Mardula; we meet Veronica O’Keane; and more

Culture Life in the labyrinth; mental health podcasts; and more

One on one Cerith Waters

A year since the first lockdown, a year in which so many have lost so much (p.24). A loose theme flows through this issue, of being lost and finding your way. As psychologists, what have we lost during the pandemic? Judging from my inbox at times, I’m tempted to say ‘the plot’. As Stuart Ritchie says (p.10), many of the psychological questions around the pandemic are complex and nuanced. But when readers email to argue that Covid is no more serious than the flu, and that masks have no impact… well, then I question whether some – admittedly a minority – have lost sight of science and compassion. In ‘News’, we consider the death of nuance and whether this is a critical point for psychology. There’s so much more to find in this issue. Like most of you, we’ve lost a lot through a year of remote working. But thanks to our fantastic team and with contributions from hundreds of you, we’ve found a way to bring you packed editions and more to discover on our website than ever. Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

As both a psychologist and nutritionist, I read the coverstory articles on ‘A vegan future?’ (January issue) with interest. They provided useful perspectives on barriers and opportunities for both vegans and non-vegans to adopt a vegan diet, seemingly to achieve full planetsaving self-actualisation, for example by overcoming the apparently misguided beliefs that eating meat is ‘Nice, Normal, Necessary and Natural’ – surely as powerful a quartet of cognitive horsemen to sustain habitual behaviour, like sex for example, as ever there was. I agree our increasing separation from agricultural use of animals is concerning, as was brought home to me vividly on overhearing a trainee teacher exclaim, ‘Are you telling me that pork comes from pigs?!’ Yet, I believe that a lack of connection to livestock farming is as likely to be permissive of veganism as it is to meat eating (vegan farmers?). However, rather than debate the merits of veganism for animal and human welfare, biodiversity or environmental sustainability, I would like to consider nutritional and public health behavioural implications. One concern is the tendency to conflate ‘vegetarian’ with ‘vegan’ (‘veg*n’), whereas nutritionally the two are very different: typical ‘lacto-ovo-vegetarian’ diets, i.e. including consumption of dairy and eggs, are far less likely to present nutritional concerns than the restrictive vegan diet. Moreover, according to the Vegan Society, veganism is a legally defined lifestyle philosophy that seeks to avoid animal exploitation or use of animalderived products not just for food and drink, but for clothes, cosmetics, household goods, etc. Thus, the vegan diet is determined by this philosophy, and any consequences for health, good or bad, are coincidental: few nutrition professionals would advocate adopting a vegan diet purely for health reasons. A ‘plant-based’ diet may be widely advocated as healthy, but many people are confused as to what ‘plant-based’ means: a recent survey by the British Nutrition Foundation found that only 10 per cent of respondents understood that plant-based diets were not simply equivalent to vegetarian or vegan diets, i.e. they are mostly but not only based on plants, thus allowing reduced intake rather than avoidance of meat. To split hairs, vegan diets also rely on fungi, yeasts and algae, which are not strictly plants. I would prefer to use ‘plant-rich’, but I suspect the ‘plant-based’ ship has already sailed. Avoiding animal products increases the risk of deficiencies in n-3 essential fatty acids, and several vitamins and minerals, as plants do not give up these nutrients easily. Supplements, or supplemented foods, can help, as can deploying various ‘nutrient hacks’ such as using n-3-rich rapeseed oil, nuts and seeds, combining cereals and pulses, or avoiding tea near a meal. However, these strategies need nutritional knowledge – so the finding from a large French study that vegans are less

educated than omnivores or vegetarians may be important – and it usually comes at a cost, especially financial and/ or temporal, and potentially cognitive: unsupported dieting can impair cognitive performance, at least in the lab. Although ‘vegan-friendly’ ready meals are commonplace, being labelled as suitable for vegans is no guarantee of a healthy meal, since they can also be high in fat, sugar and/or salt – a cheap and easy route to the twin holy grails of the food industry, palatability and shelf-life. Together with nutrient deficiencies, this might explain limited benefit to all-cause mortality from avoiding meat, particularly if the fat is largely saturate-rich coconut or environmentally disastrous palm oil. Another concern is that uptake of veganism is greatest in young women, because they are already susceptible to low intakes of many of the same micronutrients that are hard to obtain from plants. Furthermore, some young women may use restricted plant-based diets to lose weight: given that eating disorders seem to be rising sharply during the Covid-19 pandemic, clinicians should be alert to vegan diets being adopted primarily for restrictive purposes – doubling down on restriction will not end well. A suggested link between veganism and depression may also be unhelpful during lockdowns; however, vegans might simply wear weaker rose-tinted spectacles than the rest of us, i.e. their bleaker outlook on the world, or ability to eschew pleasure for ethical principles, helps drive them to veganism. The pandemic has increased use of food banks and exaggerated the stark socioeconomic differences in food security in the UK. To many people, nutrient-dense meat is already a luxury, and with the demise of factory farming this may well be the future for most of us, however welcome that is for animal welfare. The future may be more ‘flexitarian’, and greater uptake of ‘plant-based’ meals should have clear health benefits, but following a strict vegan diet, with its exclusion of nutrient-rich seafood, dairy and egg products, as well as reliance on supplementation, does not look like a solution to these public health problems any time soon. E. Leigh Gibson University of Roehampton l.gibson@roehampton.ac.uk Full version, plus references, at https://thepsychologist. bps.org.uk/public-health-pitfalls-vegan-future

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Public health pitfalls in a vegan future?

the psychologist march 2021 letters

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children with ASN better integration of ASL into Curriculum for Excellence celebrating achievements of children with ASN national measurement framework for outcomes for children with ASN

The Review names educational psychologists as ‘crucial in supporting the 30.9 per cent of the school population with ASN. There is a poignant parents’ narrative which at its lowest ebb talks of battle, hurt and frustration. But there is optimism when parents reveal how the tide was turned. Without exception parents said ‘she/he listened...cared...just gets it’. The ASL Review references the kindness agenda and speciﬁcally the importance of relationships – not news to us as psychologists. I, Aicha, have worked with children with ASN for 23 years, 16 of which as an educational psychologist, and I am now a parent of a child with signiﬁcant ASN. I believe the role of the educational psychologist is to use what we know as psychologists about how people think, feel and behave to help professionals ‘get it’. That is when the magic happens. That is when children with ASN feel included in their local school and community. That is what I see when we go to the park, the swimming pool and

walk around our neighbourhood and people know my child from school. That is the beneﬁt for our family of being included where we belong. Selfe claims that ‘Today if educational psychologists wish to argue for inclusion they will ﬁnd they are swimming against the tide’. We believe that in Scotland the tide is with us. This is not to imply all is perfect, but policy and practice are headed in the right direction and maybe, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, ‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive’. Aicha Reid and Martin Gemmell Depute and Principal Educational Psychologist respectively City of Edinburgh Council Aicha.reid@ea.edin.sch.uk

‘BRING AN END TO THE INHUMAN DISREGARD…’

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Dr Lorna Selfe (February issue) describes swimming against the tide of segregation as an educational psychologist. During Selfe’s career, educational ideology in England has clearly ebbed and flowed. We provide an update on the state of education and educational psychology in Scotland. Educational psychologists are still working with children and young people through local authority run schools. We still have no academies. We still have no traded services. There is perhaps a slight inflation in the recording of Additional Support Needs (ASN), the Scottish version of Special Educational Needs (SEN). Our definition of ASN is slightly wider and more contextually based than SEN. Funding for our training has improved. We are nearly all involved in some capacity with the Scottish Government roll out of School Counsellors and the wider provision of Community Mental Health. Children living in poverty and those who are Care Experienced remain our priority. By contrast to the situation Selfe presents, in Scotland we are decreasing exclusions for children and young people with ASN and the horizon is lit by, for example, The Promise: Independent Care Review (2020) which was born from a commitment to ‘come together and love [our] most vulnerable children to give them the childhood they deserve’. Our legislation, the Standards in Scotland’s Schools etc. Act (2000) and the Additional Support for Learning (ASL) Act (2004, amended 2009), states that provision for children with ASN is required, children’s and parents’ views matter and we have a ‘presumption of mainstreaming’. The implementation of the ASL Act was reviewed last year, in Support for learning: All our children and all their potential (2020). Recommendations included: • a vision statement for success for

From a psychological perspective, the current treatment of refugees reaching the European border has negative consequences for all: for refugees, for European security and the European democratic political system. We therefore strongly recommend that all people involved in the political process of decision making adopt a renewed perspective and act responsibly to bring an end to the inhuman disregard for the human rights that refugees experience. Read the full open letter, signed by 118 psychologists in Europe, at https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/bring-end-inhuman-disregard

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Educational psychology in Scotland: We travel in hope

Zangwill’s contribution Professor Oliver Zangwill was undoubtedly a major contributor to British psychology. In the January issue, Barbara Wilson highlighted his contribution to the study of brain injury and the rehabilitation of those suffering from its effects. However, Zangwill’s legacy is much more controversial if one looks at the entire discipline of psychology rather than neuropsychology alone. In this respect, Wilson’s review is too narrow. In the 1950s my father, Ronald Stansﬁeld, was a scientiﬁc civil servant concerned with the research funding of psychology and other social sciences. He was a Cambridge graduate, arguably biased towards

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favourable treatment for his old university; but his opinion of Zangwill bordered on hatred. Zangwill’s appointment as Professor of Experimental

from the president As the pandemic continues, it is a time to reflect as well as to take action. As Jawaharial Nehru said, ‘Crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think’. For psychology, this means that we need to be agile and responsive as well as resilient. But it is also an opportunity to innovate and to change the way we achieve our goals. We recognise that, as social beings, what is important is relationships, and this includes those small interactions and positive and unexpected words of encouragement from others. At the time of writing, the UK has just passed the unimaginable milestone of 100,000 deaths from Covid. There is a degree of hope on the horizon with the rollout of vaccines – a fantastic scientific achievement in just over a year. The focus is to keep people safe, but also to recognise the challenges and to support mental and physical wellbeing. Throughout the course of this year, the BPS has been working on your behalf and we have produced more than 70 resources and numerous webinars. The role of psychology is critical, both in terms of mental health and wellbeing but also adapting and coping with the challenges of this global crisis. Psychology and psychologists are supporting people from all walks of life, and make a difference for individuals as well as at a structural and systemic level. Thank you to all who have contributed to this work. In the news we hear about the availability and the rollout of vaccines, and time is often given to understanding why some people are hesitant about taking a vaccine. As psychologists, we must challenge misinformation and have a duty to provide clear information on public health issues. This communication needs to be clear, transparent, and effective. This enables us to communicate beyond the scientific research and in a way that is relevant and supportive of the public but also accurate and based on the research and scientific evidence. 04

We also need to consider recovery, and how we can help those who have been affected by the pandemic. This is particularly true for young people, with a recent report by the Children’s Commissioner suggesting that one in six children has struggled with a mental health issue during lockdown. In the wider population, a study by the University of East Anglia found that, on average, people drank more alcohol, ate less healthily, and exercised less frequently during lockdown. Unfortunately, we know that it is likely that the UK will continue with some form of restrictions for some time to come, so there is an opportunity for psychologists to be more proactive in the way we support people to live more healthily during these uncertain times. This is also true in terms of promoting health and wellbeing for our colleagues and ourselves. Reducing isolation and staying in contact with friends and family where we can do so safely is vital right now. This is an issue that transcends international borders, and I am currently contributing to the Global Psychology Alliance, which is seeking to understand more about the impact of social isolation on people’s mental health across the globe. I encourage you to take a fresh look at the resources produced by the BPS Covid-19 taskforce and coordination group, for nuggets of information and suggestions that will support others. The ‘lost and found’ theme of this issue reminds me to think about what is important in our lives and to focus on those around us. With that in mind, I also want to thank you for the excellent response to the launch of the Presidential Development Fund. This is a practical way to support psychology and psychologists in these uncertain and challenging times. There is still time to get involved, either by contributing to the fund or as a prospective beneﬁciary. Take a look at bpspresidentialfund.co.uk. To quote Dr Seuss, ‘Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.’ Dr Hazel McLaughlin is President of the British Psychological Society. Contact her at PresidentsOfﬁce@bps.org.uk

the psychologist march 2021 letters Psychology at University of Cambridge followed the retirement of Sir Frederic Bartlett, who was beyond doubt the leading British psychologist in the years leading up to, and including, the Second World War. The choice of Zangwill was difﬁcult, as can be seen from papers deposited in the National Archives, now at Kew, by one of the selectors. Bartlett specialised in social and industrial psychology, so Zangwill’s interests focussing on clinical psychology represented a major change of direction. As a result, after Zangwill arrived at Cambridge he caused major dissatisfaction amongst the academic staff in his department. In consequence, several Cambridge psychologists who went on to make notable contributions to our discipline moved elsewhere. Throughout his tenure of the Chair at Cambridge, Zangwill and his staff concentrated on experimental psychology as a pure science to the exclusion of social scientiﬁc aspects of the subject. Whilst it is not well documented, because of the prestige of Cambridge University at a time of academic expansion Zangwill led psychologists across England to concentrate on the subject as an experimental science. However, in the 1960s psychology and sociology came to be seen as complementary social sciences. As a result, several of the 1960s generation of universities did not set up psychology departments in their earlier years. Wilson points out that Zangwill died of a degenerative brain disease. It is possible that Zangwill’s performance

was affected by this illness well before his retirement. In recent years clinical psychology has been revolutionised by new techniques, notably magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and genetic analysis. This has enabled non-invasive investigation of the brains of living people. By contrast, Zangwill and others of his generation depended upon animal vivisection, which many people found ethically dubious, in addition to adventitious studies of serious brain injury. It is therefore an oversimplification to describe Zangwill as ‘the founder of British neuropsychology’. Zangwill’s contribution to British psychology is likely to be controversial for the foreseeable future. I believe that re-evaluation could bring greater clarity to a subject which is of continuing relevance and importance today. Frederic Stansfield Kent Barbara A. Wilson’s response: I did not describe Oliver Zangwill as the ‘founder’ of British Neuropsychology; I chose the word ‘father’. However, I concede that this might still be too strong and the phrase ‘one of the forefathers’ could have been used instead, as this allows for other great personages to be considered for their illustrious contributions. As for not talking about Zangwill’s contribution to psychology in general, I made it clear that I was specifically focusing on his contribution to

neuropsychology. I was somewhat offended by Stanﬁeld’s suggestion that Zangwill’s degenerative brain disease may have affected his performance while at work. This is like suggesting that D.H. Lawrence’s writing of Lady Chatterley’s Lover would have been even better had he not been dying of consumption at the time of writing. Anyway, most of the contributions I mentioned were from Oliver as a younger man when he certainly did not have a degenerative disease.

The crucial role of exercise psychologists Voices in Psychology Our next question:

How can we ﬂourish? We’re also interested in members’ views on How can the British

Psychological Society ﬂourish? Deadline 1 April https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ voices-psychology

I recently completed my BPS training to become an accredited Sport and Exercise Psychologist. Although one qualifies as sport and exercise psychologist, practitioners tend to go on to work in either sport or exercise fields. I’d like to raise awareness into exercise psychology as a valuable field in its own right. In sport psychology, the primary aim tends to be enhancing athletic performance (with a secondary aim of optimising wellbeing). Although other sporting professionals tend to understand a sport psychologist’s role, it can be difficult to convince some of them of its value. That being said, in recent years the understanding and appreciation of sport psychology has improved. The effects of sports psychology in professional football are now well known, and it is not uncommon now for athletes to publicly espouse how developing their psychological skills has benefitted them. Notwithstanding this, it is clear that exercise psychology does not garner this same publicity. Rather than focussing on professional or elite athletes, exercise psychologists tend to have a primary aim of improving health and wellbeing for the ordinary person. In that sense it is a broader field than sports psychology – the large majority of the population are not elite sportspersons – and, therefore, one could argue that it carries greater importance in health

and wellbeing. Because of this, I pursued the ‘exercise’ branch of sport and exercise psychology. My inclination towards exercise psychology further stemmed from having seen first-hand the positive and reciprocal relationship of mental health and exercise. What I now realise is that few people have actually heard of an exercise psychologist. Because of this, working in private practice, it can be difficult to find work, and this can feel like a constant uphill battle. Without that assumed knowledge, it becomes much harder for one to sell their services as an exercise psychologist. I am currently communicating exercise psychology knowledge to different individuals, teams and organisations. I work to spread the word about what exercise psychologists do and why it is such a worthwhile field. As the world changes, so do the requirements within it. Increasing recognition of the dangers of mental health issues, for example, is a fantastic development which will

necessitate an increase in professionals to cater for the demand in support, ultimately benefiting society. New jobs are created, and soon enough it becomes impossible to imagine a life without them. But this progression can’t happen without a light shining on the role, and its value being recognised. I am now a qualified sport and exercise psychologist, and more than ever want to communicate an important message; exercise psychologists play a crucial role in the health and wellbeing of society. They use psychological principles to encourage participation in, and adherence to, exercise. This can improve mood/ confidence/motivation/self-esteem, reduce stress levels, increase energy, and much more. With this in mind, how could exercise psychology help you achieve your desired state of health and wellbeing? Shaween Amin London shaween1st@hotmail.com

Chris Mawson 1953-2020

Our dear friend and ex-colleague, Chris Mawson, sadly passed away on 9 November 2020. At the time of his death, aged only 67, he was a practising Psychoanalyst, though he started his professional life as a Clinical Psychologist, having qualified on the BPS course then run by Freda Levinson; this course eventually became the PhD course run at UCL by Peter Fonagy and Shirley Williams. Chris did not always intend to be a mental health clinician: indeed, he applied through the former UCCA scheme to study Dentistry, but regrettably for the dental profession his unexpectedly poor (even abysmal) A-level results left him in Clearing. His then girlfriend (and later his wife) Susan did a lot of research into what these A-levels would allow him to study and Psychology won the day. Very much later in his professional life he was to spend 11 years producing the definitive work on Wilfred Bion, the famous Psycholoanalyst, but I digress. Chris was born on 7 July 1953 to Bob and Eileen, the oldest of three boys. Chris completed his first degree at Goldsmiths College, acquiring a BSc in 1974. He then elected to study for a PhD at Sheffield University under Professor Alec Jenner. His research concerned the attention and dreaming of manic depressive patients, whose episodes uniquely lasted only 48 hours. At the end of that period in June 1977 he married Susan, whom he had met when they were both 17, and who, at the same time as he had, had completed her Law degree. They were married for 39 years but sadly separated in 2016. We got to know Chris initially when he joined the Psychology Department under Dr Richard Mein, whose recent obituary was published in The Psychologist. The nature of his training was consecutive six-month placements in different specialisms and it was our luck, and his initial misfortune, that there was a complete breakdown of his second placement owing to

irreconcilable differences between him and his supervisor and so he started a placement at Harperbury. Chris was so taken with his experience at Harperbury that he continued to travel on his motorbike to remain a member of the group we ourselves started and held after work on Mondays; we clearly remember Chris arriving frozen to the bone from the long journeys to Radlett from the nether regions of London. This was a huge commitment on Chris’s part as he continued this journey every week until he completed his training in 1980, and reflects very much on the dedication he was to show throughout his career as both a practitioner and a teacher. Immediately on qualifying as a Clinical Psychologist Chris commenced a two year course at the Tavistock Clinic in the Child and Adolescent Department, at the end of which he was employed at St. Mary’s Hospital, London, working with children and adolescents in the days when children could receive psychoanalysis on the NHS. During this time Chris undertook training at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and later became a training analyst himself; he also published several papers and the aforementioned work on Bion. Outside of his professional work Chris was a keen walker, skier, ex-high board diver (in his youth he dived for his County), bon viveur, witty raconteur, amazing impressionist and a really nice guy. Chris leaves behind his former wife, Sue, their daughter Hannah and son Jamie, grandson Rory as well as his partner, Donna. At his funeral the first piece of music played was Dire Straits ‘Romeo and Juliet’ from their live performance in Verona. We think it is fitting to end this tribute to Chris’s life with a line from that very song: ‘when you gonna realise that it was just that the time was wrong, Chris’. Dr Wendy Brown Harpenden

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‘There are no good options’ We hear from psychologists ﬁnding themselves in the ﬁring line on Covid information and response

One year on from the UK’s first Covid-19 lockdown, psychology is still to the fore in our fight against the virus. With vaccinations being rolled out in many countries we have perhaps reached a critical juncture in the role psychology can play in bringing us out of the current crisis. We spoke to psychologists who have been doing some of this important work – in advising governments and tackling misinformation – and asked them about their experiences over the past year, as well as the limits of their knowledge. Here on The Psychologist several readers and others in the field have contacted us to downplay the seriousness of the virus and to express concern over the impact of national lockdowns and school closures. Dr Stuart Ritchie (King’s College London) has co-founded a website – covidfaq.co – to counter some of the most common arguments made by Covid sceptics, using evidence. These include the claims that Covid is only as deadly as the flu, that lockdowns cause more deaths than they prevent, and that children do not spread the virus. Ritchie said although he could understand why psychologists who focus on mental health were concerned about lockdown effects, we should adopt a more nuanced position on impacts. ‘What I can’t get my head around is why they’re so sure that any detrimental trends in mental health in the past year are due to lockdown specifically, rather than to the effects of there being a terrifying once in a Century pandemic occurring. I don’t think you need to be a psychologist to know that seeing hospitals overloaded and family members suffering and dying would have a terrible effect on people’s mental health – and that’s what lockdowns are trying to prevent (even if many of the policies don’t quite fit with each other, or the government has screwed up on lots of things – which they certainly have!). It’s strange that people can’t see that there are no good options, rather than trying to make out that our lockdown policy is the cause of all the psychological problems people are reporting.’ There is undoubtedly a balancing act at play in the global response to Covid – each option to tackle the virus brings its own challenges. The psychologists we spoke to told us that we should acknowledge these challenges even if, at present, they cannot be resolved. Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (University of Cambridge) often takes to Twitter to raise concerns about the effects of school closures on children, adolescents and young adults, and the crucial importance of reopening schools fully as soon as it is safe to do so. She is perhaps

unusual amongst psychologists in terms of receiving some pushback from those who support lockdowns. She told us: ‘I have had shocking replies saying things along the lines of “you’re trying to kill teachers and their families and children”. I’ve had to respond: “Something that shouldn’t need saying and yet sometimes does: It is possible to care deeply about both Covid and the horrendous infection and mortality rates and the educational and mental health consequences of children and young people not being in school or seeing their friends”.’ Blakemore acknowledges that schools would not be safe to open with community transmission at current levels. ‘Professors Russell Viner and Chris Bonell are the two scientists who work with children and young people and are on SAGE, and it seems they’re saying with a heavy heart that right now is not the right time to open schools fully.’ Blakemore points to Professor Devi Sridhar and Anne Longﬁeld, the Children’s Commissioner, as other voices making nuanced arguments about the balance between the public health strategies aimed at reducing the spread of Covid and the importance of schools being ‘ﬁrst to open and last to close’. ‘But nuance is often lost on social media,’ she says, ‘views become very polarised.’

Expertise in parts Professor Susan Michie (UCL), a member of both SAGE and Independent SAGE, said managing pandemic transmission and effects required a multifaceted approach. ‘Enabling behaviour by educating, training, persuading and using the environment to support behaviour change, and working to protect and mitigate harmful effects on people’s lives, including their physical and mental health. Psychologists have an important role to play within this, but no group of psychologists can take on all of it; they have expertise in parts. It is important that all psychologists work for the public good, recognising that their input is only a small part of the total psychological and broader public health input.’ Blakemore pointed out that cherry picking data can be an issue when discussing Covid, given that research ﬁndings on issues such as transmission in schools are evolving on a near-daily basis. ‘This is a problem of science generally, that you’ll always be able to ﬁnd a study that backs an argument, but when it’s such a new area one study comes out one day, and another completely contradictory study comes out the next day, but they’re the only two studies… take your pick! There are so many

the psychologist march 2021 news areas around this virus that we won’t really understand for probably years to come. There is an opportunity, Blakemore said, for psychologists to prove the importance of the discipline during the pandemic and many psychologists worldwide have already made a huge difference in countries’ approaches to tackling the virus. ‘But if data about rates of mental ill health are taken as evidence to support an ‘anti-lockdown’ stance, that’s just too simplistic. And for psychologists like me, and Dr Duncan Astle and colleagues in Cambridge who just published longitudinal data on mental health in young people over the last year, it makes us slightly nervous about saying anything about it because we don’t want our ﬁndings or what we say about them to be used in that way.’

Open to uncertainties Professor Stephen Reicher (University of St Andrews), a member of SAGE and Independent SAGE, has become a familiar face on news channels across the UK. He told us he had not seen such an interest in psychology and the behavioural sciences for 40 years. ‘Discussions about risk perception, trust, social influence, once the preserve of the tutorial session, they’re now the stuff of talk shows. Moreover, the interest is not confined to the media. Policy makers and policy groups are now including psychologists where none were included before. And there is a genuine sense of respect and interdependence between the modellers, epidemiologists, virologists and ourselves: they can tell us what behaviours need to change to contain Covid, we can tell them how to try and change such behaviours.’ While this is good for psychological science, and public perception of psychology, Reicher said there are numerous challenges – not least tighter timescales in producing advice. ‘While we should be confident in the knowledge base we bring to the table, we should also be open about our uncertainties and even rethink our attitude to uncertainty. Our normal practice is to assume we know nothing until we are certain beyond reasonable doubt. But in conditions where life or death decisions have to be made without delay we may want to go on the balance of the evidence and also to apply new criteria such as the precautionary principle.’ Reicher also suggested that one of the main roles for psychologists should be to point out those areas where psychology does not apply. ‘For instance, much of the debate on adherence to Covid measures has assumed it is a motivational issue and that those who break the rules, say on self-isolation, choose to do so. This then leads to a focus on the errant individual and is associated with calls for tougher sanctions. Yet much of the evidence suggests that the problem is not one of will but of opportunity: having the resources to act as required. That is why deprived and vulnerable groups are far less likely to isolate.’ Covid has revealed the contribution psychology can make to society, Reicher said. ‘On the one hand, let us grasp that opportunity and ensure the lesson is not lost after the pandemic. There are many other actual or

looming crises where we should be playing an equally important part – climate change, immigration and more. On the other hand, let us not overstate our contribution or counterpose it to that of others. When justiﬁable disciplinary pride slips over into hubris, triumph can also turn to disaster.’

The coming year Psychology looks set to remain on the frontline of the battle against Covid. ‘A vaccine,’ Reicher told us, ‘solves nothing. It is people getting vaccinated that will affect the disease and its transmission. So, we need to address issues of vaccine hesitancy, why hesitancy is so much greater in some groups than others, how conspiracy theories gain traction, and how to impact all of these if the vaccine is to play its part. Moreover, once people are vaccinated we need to ensure that they do not become complacent and offset the biological gains by behaving in ways that increase the risk of transmission.’ ‘The epidemiologists are obviously the vital people in all of this, this is their thing,’ said Blakemore. ‘But they’re not psychologists, and it’s a good thing there are psychologists there to balance that part out as well. To understand how human behaviour and societal behaviour affects things, and also how messaging affects behaviour. One area I do feel is lacking in the messaging is a psychologist who understands adolescents. Anyone who works with young people will tell you the way to encourage adolescents to make positive and good decisions is by including them in the conversation, and involving them in the design of advertising campaigns and slogans. Young people know what each other responds to – we don’t.’ And that issue of misinformation? ‘I don’t think I’m doing the Covid FAQ website as a psychologist,’ Ritchie said. ‘I think it’s just a matter of getting the facts right. A lot of the psychological questions that have been raised are quite interesting and more nuanced: “how has mental health fared?” (for which there’s conflicting evidence) and “how will being out of school affect kids’ learning?” (which, again, is very tricky to answer). They’re a bit different than outright-wrong statements like “it’s just as dangerous as the flu”. Sadly, a lot of people within psychology seem to have fallen back on the outrightwrong statements to try and back up their answers to the more nuanced ones.’ Blakemore concluded: ‘Most people who voice objections to lockdowns do so because they are deeply concerned about the harmful effects of shutting down the economy, limiting social contact and closing schools. But I think there are a small minority preying on people’s vulnerability – hating the situation, wanting freedom and being worried about their jobs and other stuff. You want someone in authority to say, “it’s actually nothing to worry about. It’s no worse than the flu. We can all go back to normal”. Wouldn’t that be great?’ ER/JS Find the Society’s coronavirus resources at www.bps.org.uk/coronavirus-resources and our collection of perspectives at tinyurl.com/psychmagcorona

‘As a society, we remain committed to facilitating the positive contribution of psychologists to tackling this pandemic, by working together for the public good and looking towards the guided light of our values of scientiﬁc rigour, respect for diversity, and compassion.’ From the statement on the BPS’ role in the pandemic response (released as we went to press) See bps.org.uk/ c19response

A major contribution Professor Dawn Brooker, a Chartered Psychologist and Director of the Association for Dementia Studies at the University of Worcester, received an MBE in the New Year Honours list for services to supporting those living with dementia, and their carers, through research, education and policy advocacy. ‘I have been privileged to work in the NHS and the university sector as a clinical psychologist and a professor in dementia care,’ she said. ‘During my career, dementia has shifted from being a condition that many had never heard of to one that now affects most families in the UK. I am very grateful to be made an MBE for services to those affected by dementia. However, I also feel humbled by the knowledge that we still have a long way to go to ensure that everyone gets the best treatment and care. I will use this award to play my part in making this a reality.’ Professor Brooker first chose to work in the field of dementia care more than 35 years ago, when it was very much a ‘Cinderella subject’, recognising its importance for millions of people. She has strived to ensure those living with dementia and their families are not marginalised within society and has advocated for the voice of people with dementia to be heard. Professor Brooker has made a major, transformative contribution to improving standards of care. She has served on many national and international bodies, provided evidence to Government enquiries and contributed to the G7 Action on Dementia and Action Against Dementia. Professor Brooker was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Dementia Care Awards 2019. Professor David Green CBE, University of Worcester Vice Chancellor and Chief Executive said: ‘The scale and purpose of Dawn’s achievements in dementia care is unique. She has created significant and life-

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The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse started taking evidence at The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in July 2015

Professor Dawn Brooker, MBE

changing practises to support people around the world and dedicated her professional life to ensuring the voice of people with dementia, as well as their families and carers, is heard in political and public forums.’ Apologies to Professor Brooker that we did not include her in our February issue coverage. Many apologies also to Professor Coral Dando, who we renamed Carol in the ‘Careers are squiggly’ report, despite having known of her and her work for many years. Not the best of months…

New research from the Truth Project, part of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, has found that more than two thirds of victims and survivors did not disclose sexual abuse while it was happening. One in 10 people spoke about sexual abuse they had experienced for the ﬁrst time when speaking to the Truth Project. The Truth Project in England and Wales has now heard from more than 5400 childhood sexual abuse victims and survivors – 5104 of these accounts have been analysed for research. More than one third of survivors were between four and seven years old when the abuse began and such abuse was seen in a host of institutions including schools, religious settings and residential care. More than half of the survivors reported other forms of abuse to the inquiry, most commonly physical abuse, and 87 per cent reported that the sexual abuse they had experienced had impacted on their mental health. The inquiry has also recently published 80 further experiences which have been shared with the Truth Project which highlight that, even when victims tried to report the abuse, they were threatened, ignored or told to remain silent. ER Read more about the work of the Truth Project at thepsychologist.bps.org.uk

the psychologist march 2021 news

Drawing inspiration A clinical psychologist has been honoured by the Prime Minister’s Ofﬁce with a Points of Light Award for her illustrations aimed at supporting wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic. Dr Emma Hepburn, currently working on secondment to support NHS staff in Aberdeen, had always used drawing in her clinical practice and later began sharing her mental health related illustrations on Instagram. When the pandemic hit the UK, Dr Hepburn shared her efforts under the username thepsychologymum, where she has more than 100,000 followers, to support people with their mental health in lockdown. Her free e-book, How to Stay Calm in a Global Pandemic, includes a selection of her Covid-related illustrations, and her recent A Toolkit for Modern Life: 53 Ways to Look After Your Mind includes some of her psychological wellbeing tips and drawings. Her drawings emphasise selfcompassion, normalise the complex

feelings people have felt in response to the pandemic, and give practical tips. Dr Hepburn said she has been inundated with requests to use her drawings – from charities, NHS trusts, colleges and schools – and that many people tell her they have found them useful. ‘I think that we need to start thinking, as a society, about how we look after our mental health and wellbeing proactively not just reactively,’ Dr Hepburn told us. ‘That was one of my motivations. I also wanted to make psychology engaging. There’s a lot of really good stuff out there but my attention span at the moment is so limited… I wanted to make it simple, accessible, engaging,

Dr Emma Hepburn, AKA thepsychologymum

easy to use and memorable. There’s quite a lot of bad information online and on social media and I thought… we need to do something about it and get good evidence-based information out there. But I had absolutely no idea it would turn into this!’ Dr Hepburn was named as a Points of Light award winner in January for her work during the pandemic. The award is given out by the Prime Minister’s ofﬁce once a day to those making a difference in their communities and more broadly. She was invited to talk to Boris Johnson, along with several other Points of Light winners from Scotland, and was ‘video-bombed’ by her children who were later able to tell their friends they got to speak to the Prime Minister. ‘It was not something I expected to happen on a Monday morning!’ ER

Chris Close

News online: Find more news at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/reports For much more of the latest peer-reviewed research, digested, see www.bps.org.uk/digest Do you have a potential news story? Email us on psychologist@bps.org.uk or tweet @psychmag.

From sparklers to schizophrenia Pre-university psychology students came together for a day of inspiring talks from all areas of the discipline at the British Psychological Society’s recent ‘Your Future in Psychology’ event. Ella Rhodes was there to report.

Compulsion or choice?

Professor Matt Field (University of Shefﬁeld) gave a whistle stop tour of theories of addiction as well as his own research in the area. He has explored whether addiction is a disorder of compulsion or choice, and he highlighted the dual process theory which says that all behaviours are inﬂuenced by both controlled and automatic processes. When people initially begin using a drug it tends to be a choice but after repeated exposure, although there is still an element of control, automatic processes become much stronger. Feedback loops and classical conditioning can lead people to associate cues in their environment with a particular drug, such as the smell of tobacco smoke, leading to an automatic response to use that substance. Field has found that smokers have an attentional bias towards images of smoking compared with non-smokers,

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I’m sure many people will fondly remember that bonfire night tradition of sticking used sparklers into a kitchen drawer only to find them refreshed with new ones the following morning… or perhaps not. Dr Robert Nash (Aston University), who studies false memories, shared this childhood recollection – which later turned out to be entirely imagined. Nash asked what causes false memories, what happens when we discover them, and why we often fail to do just that. He explained that the source monitoring theory of false memories suggests that retrieving a memory is an unconscious decision process and we can retrieve memories of dreams or things we have imagined – which may seem as vivid, plausible and emotional as a real memory – and believe they really happened. Our beliefs about a memory also play a role in whether we feel that memory is true. In a number of studies Nash and his colleagues invited people into the lab and had them sit across from an assistant who would perform an action, such as stirring a glass of water, which the participant would then copy, all the while being filmed. After they left the lab Nash would doctor the video to show them sitting across from the assistant, who would be performing an action the participant had never actually seen or copied. When subjects were asked how strongly they remembered these false actions and how strongly they believed they had copied that action, they felt very confident they believed they performed that action and that they had a memory of it. In a follow-up study Nash found that even after participants were told they never saw or performed those false actions they could still ‘remember’ them, even though they did not believe they had seen or performed them. Nash said this is similar to visual illusions – even when we are told a visual illusion is not real we still ‘see’ its illusory effect.

Vivid, plausible and emotional…

a pattern which is seen across different addictions. Such a bias can make it more likely that people trying to abstain from using a substance will be more likely to relapse in response to cues in their environment. Heavy drinkers, and people addicted to other substances, also show an automatic approach bias to photographs of alcohol in lab studies. If presented with a photograph of alcohol and control pictures and asked to move an avatar towards or away from alcohol-related photos, heavy drinkers are much faster to approach alcohol photos than avoid them. This paradigm may also have clinical implications. If people are trained to avoid, rather than approach, photographs of alcohol, and then asked to rate alcoholic drinks, they end up drinking less alcohol. Another research group in the Netherlands has also tried this type of training in a treatment clinic for alcohol-dependent people and found those people were more likely to abstain from using alcohol after associating alcohol with avoidance. Field ended by suggesting several career options for students interested in addiction, including in academia, practice, and working within public health teams.

Coping with inequality Using large scale panel studies in New Zealand and India, in which tens of thousands of people are asked the same

the psychologist march 2021 news questions once per year, Dr Nikhil Sengupta (University of Kent) has examined how inequality affects people and how people affect inequality. Each of the panels Sengupta works with, the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study and the Lok Surveys in India, are both nationally representative. Sengupta pointed out some of the negative effects of inequality on wellbeing, social and economic factors and even interpersonal trust. Looking at the impact of inequality within local areas, Sengupta and his colleagues examined 4000 neighbourhoods in New Zealand and found living in a neighbourhood with higher inequality was related to lower wellbeing and self-esteem, regardless of people’s individual circumstances. How might people cope with being faced with inequality? Sengupta highlighted system justification theory which suggests that people cope with inequality by holding certain beliefs that downplay inequality or justify it. For example, they might believe in a meritocracy – that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. In his research Sengupta has found that people in India and New Zealand who do not hold these types of beliefs suffer more from the effects of inequality compared with those who believe the system is fair – no matter what level of the hierarchy they sit on. This poses a problem, he said, for changing inequality in society. In the past this type of change has been achieved by collective action, usually on the part of disadvantaged groups, but how can this be achieved if people believe the system is fair? In his research Sengupta has examined this through exploring the extent to which people from disadvantaged groups support policies that would support their ingroup, or protest on behalf of causes that would help their in-group. The results are somewhat startling. In the New Zealand sample Sengupta focused on indigenous Māori people, the amount of contact they had with New Zealanders of European descent, and their support for policies that would benefit Māori people. The more contact Māori people had with European-descended New Zealanders the less they supported policies that would benefit Māori people, and the less they perceived injustice in New Zealand society. In a slightly different study Sengupta looked at the attitudes of people in India from lower-caste groups, who have been disadvantaged for many thousands of years, who were asked about their contact with higher-caste groups as well as their support for protesting for the rights of their own lower-caste groups. He saw a similar pattern – those lower-caste members who had more contact with high-caste groups saw less injustice in their society and felt less inclined to protest for the rights of their own in-group – although protests among lowercaste groups are a common occurrence in India. ‘These findings of out-group contact and the fact it can have these ironic effects by dampening down the political mobilisation of low-status groups in society highlights this tension between harmony and equality in society – it shows that harmony and equality are not the same thing. Having more positive contact between

groups is a good thing in the sense that it does foster greater warmth and less anxiety… but when it comes to pressing for social equality that has, historically, taken a ﬁght. Intergroup contact for improving society has this limitation where it can increase harmony but it doesn’t necessarily increase equality.’ There is a counterargument to this, Sengupta said, and pointed to the many white people who supported the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 – a different story to earlier protests by the movement. He asked whether contact may increase solidarity with disadvantaged groups, and as a result might this solidarity counteract the sedative effect of contact between advantaged and disadvantaged groups? When he looked at this in a longitudinal way with more than 22,000 white New Zealanders, Sengupta found that outgroup contact increased feelings of warmth towards Māori people. However, over time he did not see any increase in their feelings of political solidarity with Māori people. ‘Once again it doesn’t look like just fostering strong, positive bonds of friendship across groups is this great panacea that’s going to help us to change society for the better.’

An enormous leap The transition from studying A-levels at school or college to starting university can be an enormous leap for many. Dr Phil Banyard (Nottingham Trent University) spoke about some of the challenging transitions the students were set to face – from leaving home and studying more independently, to asking bigger questions in one’s studies and even challenging the curriculum itself. Banyard was then joined by Chair of the BPS Student Committee Eduard Margarit who answered questions from the audience. They were asked whether students would be supported in a similar way at university compared with school – Margarit said relationships with tutors felt more like a partnership at university, while Banyard said it depended on the university. Professor Veena Kumari (Brunel University) gave the ﬁnal talk before a speaker Q&A session on her work with people with schizophrenia. She explained some of the main symptoms of the condition and highlighted a lack of attention on the cognitive deﬁcits seen in schizophrenia by researchers until relatively recently. Kumari emphasised the fact that most people with schizophrenia are not violent, but that in some of her own research involving people with schizophrenia and a history of violence, she has found they tend to have heightened feelings of threat. She suggested that when violence does arise in people with schizophrenia, it may need to be managed differently to violent people in the general population.

News online Figuring out the destination: Ella Rhodes reports from the Annual Conference of the Division of Occupational Psychology https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ﬁguring-out-destination

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Psychological ﬂexibility may be key to good relationships Emma Young digests the latest research

Editor: Dr Matthew Warren Writers: Emily Reynolds and Emma Young Reports, links and more on the Digest website

hat makes for a happy family? The answer – whether you’re talking about a couple or a family with kids – is psychological ‘flexibility’, according to a new paper in the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science. Based on a meta-analysis of 174 separate studies, Jennifer S. Daks and Ronald Rogge at the University of Rochester conclude that flexibility helps – and inflexibility hinders – our most important relationships. The pair analysed data from 203 separate samples, comprising almost 44,000 participants in total. They homed in on measures of psychological flexibility and inflexibility within these studies (which often gathered other data, too), and how they related to measures of family and relationship functioning. A psychologically flexible person is characterised by a set of attitudes and skills: they are generally open to and accepting of experiences, whether they are good or bad; they try to be mindfully aware of the present moment; they experience difficult thoughts without ruminating on them; they seek to maintain a broader perspective when faced with a challenge; they continue to pursue important goals despite setbacks; and they maintain contact with ‘deeper values’, no matter how stressful a day might be (so, for example, a parent confronted with a screaming child who holds the value of being a kind, compassionate parent is able to bear this in mind when choosing how to react to the child). Psychological inflexibility describes the opposite of these thoughts and attitudes, and also entails feeling judged or shameful for holding negative thoughts and feelings. The pair identified a host of specific links between aspects of flexibility or inflexibility and family functioning. For example, they found that inattention to the present moment and a tendency to respond to challenging experiences in a rigid, inflexible way were linked to weaker family bonds. These factors were also linked to lower levels of satisfaction with romantic relationships, and less ‘adaptive’ parenting, suggesting that such an inflexible parent ‘might have a more difficult time responding to their children’s misbehaviour in sensitive, compassionate and responsive ways’. (In contrast, greater flexibility was strongly linked to more adaptive parenting.) A lack of awareness of the present moment was also associated with more shouting and violence among couples and, along with some other measures of inflexibility, to stronger feelings of insecurity in relation to the relationship.

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It’s important to note, however, that the overwhelming majority of links were correlational, so the direction of cause and effect is not clear. It could be the case that consistently poor child behaviour drives parental inflexibility, for example – or that the two exacerbate each other. The researchers themselves highlight this issue, calling for longitudinal studies to explore the direction and strength of the associations that they report. But Daks and Rogge also point to potential practical implications of their findings. It might not seem especially surprising that psychological flexibility has emerged as being good for relationships. But in the past, research on flexibility has tended to focus on how it enhances an individual’s wellbeing, rather than the quality of romantic or familial relationships. In revealing the links between flexibility and family functioning, the work suggests a possible target for new interventions. A form of therapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) encourages the development of flexibility, and there is plenty of evidence that it improves an individual’s own functioning, the pair notes. Perhaps, given the new results, it could help family functioning, too – especially if a parenting-focused ACT intervention were to be developed. Since links between greater psychological flexibility in parents and in their children have been reported, such an intervention might in theory have benefits that transmit down through generations.

the psychologist march 2021 digest

Here’s how personality changes in young adulthood can lead to greater career satisfaction Personality traits were once thought to be fairly stable. But recent research has suggested that our personality can alter over time – whether that’s due to ageing or because we decide to change our traits ourselves. And as personality is linked to our behaviour, it follows that we might see different life outcomes as our personality shifts or grows. In a new study in Psychological Science, Kevin A. Hoff and team look at the personality changes of teenagers as they move into adulthood. And they find that certain shifts in personality can result in real-world benefits during the early years of a career, suggesting that interventions that increase particular traits and skills could make all the difference at work. The team examined data from two longitudinal samples of young people from Iceland, who were followed over 12 years from their late teens to early adulthood; at several time points, participants rated their Big Five personality traits. The team also examined standardised test scores from the teenagers’ final year in education and noted the highest degree each participant had attained. The researchers also rated participants’ ‘occupational prestige’ once in the workforce – how high or low status their work was seen to be in general society. Participants also shared how much money they earned, and indicated Getty Images

how satisﬁed they were with what they had achieved in their career thus far and in their current job. As expected, the personality traits of the teens changed as they entered young adulthood. The largest increases were seen in agreeableness, openness and conscientiousness, while extraversion decreased. Personality traits at adolescence were stronger predictors of participants’ academic achievement than personality changes: those who were more conscientious, emotionally stable, and agreeable were more likely to attain a higher degree. Emotional stability and conscientiousness at school-age were also the strongest predictors of occupational prestige. Those personality changes, however, were also important. Participants who became more emotionally stable and those who became more extraverted were more likely to receive a higher income, while increases in emotional stability, extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness were the strongest predictors of career and job satisfaction across the samples. We already know that we can change our personality and increase how outgoing, agreeable, or open we are. And given the results of the study, it also seems possible that targeted interventions to help young people develop the skills associated with particular personalities could help them achieve certain goals. The fact that personality growth was the strongest predictor of the subjective measures of career and job satisfaction also indicates that growth is an important part of how young people think about their success. Though this study focused on work success, other areas of life could also be explored in future research. For some people, relationships, social skills or self-image are more important than their careers, and understanding how personality change can impact these dimensions would also be interesting. Certain personality traits are also likely to be more valued or useful in certain lines of work, so further exploration of this might also help teenagers work out which elements of their personality they would like to develop depending on their goals. Helping teenagers understand that their personality is not ﬁxed, the team concludes, is one of the most important takeaways from the study: while our personalities clearly play a part in our lives, we’re by no means fated to stay the same forever. EMILY REYNOLDS

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Save the dogs ‘Two boats are sinking and you can save only one. One holds two dogs, the other a person. Which do you save? If you’re not sure, you can say, “I can’t decide”.’ When I put this to my 11-year-old, his response was immediate: ‘Save the dogs!’ In his defence, he has grown up with a pet dog, which he adores – and, according to a new study in Psychological Science, most other kids would say the same thing. To adults, these ﬁndings might seem a little alarming. Indeed, when the team put similar questions to adult participants, 61 per cent opted to save one human over 100 dogs,

and 85 per cent of people prioritised one human over one dog, while 93 per cent opted to save a human rather than a single pig (3 per cent went for the pig).

When the team asked 249 kids aged between ﬁve and nine about what they thought, though, they found that just over 70 per cent opted to let a person die to save 100 dogs.

Whose psychology is it anyway? In episode 23 of our PsychCrunch podcast – https://digest. bps.org.uk/podcast – Emily Reynolds explores modern psychology’s relationship with race and representation. Studies overwhelmingly use so-called ‘WEIRD’ participants: those who are Western and Educated and from Industrialised, Rich and Democratic societies. But how does that shape the assumptions we make about participants of different racial identities or cultures? And how can top-tier psychology journals improve diversity among not only participants but also authors and editors? In 2020, Steven O. Roberts, assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University, published a paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science which examined the racial identities of those editing and publishing research in top psychology journals. In the podcast, Steven tells Emily what he found, and the implications. ‘We wanted to look at to what extent are the identities of people who are involved in the psychology publication process interconnected? So we reviewed over 26,000 papers published in top tier cognitive, social and developmental journals, published between 1974 and 2018. And we coded for a few things. One, how often do these journals even publish stuff on race and racism? Who edits the journals – what’s the racial identity of the editors? These are the people who decide what’s worthy of being published and what isn’t, so who are they? What are the racial identities of the authors? And what are the racial identities of the participants? We found a few really interesting things. First, we found that from 1974 to 2018, these top tier journals rarely published stuff on race. [For] cognitive psychology, I think it was from about .001% of publications in the 70s to .01% in 2010. So it’s a little tiny improvement, but it’s 20

pretty low. And then we find that on average, the vast majority of the editors have been white. In cognitive psychology, since 1974 in these top tier journals, 100% of the editors have been white and male. And we find that under white editors there are significantly fewer publications on race. And we argue or speculate that the extent to which you care about race and racism is going to of course a play a role in the likelihood of you publishing that stuff. But we find under white editors, there are fewer publications on race than there are under editors of colour. We think that journals need to explicitly communicate whether or not they care about issues of diversity and inclusion. They need to explicitly evaluate the diversity of the samples in evaluating the manuscripts. So as of now, many journals will evaluate how theoretically significant is the paper? How methodologically rigorous? Few actually evaluate to what extent are we only studying rich white American college kids? That has important implications for generalisability … Just as we are encouraged to justify our sample sizes, we can justify our sample demographics: why are we studying who we are studying? We can talk about the extent to which our findings generalise across populations. We can also be encouraged to work and collaborate with people from different universities who may have access to different samples. Some people say “Well, I don’t have access to this population, so I can’t study them.” If we want to move toward a more collaborative science, then we can collaborate with people who do have access, and that will again give us another way to advance our science. So I think there are many things that we can be doing. And I think it all starts with deeply interrogating our own science, not for the sake of ripping it down, but for the sake of building it up and making it better.’

the psychologist march 2021 digest

Digest digested… When it came to one human vs. one dog, only about a third of the children opted to save the person, 28 per cent were clear on going for the dog, and the rest couldn’t decide. Only 57 per cent prioritised one human over one pig, and 18 per cent reported that they’d save the pig. The team also asked the adults and kids to rate humans’, dogs’ and pigs’ intelligence and capacity to feel pain, sadness and fear. Both adults and kids gave similar ratings for all three species, and agreed that people scored higher on these counts than dogs, who scored higher than pigs. ‘Yet despite this,’ the team notes,

‘children and adults gave different moral judgements, which suggests that perceived intelligence and sentience does not fully account for moral judgements.’ So why do adults have a much stronger pro-human bias? The team suspect that this is something that is learned relatively late in childhood. ‘Adolescents may learn and internalise the socially held speciesist notion – or ideology – that humans are morally special and deserve full moral status, whereas animals do not,’ they write. EMMA YOUNG

The pandemic has allowed researchers to better understand why basketball teams perform better at home than away. Researchers compared the performance of NBA teams during normal times and after they were ‘bubbled’ together in Florida last year, removing the need to travel. They found that travel within the same time zone and circadian disruptions from travelling across time zones can both impact the performance of away teams, in slightly different ways. (Scientiﬁc Reports). An analysis of decades of Congressional transcripts suggests that American politicians use moral language more often when their party is in the minority. The paper also ﬁnds that appeals to morality became common in tweets from politicians of both parties after Trump was elected in 2016, but that this increase was particularly prominent among Democrats. (Psychological Science). Getty Images

In 2017, a surprising result made international headlines: the mere presence of a switched off smartphone on the desk can impair working memory. Now a new study has found that this ‘brain drain’ effect doesn’t necessarily extend to other kinds of memory. Participants showed similar performance on tests of short-term and prospective memory regardless of whether they had their phone on the desk or on the opposite side of the room. (Consciousness and Cognition).

Call for Nominations President 2022-23 The President is the visible ﬁgurehead of the Society and Chair of the Board of Trustees. We are seeking nominations of Members of the Society to stand for election to the role of President in the Presidential year 2022-23. The successful candidate will be President-Elect in 2021-22 and Vice-President in 2023-24. Descriptions of the role and responsibilities, together with requirements and time commitments, are available on request. Please contact Kerry Wood, kerry.wood@bps.org.uk Procedure The Board of Trustees has the responsibility to ensure that there is at least one candidate for this position. Those wishing to propose candidates are invited to contact the Honorary General Secretary, Dr Carole Allan (e-mail: governance@bps.org.uk) for guidance and President, Hazel McLaughlin (e-mail: hazel.mclaughlin@bps.org.uk) Deadline for nominations is extended to 18 March 2021. Nominations can be made via the link: https://www.mi-nomination.com/bps If more than one candidate is nominated, the election will be decided by a ballot of the Membership and the result announced at the AGM in July 2021. 22

Call for Nominations Honorary General Secretary 2021-2024 Nominations are sought for the election of Members of the Society to fulﬁl the role of Honorary General Secretary with effect from the AGM 2021. The Honorary General Secretary is a trustee of the Society and has the overall task of ensuring that the administration of the organisation is conducted with probity and integrity. The HGS has a number of formal responsibilities within the Society including the oversight of the election/ appointment of ofﬁcers to the Society and responsibility for certain actions within the Society’s complaints and Member Conduct processes. Whilst the Board of Trustees takes ultimate responsibility, it is the Honorary General Secretary who assures the operation of the organisation. Descriptions of the role and responsibilities, together with requirements and time commitments, are available on request. Please contact Kerry Wood, kerry.wood@bps.org.uk Procedure The Board of Trustees has the responsibility to ensure that there is at least one candidate for this position. Those wishing to propose candidates or to discuss this position are invited to contact the Honorary General Secretary, Dr Carole Allan (e-mail: governance@bps.org.uk) for guidance. Deadline for nominations is 30 April 2021 Nominations can be made via the link: https://www.mi-nomination.com/bps If more than one candidate is nominated, the election will be decided by a ballot of the Membership and the result announced at the AGM in July 2021. Please Note: There are proposals to reform the governance of the Society and when implemented are likely to result in the role of Honorary General Secretary being removed. If this happens before the end of the three year term of appointment, the successful candidate will continue to be a trustee on the Board of the Society until the end of their three year term.

Find the river On loss, living, and love

Nick Little, Clinical Psychologist, on a year of national tragedy, played out in small, personal vignettes

was making Sunday roast when my sister rang me, unexpectedly, the day after winter solstice 2019. I could hear that her heart was in her throat and I knew instinctively that death had visited our family. I assumed my sister was ringing to tell me that her partner had died. We knew it was close after a years-long battle with cancer. But it wasn’t that. Our mother had died unexpectedly during the longest night of the year. She was found upright in her wheelchair, looking at her reﬂection in the mirror above the bathroom sink. She had been brushing her hair. My sister’s partner died two months later. Across Britain, death visited thousands upon thousands of families in 2020, both Covid-related and otherwise. At the time of writing, the UK Covidrelated death toll is 88,590 and it will continue to rise. Like me, family members will receive phone calls. If they are lucky, they may have a chance to be at their loved one’s bedside, but many will not. After my sister’s phone call, I clung to my boyfriend and bellowed, ‘I don’t understand! What does it mean? How could she be gone?’ In that moment, my whole understanding of the world came undone.

Dot, my mother

Back and forth, past and present Similar scenes were played out in living rooms across the nation. Over the past year, many of us have been tasked with healing from personal and national tragedy simultaneously. But how do we do that? In her book Grief Works, psychotherapist Julia Samuel argues that the only way of learning to live with this new, painful reality that we desperately wish was not true, is to open ourselves to and selfcompassionately experience the pain. Not immersively, which would emotionally overwhelm us, but intermittently, travelling back and forth between the past we wish to hold on to and the present to which we must ultimately accept and re-commit. That’s a big ask, whether for the bereaved individual or the shellshocked nation. To successfully navigate this iterative journey time and again demands personal resilience, skills of emotion regulation, and the ability to tolerate distress. So where do we get those? 1918 was also a year of personal and national tragedies. That thought popped into my head on New Year’s Day 2021, a little past the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death. I had been thinking about my dear old Gran. Or rather, I was thinking about her parents, my great-grandparents. Their daughter was born on 28 August 1918, six weeks before the end of the First World War. Around one million British military personnel and civilians were killed in World War One. Imagine. In January 1918, the ‘Spanish flu’ was first observed in Haskell County, Kansas. By the time of my Gran’s birth in August, it had become a global pandemic. UK doctors and nurses were overwhelmed. There were no treatments for the virus. There was no NHS. During the 1918-19 pandemic, over 50 million people died worldwide. A quarter of the British population were affected. The UK death toll was 228,000. A 1918 playground rhyme went, ‘I had a little bird, its name was Enza. I opened the window, and in-flu-enza’. Imagine giving birth to a beautiful little girl amidst the death and the chaos, the shock and the grief. And yet, amidst a global pandemic and hundreds of thousands of deaths of mostly young men, babies were born. Life did continue. The British public found a way to survive and re-build their lives. In fact, even amidst all that grief, momentous events still took place.

the psychologist march 2021 loss, living, and love

Thanks to the suffragette movement, the right to vote was extended to women for the first time in 1918 – albeit only to propertied women over the age of 30. About 8.4 million women gained the right to vote. Later the same year, Parliament voted to allow women to be elected to the House of Commons for the first time. Progress was possible despite the decay. There is reassurance in knowing that past generations also wondered if the sky was falling, yet kept going, finding new ways to live. ‘Let’s talk about the future. That’s what should be beautiful’ On New Year’s Day, with 2020 behind us at last, I considered the mix of emotions my great-grandparents must have felt holding their little girl. I considered that, in 1939, only three days after my grandmother’s 21st birthday, a second world war broke out. Nearly half a million Brits would die. By the end of that war, like so many other women raising children alone while their husbands were at the frontline, my grandmother had trained and joined the workforce for the first time as a schoolteacher. Working life proved to be a source of great joy and freedom for her. She maintained friendships with other women she met through her work right up until her death at the age of 94. How did they cope with so much grief? In her book, Samuel notes that the children of parents who had survived the First World War rarely saw their parents mourn openly, and so learned to generally suppress their own personal and collective grief. Samuel argues that British death tolls were so high in the first half of the 20th century that emotional shutdown may have been necessary to survive. Since the end of World War II, European generations have thankfully enjoyed relative security, perhaps providing us with greater psychological safety to make those grieving journeys back to the past. Consider Ágnes Keleti, the Hungarian-Israeli gymnast and ten-time Olympic medallist born in 1921, who celebrated her 100th birthday on 3 January this year. Keleti’s story of escaping Nazi death camps to claim asylum abroad and achieve athletic domination is inspiring, but what mesmerises me is the joy and hilarity she exudes in almost any interview or photo (honestly, she’s a treasure). We might intuit something of how she overcame grief through her self-description: ‘I’m strong. And silly!’ Asked directly about the tragedy of her childhood, Keleti said, ‘The past? Let’s talk about the future. That’s what should be beautiful. The past is past but there is still a future.’ She lived most of her life in Israel, where she taught gymnastics. ‘I love children and I also love to teach them.’ The most important thing for children to learn about? ‘The joy of life.’ My foundation My first and greatest teacher was my grandmother. She is my foundation, intellectually and emotionally. She

taught me to tell time, read, use money, bake bread, knit, sew, and to play a mean game of canasta. She also taught me about feelings, love, cuddling, and safety. I didn’t know it then, and I doubt my Gran would have known these words herself, but when she let me squeeze in beside her and she read to me while I felt the warmth of her body, she was teaching me how to attach to others securely. It’s this secure attachment that would later in life allow me to soothe myself when important others disappeared in the night and I found myself alone. My Gran raised my mother with strength, which gave my mother the strength to raise me and my three sisters on her own. Poet and singer Gil Scott-Heron was also raised by his grandmother and mother. He wrote: I came from what they called a ‘broken home’, but if they had ever really called at our house, they would have known how wrong they were. We were working on our lives and our homes, dealing with what we had – not what we didn’t have. My life has been guided by women, but because of them I am a man.

Personal resilience. Skills of emotion regulation. The ability to tolerate distress. Ágnes Keleti’s acceptance of the past, commitment to the future, and insistence on living exuberantly in the here-and-now might be explained by a fellow Hungarian, who arrived in Britain in 1967 at the age of 16 as a refugee, and has gone on to achieve countless honours in his own ﬁeld of psychoanalysis and clinical psychology. Professor Peter Fonagy describes how secure attachment equips children with the ability to emotionally self-regulate. Children, from six months, and long before they become verbal, look around and try and ﬁgure out

Nick Little (nick. psychology@ gmail.com, Twitter: @n9birds) is a clinical psychologist based in Manchester and a member of the Psychologists for Social Change network psychchange.org Photo, above: Me with my mother

what it is that the person they are interacting with knows or doesn’t know. Long before they can use language, children are already interested in the minds of others. And even more than that, they expect others to be interested in them. [A young child] will expect [an attachment figure] to react to them contingently, to react to them in a meaningful way depending on what they have been doing. Because they want to find themselves in the other person. They want to find someone who mirrors them, who reacts to them. Because none of us starts out knowing who we are, knowing what we are. [As children,] we are interested in others mainly to find out about ourselves. In the first three years of life, we find out about the nature of our own minds, the nature of our thoughts and feelings, through the relationship that we have with others. So I don’t know when I’m smiling or I’m laughing, as a baby, what the meaning of that experience is. If I see my emotion being responded to by someone who mirrors it, I see that experience outside of myself. I can then take it back and that gives meaning to all the sensation I had in relation to my happiness. But it’s even more important when I feel anxious or I feel sad. If I feel sad, I feel distress, I feel disorganised. I can feel lost in the world, lost in all my experiences. But there is my Mum, or my Dad, who responds to me with a reaction that indicates that they are aware of how I feel. I look at them and I actually take into myself that representation of sadness, and that helps me to organise myself. Now I know what I feel. This is what we call emotion regulation… Paradoxically, even though I, [as an adult], now know perfectly well when I feel anxious or when I feel sad, the anxiety that I recognise as my own anxiety, is actually not my own anxiety, but is my picture of my Mum looking back at me when I, as a baby, felt anxious.

Just as there were in 1918, there were moments of light amidst the hardship of 2020. Surely, footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaign against child poverty and hunger is high among them. In his June 2020 open letter to Members of Parliament, which eventually forced the Tory government’s policy U-turn on suspending its school meal voucher programme, Rashford wrote: I’ve read tweets over the last couple of weeks where some have placed blame on parents for having children they ‘can’t afford’. That same ﬁnger could have been pointed at my mum, yet I grew up in a loving and caring environment. The man you see

Dot, my mother, from baby to adult

stood in front of you today is a product of her love and care. I have friends who are from middle-class backgrounds who have never experienced a small percentage of the love I have gotten from my mum: a single parent who would sacriﬁce everything she had for our happiness. These are the kind of parents we are talking about.

My grandmother’s story, and the hope, light, and love that she and my mother brought to my life, are not unusual. Rashford’s dignified activism was so compelling because his words struck people as authentic in a landscape of platitudes, over-promises, and inflated optimism. A natural leader in seemingly leaderless times. His words rang true for millions of people across the UK who bailed out the banks, survived a decade of austerity, battled through Brexit, and are now locked down, unemployed, and still trying their best. His unimposing manner contrasts sharply with the buffoonery of politicians who seem to rely on stunts to demand attention. Instead, Rashford speaks plain words about what he learned growing up and getting by in a single-parent family. An education like his cannot be bought with private tuition. The river flows I joke that if my family has a religion, it’s a sort of matrilineal ancestor worship. Although my understanding of the world came undone in the moments following my sister’s phone call last year, to my surprise, my world itself did not fall apart in the year that followed. I survived and I’m surviving. I have mourned and I continue to mourn my mother. But many days, I am happy to discover there is also a joy and gratitude to the mourning. I feared I would feel orphaned, deserted, left on my own in the longest night of the year. But I find she is still with me and that both she and my grandmother equipped me with the skills I need to travel back and forth between the past I wish to hold on to and the present to which I must ultimately accept and re-commit. Utah Phillips, an American anarchist, labour activist, folk singer, storyteller, and poet, who himself died a few years ago, spelled it out: Time is an enormous, long river. And I am standing in it, just as you are standing in it. My elders were the tributaries. And everything they thought, and every struggle they went through, and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me. And if I take the time to ask and if I take the time to seek and if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world.

Building that bridge, reaching down into that river, in small, unextraordinary scenes that make up our lives and later our deaths. All across the nation.

the psychologist march 2021 loss, living, and love

Chair of the Research Board The British Psychological Society is looking to appoint a Chair of Research Board, to take up ofﬁce from July 2021-2024. The Board aims to promote excellence in psychological research, pure and applied, so that everyone can access evidence-based psychology to enhance their lives, communities and wider society. Are you: • A well-respected academic or practitioner, with a focus on excellence in psychological research • Well aware of the challenges faced by researchers at all career stages • A strategic thinker that is able to work across a range of research priorities (eg academic publishing), bringing focus for the Society, its members and wider academic community • Able to identify the strategic priorities for the BPS in relation to psychological research across the discipline The Chair will also serve as a Trustee of the Society, playing a key part in the overall strategy and direction. Interested parties are welcome to speak with Debra Malpass, Director of Knowledge and Insight, for an informal discussion before they put forward their statement of interest. In order to arrange a convenient time please contact Kerry Wood via email – kerry.wood@bps.org.uk. Closing date for applications is: Thursday 8 April 2021. Interviews are to be held within the ﬁrst 2 weeks of May. For information on the role requirements and how to apply go to the https://www.bps.org.uk/about-us/ jobs#voluntaryposts. Please download a Statement of interest form, and submit to Kerry Wood – kerry.wood@bps.org.uk BPS embraces diversity and values equal opportunities. We are committed to building a Society that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives and skills. We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.

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Vacancy Director of BPS Assessment and Awards Ltd (Company number: 12668789) Remuneration: Expense claims only BPS Assessment and Awards Ltd are seeking to appoint two directors. The successful applicants will take an active role in assisting in the running of the company. BPS Assessment and Awards Ltd is the trading subsidiary of the British Psychological Society (also referred to as ‘the Society’). BPS Assessment and Awards Ltd has been approved to act as an End Point Assessment Organisation (EPAO) in order to provide assessment services to employers and their apprentices. The share capital of the company is held by members of the British Psychological Society, who hold these shares as nominees for the Society. The successful applicants will be required to attend quarterly online board meetings and up to one additional strategy session per year. We are seeking to appoint applicants who can fulfil the following requirements, with the relevant skills set and knowledge: • Knowledge of apprenticeships, with a particular interest in the health sector; • Experience of end-point assessment organisations, or assessment of apprenticeships; • Evidence of strong commercial knowledge and business development expertise; • Ability to express opinions, while respecting the thoughts and opinions of others; • Dynamic in thinking and approach with a drive and passion to make a substantial impact; • Other areas of interest may include finance, social media, brand development and marketing or public sector commissioning; We encourage applications from people with a diverse range of experiences and backgrounds to ensure our Board truly represents the people they serve. All expressions of interest should be sent to jenni. scothern@bps.org.uk by 5pm on 31 March 2021, enclosing a copy of your CV.

the psychologist march 2021 lost

Lost Psychologist Hugo Spiers introduces chats with ﬁve authors of popular books on the topic of ﬁnding and losing your way…

t’s hard to imagine how terrifying being utterly lost is until you experience it. For me it was in the Amazonian jungle of Peru during a gap between PhD and post-doc. I’d taken a short stroll from my camp along what looked like a clear trail. After short time I turned round to return and was astonished. My path ahead soon petered out, dispersing into the jungle. I’d taken a wrong turn. I was not too worried at ﬁrst, but when a second trail also evaporated into the undergrowth fear started to grip me. Sheer terror arrived when, after I had walked a while, I realised I had gone in a circle. I was back at a distinctive log and hopelessly lost. No idea of the correct path or the direction home. My guide had said: ‘if you are ever lost in the jungle at night, get your back against a tree and stay still – at least one part of your body won’t be utterly bitten to death!’ Luckily for me it didn’t come to that, I was found by a dog who looked suspiciously like Lassie. I also found my interest in navigation had risen. Why was I unable to realise I’d walked in circle? How do people in traditional communities manage to navigate in such confusing environments for days on end and indeed how do other animals do it too? The fear of being lost is something we share with

vast numbers of animals on our planet. Being lost puts us in harm’s way – without help I would not have survived for long in the jungle. Modern humans have developed a multitude of tools to avoid being lost: maps, signs, the compass, and global positioning system (GPS). But without such tools some humans are able to navigate challenging terrain, from taxi drivers in vast cities to the desert travellers. How we and other animals are able to orient and recall how to travel to far off remembered places is remarkable. How does our brain keep us from being lost? In a recent co-authored book, Human Spatial Navigation, I helped set out to answer this question. One exciting path on the quest involves eavesdropping on the neurons in the hippocampus by recording their activity during navigation. In 1971 John O’Keefe made an amazing discovery – as rats scurried around in a box searching for food, different hippocampal neurons would be active in different parts of the box. The conclusion drawn was that these cells – known as place cells – provide something akin to ‘you are here’ signal in an organised mental map of space. O’Keefe would go on to co-win the Nobel prize for physiology and medicine in 2014 for this discovery and laying the foundations for how the brain creates

this map of space – what keeps us from being lost. In the past decades so many amazing insights into how we build mental maps of space have come from studying hippocampal place cells and other spatial cells in regions of the brain connected to the hippocampus. Beyond individual cells whole brain wide it has been possible to observe how the brain tracks distance and direction information during navigation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and virtual reality. Recording from depth electrodes in the hippocampus of humans awaiting surgery for epilepsy has given us even more detailed insights, most recently with humans walking around environments while brain activity is recorded. Another key discovery has Key sources been the observation that London taxi drivers have a larger posterior Ekstrom, A.D., Spiers, H.J., Bohbot, hippocampus. Notably it increases in V.D. & Rosenbaum, R.S. (2018). Human size with amount of years of working Spatial Navigation. Princeton Uni Press. as a taxi driver in London, but not for bus drivers who drive the same routes Coutrot, A., Silva, R., Manley, E., de Cothi, W., Sami, S., Bohbot, V., Wiener, daily. J.M., Hölscher, C., Dalton, R.C., Recent research with the mobile Hornberger, M. & Spiers, H.J. (2018). application – Sea Hero Quest – has Global determinants of navigation allowed my team to explore how ability. Current Biology, 28(17). 3.9 million people across our planet Maguire, E.A., Woollett, K. & Spiers, navigate spaces, revealing that Nordic H.J. (2006). London taxi drivers and bus drivers: a structural MRI nations appear to produce the best and neuropsychological analysis. navigators and that gender differences Hippocampus, 16(12), 1091-1101. can be traced in part to societal gender inequalities between nations.

Hugo Spiers is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and director of the Spatial Cognition Laboratory at UCL. h.spiers@ucl.ac.uk

Despite all these discoveries there remain many unknowns. Why do some people get lost more than others? How do some animals manage to navigate such huge distances? How do people in traditional communities avoid being lost? In a set of recent books for general readers on being lost and navigation, authors have explored answers to these questions. What is wonderful about these books is the approach to enquire and interview experts to get to the bottom of some of the problems, but then to re-contextualise the science from a personal perspective. They come away with some interesting answers and discuss ideas with some remarkable people.

‘That mysterious border between what science can and cannot explain’

Maura O’Connor is a journalist and author of Wayﬁnding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World (St Martin’s Press, 2019). maura.r.oconnor@gmail.com

What got you interested in wayﬁnding / being lost? Years ago, I tried to use GPS to get to an extremely rural place in New Mexico. The device led me to the edge of a very steep cliff. It was such an absurd experience that it got me thinking about navigation more generally and asking questions about how humans wayﬁnd. Millions of people have adopted GPS today and it creates this sense of incredible mastery and control over our surroundings. But the more we rely on it, the less information and knowledge we seem to absorb and retain about the landscapes around us. I started talking to anthropologists who have documented the astonishing diversity of human navigation practices around the world, as well as the neuroscientists trying to understand the neural basis of navigation.

the psychologist march 2021 lost

As a journalist, that mysterious border between what science can and cannot explain is very interesting to me. There are still so many different theories about human and even animal navigation. How do humpback whales find their way across an entire ocean? We still don’t really know. We don’t even know for sure how a butterfly navigates. What surprised you when you researched the topic? There’s still this idea out there that so-called huntergatherers are primitive wayfinders that navigate much like our prehistoric ancestors did, or even use some kind of ‘sixth sense’. This is totally wrong. People tend to generalise navigation from a Western perspective which focuses a lot on a very specific problem: navigating unknown places. So, it’s a struggle to understand how people from other cultures find their way in ‘wilderness’ without material technologies such as maps or instruments. The truth is that there is an amazing range of navigational systems that rely on highly sophisticated combinations of observation, memory and intergenerational knowledge. Mapping and map-reading is just one type of navigation strategy among many. Individuals learn unique cultural practices and skills to orient and know where they are with great accuracy. In some places, indoctrination into cultural navigation practices starts in childhood and absolute mastery can take many decades. Can you give us an example? I met Solomon Awa, the Inuit community leader and legendary hunter in Nunavut. Awa’s personal story of being born in a sod house and growing up on the land with his father and mother while all of his brothers and sisters were forced to go to residential schools is very moving, and he is someone who has thought so deeply and extensively about navigation and how it works. ‘Do you have 30 years?’, he joked when I asked if he would talk with me about Inuit wayfinding. He can talk about the logic of geography, wind, stars, snow. His opinion is that Inuit navigators can commit a staggering amount of visual information to memory. Rocks and snow all look the same to outsiders but he can ‘read’ the landscape and travel hundreds of miles using very innocuous landmarks. I saw, thanks to him, how practicing traditional navigation in Nunavut (and other places) is a potent form of cultural selfdetermination and decolonisation, connecting people to the land, language and stories. And the kind of empirical observation he practices are also how people are tracking the impact of climate change on their homelands. Who else did you meet along the way? I loved talking to the late neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum about his research and theories of the hippocampus. He saw navigation as a story or memory problem. As such, to him the hippocampus was not about spatial memory, it was more about

Do you have a favourite account of being lost? Maura O’Connor: My favourite is the story of the American tourist in Iceland. He was trying to get from the airport in Reykjavik to a hotel nearby and ended up driving 270 miles in the wrong direction because his GPS told him to. He even saw signs showing Reykjavik was in the other direction but he kept going! Why is our faith in technology so complete that we would doubt our direct experience – literally what we see with our own eyes? I think this question has a lot of implications in our era of fake news, conspiracy-mongering, Covid-19… Michael Bond: Hansel and Gretel – although it’s a fairy tale, it’s a great metaphor for the universally terrifying experience of being lost in the woods.

Tristan Gooley: The Star Dust aircraft crash in the Andes in 1947. It has everything: mystery, science, intrigue, adventure, romance. The irony is it is mainly a story about us losing the aircraft, rather than the pilots or passengers themselves getting lost. They were lost, but didn’t know it. For more than 50 years the world had no idea what had happened to Star Dust. It had just disappeared. Conspiracy theorists will be disappointed that most people feel that science has solved the mystery, but they haven’t all given up; do they ever? I don’t think it will spoil the story to reveal that the pilots thought they were one side of the Andes ridge, having cleared the peaks, because they had no awareness of the (then poorly understood) jet stream.

something he called ‘memory space’. And he talked about the hippocampus as this grand organiser of the brain that mapped time and space but also other dimensions of our experience, like social relationships and even sound. It was a joy to listen to a neuroscientist philosophise about the significance of the hippocampus in human life and marvel at how the brain works, even after decades at the top of his field. Were there any questions you were surprised haven’t been answered? I’m really looking forward to the future of research on hippocampal development in children. We know that the hippocampus develops in infancy and childhood, a time in which circuits are maturing, and new cells are firing and encoding space to create cognitive maps. But we don’t know for sure how much of kids’ experiences – exploring environments, navigating space, self-locomotion – influences how the hippocampus develops. Likewise, how much might limiting children’s independent exploration of space – which is happening across many cultures as people become risk averse – affect the hippocampus? I love the ideas of the psychologist Edith Cobb who described children as possessing this ‘genius loci’, the ability to explore the world in highly evocative ways. She believed they have this capacity for highly exceptional perception of time and space and moments of transcendence. I’m excited to see the ways in which new research in neuroscience and psychology

might illuminate more about children’s unique and mysterious relationship to wayfinding. What concept was hard to get your head around? The environmental psychologist James Gibson had some incredible ideas about wayfinding: he argued that humans could directly perceive the world through ecological information rather than assemble our sensory inputs into mental representations. Likewise, he argued that navigation isn’t based on a cognitive map in the brain but on our immediate experience of the environment, which he described as a sequence of transitions… the stretches of connected sequences over time, that connect vistas. Gibson said that wayfinding ‘is not so much having a bird’s eye view of the terrain as it is being everywhere at once’. I’ll probably never stop thinking about that quote and trying to understand it! Has writing the book changed you in other ways? I have a profound appreciation for my own

ethnocentrism now. It was a shock, for example, to me that being lost is not a common experience at all among the traditional wayﬁnders I spoke to. In some places, it’s almost unthinkable that people can get lost. The anthropologist Thomas Widlok, who spent many decades with the San people of the Kalahari, helped me to understand why this is. Being lost is a very speciﬁc historical situation that stems from trying to chart unknown territories. And exploring unknown places is very different from the type of navigation indigenous people practice in Australia, the Kalahari or the Arctic, for instance. I remember talking to a Jawoyn elder in northern Australia, Margaret Katherine, who laughed at me when I asked what she did when she got lost. If you grow up immersed in your people’s Dreaming stories and know how to use everything from trees and termite hills to stars and landmarks to orient over hundreds of kilometers, getting lost is just not something that happens very often. You are always at home no matter how far you travel.

‘The connection between physical navigation and mental health is fascinating’ What got you interested in wayﬁnding / being lost? Firstly it’s a very exciting time in spatial neuroscience with all the recent ﬁndings about how the brain allows us to navigate and the role of spatial cognition in memory, so it felt like a great subject to explore. Secondly, in my family there are both excellent and terrible navigators, and I’ve always wondered why people can differ so much at this skill. What surprised you when you researched the topic? It surprised me how much we don’t know about how the brain makes sense of space. For example, it isn’t clear where spatial memories are stored, nor how the place cells and grid cells – two crucial elements in the cognitive map – cooperate. The mechanisms behind place, grid, head direction, boundary vector and other spatial cells in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex are quite challenging to get your head round when you’re starting from scratch, though of course it forces you to ask all the dumb questions so you can get it right for your readers.

Was there a particular area that you found thought provoking? The connection between physical navigation and mental health is fascinating. When I told friends that I was writing a book about why people get lost, many of them would ask, ‘physically or mentally?’ The two

Michael Bond is author of Wayﬁnding: The Art and Science of How we Find and Lose our Way (Picador, 2020). michaelbond213@gmail.com

are similar in many ways – we use the same language to describe them, and they affect some of the same parts of the brain. The emotional experience of being lost in the wilderness is comparable to what it feels like in depression: the fear, the distorted thinking, the alienation from your surroundings, the sense you might die.

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‘On a transatlantic voyage in a small yacht when I was 19, I was introduced to the wonders of celestial navigation’ What got you interested in wayﬁnding / being lost? As a teenager who did a lot of sailing I was fascinated by the challenges of marine navigation – this was of course long before the advent of GPS. I was especially interested in how you could tell where you were when out of sight of land. This was a major problem until the mid-18th century, when celestial navigation came of age with the discovery of two different solutions to the longitude problem. On a transatlantic voyage in a small yacht when I was 19, I was introduced to the wonders of celestial navigation. I wrote about this life-changing experience in my book, Sextant. I’m still entranced by the fact that you can ﬁx your position on the surface of this planet by reference to the light of the sun and stars. That is just sublime! It’s worth recalling that until the 1960s celestial navigation was the key to making accurate maps of the world. We owe a huge amount to the generations of scientists, mathematicians and instrument-makers who

Where there any questions you were surprised haven’t been answered? What is a cognitive map? In my naivety at the start of my research I assumed they’d nailed this one. The fact that they haven’t makes the subject more fascinating. Who did you most enjoy talking to when researching your book? So many to choose from. I enjoyed getting the very different perspectives from the two groups who in a sense are at either end of the discipline: the neuroscientists looking for answers in the brain, and the search and rescue experts observing how people behave in the real world. It would be interesting to get these two groups together to try to tackle some of the enduring mysteries about human navigation. For example, why people who get lost in the wild tend to gravitate towards boundaries – paths, tracks, the edges of forests, a line of telegraph poles. That’s something neuroscience might help with. Has writing the book changed the way you behave? It’s made it clear to me how deeply we’re affected by our surroundings and how they touch us emotionally. Also how important it is to pay attention if you want to remember where you’re going. I do try to pay attention more – a work in progress!

David Barrie is author of Incredible Journeys: Exploring the Wonders of Animal Navigation (Hodder and Stoughton, 2019). cdobarrie@gmail. com Twitter: @barrieauthor Instagram: @authorbarrie www.davidbarrie author.org

made all this possible, though we tend to forget their achievements now that we have GPS. What surprised you when you researched the topic? When I was researching Sextant I discovered that many other animals – from ants and bees to birds and butterflies – were also celestial navigators. This led me to write Incredible Journeys – a book that explores the science of animal navigation. My research took me round the world and introduced me to a lot of the leading scientists working in this field. And of course there were many surprises. For example, I was amazed to learn that nocturnal dung beetles maintain a straight course as they roll their balls of dung by reference to the light of the moon or, failing that, the orientation of the Milky Way. I was also deeply impressed by the work of the neuroscientists who are unravelling the brain circuitry that supports navigation. I was astonished to discover just how much the tiny brains of insects can do: they are a perfect illustration of the power of evolution working over hundreds of millions of years. What about birds? One of the most intriguing questions is how homing pigeons can find their way back to their lofts, even when they are taken (under anaesthetic!) to a place they’ve never before visited – which may be as much as 300 km away. There’s a good deal of evidence that their sense of smell plays an important part in this remarkable behaviour. Some researchers think they must be making use of ‘olfactory maps’ of some kind,

but this is still controversial. Another intriguing possibility is that pigeons may be making use of infrasound signals that carry over great distances to help them home in on their lofts. Of course it’s possible that both theories are correct – or neither! Don’t many animals use the Earth’s magnetic field? Yes, many animals – including bacteria, newts, marine turtles, fish, moths and birds. A great deal of research is devoted to discovering how the magnetic compass sense of migratory birds works. A leading theory is that it depends on light-activated cryptochrome molecules in the retina. The proposed process depends on subatomic effects influenced by the orientation of the surrounding magnetic field. With a good deal of help from the experts, I learned a lot about the quantum chemistry involved – though I didn’t find it at all easy! I also had quite a lot of difficulty with the concept of a ‘map’. It sounds like a simple enough thing but it’s actually very complex and it doesn’t help that scientists use the term in a wide variety of different and often ill-defined ways. Consider for example the difference between a map based on latitude and longitude, and the ‘olfactory’ maps supposedly used by pigeons. The latter might conceivably be based on a mosaic of smells or stable concentration gradients. Or what about a magnetic map based on some combination of the intensity, inclination or declination of the Earth’s unstable magnetic field? We humans are now so reliant on maps that we have difficulty in grasping that safe navigation is possible without them. I suspect that a lot of the claims made about the use of ‘maps’ by animals result from our tendency to invoke a ‘map’ whenever we encounter some navigational feat that is hard to explain. In fact I’m not sure there’s yet any really solid evidence of a ‘map’ outside the world of mammals. That said, some migratory birds do seem to be able to compensate for changes in longitude, and if that’s true, they too may turn out to be map-users. And then of course there are those puzzling pigeons...

Did any unanswered questions surprise you? It’s not surprising, given the challenges of marine research, but I’m frustrated that we still know so little about how animals navigate at sea. We know that turtles, salmon and spiny lobsters can make good use of the Earth’s magnetic ﬁeld, but what about the amazing migratory journeys of humpback whales, great white sharks, blueﬁn tuna, or northern elephant seals – to name but a few? How they navigate successfully across the apparently featureless open ocean is still deeply mysterious. Humpback whales, for example, have been tracked as they follow astonishingly straight courses over thousands of miles. How do they do it? It seems quite likely that

magnetism is involved but recent research suggests that they may also be making use of gravitational information. I would love to know the answers. I would also like to know more about the role that the navigational circuits in the human brain play in other cognitive activities. They may contribute to our ability to imagine possible worlds and to generate new ideas. It would be really fascinating to understand what part our navigational skills play in our creative abilities. And there’s a growing body of evidence that navigational circuits play an important part in the management of our social lives. In a 2015 experiment led by Rita Morais Tavares, people took part in a game that involved getting to know a cast of characters in a ‘new town’, while brain activity was monitored in an fMRI scanner. Choices and interactions based on the social standing of each character gave rise to changes in the relationships between them. Concurrent patterns of hippocampal activity suggested that the participants were navigating ‘a social space framed by power and affiliation’. The authors think that the concept of social space is more than a mere metaphor: it may well ‘reflect how the brain represents our position in the social world’. If so, people who struggle either to read social cues or to recall the outcomes of previous encounters will have a hard time constructing effective social maps, and that may play an important part in the many psychiatric illnesses that involve faulty social cognition. Who did you most enjoy talking to when researching your book? That’s really hard to answer as I had so many enjoyable conversations. But it was a real privilege – and delight – to interview Rüdiger Wehner, perhaps the greatest living scientist working on animal navigation. He has spent 50-odd years exploring the astonishingly elaborate navigational toolkits of ants – especially the desert ant, Cataglyphis fortis, and has made many seminal discoveries. I spent a whole day with him at his apartment in Zürich while he patiently answered my questions. He’s not only a brilliant scientist, but a wonderfully wise, cultivated and generous man. Has writing the book changed you? As I put it in the last chapter of Incredible Journeys: ‘I have again and again been struck dumb with admiration by the extraordinary skills of the animal navigators that are its stars. Even if our own lives did not depend on the health and vitality of the planet we inhabit, the preservation of the almost infinitely complex web of life from which such wonders emerge is surely an ethical imperative’. The trouble is, I don’t see how the political systems within which we operate can deliver the policy changes that are now so desperately needed – at least, not in time to save us. Do we then need some kind of revolution? Whether we want it or not, I suspect that a revolution is coming, and maybe soon, though what form it will take is still veiled from us – as is always the case.

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‘Labyrinths are a sort of contained, safe jeopardy’ Why do you think you have a ‘longing for the labyrinth’? I think, in general, labyrinths are very tempting places, no? Who has passed the entrance to a maze without wanting to test herself against it? Children love mazes and labyrinths: the fun of being lost, but not really being lost. A sort of contained, safe jeopardy. In my case, I was taken to Crete and Knossos when I was a child, and completely fell for the romance of the labyrinth of Greek myth. I went on to study classics at university. Ariadne, Theseus, Minos, the Minotaur – these are stories that still crowd my imagination. I was struck by what a powerful metaphor the labyrinth is, for pretty much everything in life, and therefore everything in Psychology too. In the book, you quote your late friend Mrs Grammatiki: ‘to be inside a maze or a labyrinth is to be bewildered, confused or afraid. But it is, nonetheless, also to be inside a structure. It is to be lost, but only up to a point.’ Maybe everything is fundamentally a toss-up between beauty, pattern and order on the one hand, and chaos, fear and bewilderment on the other? Power and powerlessness, mastery and terror, the complex and the meaningless… to be lost-not-lost. It’s certainly true that once one starts to think about the labyrinth as a metaphor, you start to see it everywhere, in my experience... G.K. Chesterton would have talked of the universe as a labyrinth built by God, with God

‘I was taken to Crete and Knossos when I was a child, and completely fell for the romance of the labyrinth of Greek myth’

Charlotte Higgins is Chief culture writer for The Guardian and author of Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths (Vintage Publishing, 2018). charlotte.higgins@theguardian.com. Twitter: @chiggi

at the centre: he had the comfort of the sense of an ordered world even if humanity, with her myopic limits, can’t trace those patterns fully. As a more-or-less godless person my terror, of course, is that there’s no pattern, and that we live in boundless chaos. The labyrinth without an edge. A safer course, for me, is to think of individual human lives as tracing a circuitous, labyrinthine path, whose pattern we cannot see from the inside, but make a certain sense when they are completed. Thinking back on writing Red Thread, it was palpably my mid-life book. It’s always dangerous to make pretentious comparisons with Dante, but there was an element of being in a dark wood in the middle of my life. My mother died three months after it was published, and, though she wasn’t ill while I was actually writing, on some level I was anticipating this truly devastating event, or somehow attempting to prepare for it. Half-consciously I knew that there was a crucial junction coming. You describe your book as a ‘winding journey down my imagination’s shaded byways’. Does that approach ultimately allow you to impose order, to use stories as a way out of the labyrinth? Or do you simply delight in the detours? Oh, both, for sure. The labyrinth can resemble the brain; the labyrinth, as built by Daedalus, is the kind of ur-creative object in Greek mythology, standing in for all kinds of artistic and imaginative ingenuity. The containing idea for Red Thread’s unconventional structure – the book is a long series of intuitively linked passages – was the idea of creativity itself, the way that ideas emerge from each other as branching byways of the mind.

An important way of thinking about all this was to write about Arthur Evans’s excavations, in the early 20th century, of Knossos, the site of the mythological labyrinth. He excavated a whole new civilisation – but, in a very rich and revealing way, he also imagined that civilisation into existence, projecting his own interior world on to the Bronze Age Mediterranean society he discovered. (This act of projection is surely one reason Freud was so interested in his work, aside from the fact that he sometimes used the idea of an ‘excavation’ of the mind to help explain psychoanalysis.) One of the ideas in the book is that excavation and creation are not so very different. So yes, the book delights in its own detours, delights in setting traps and misdirection, and laying clues for the reader. But of course there is also an underlying structure, one that I’m not inclined to give away. The reader must ﬁgure that out for herself. The book is called ‘Red thread’, as Ariadne gave to Theseus before he faced the Minotaur. At one point you write ‘tug at a thread and everything could unravel’. Could you expand on what you mean, in terms of our psychology and lives? I suppose a preoccupation of mine is of the slender membrane between a settled, prosperous life and complete chaos. The idea that you could undergo something like Oedipus, who began his day the respected and honoured king of Thebes and ended it self-blinded, exiled, widowed, reviled, the murderer of his father and the father of his mother’s children. Not such a melodramatic idea, really, in the age of terrifying natural disasters, of the desperate situation of refugees and migrants, of the Covid-19 pandemic, and of

increasing political and economic instability. Plenty of examples of that in 20th-century history, too. What did meeting psychologists for the book, or reading psychology, help you to understand about yourself? Well, one of the reasons for writing the book was that I lack any kind of sense of direction – I mean, literally, I get lost in the streets, I even get lost in people’s houses. I can read a map and can navigate by landmark if I properly concentrate, but I am directionally challenged, let’s say. I had a fascinating discussion and correspondence with cognitive neuroscientist Professor Hugo Spiers, who directs the spatial cognition research group at UCL, and who trained with Nobel laureate John O’Keefe. Hugo was incredibly interesting on the complex relationship between different forms of memory, the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, and sense of direction; I write about some of his work in Red Thread. Being unable to ﬁnd your way home is often an early ‘tell’ for dementia, he informed me – which led to a brief panic! He was reassuring, though: some people are just better at navigation than others. It’s also true, I have to admit, that I am lazy, and prefer to let my mind drift when walking through the streets. The entire conversation somehow left me at more peace with my own crummy navigation skills than I had been before – which, needless to say, are currently largely outsourced to my GPS signal. As for how that translates into the rest of my life? I’d like to feel that after having these conversations and writing the book I was better able to absorb the knowledge that the future cannot be controlled. But that’s optimistic.

‘There are hundreds of strange signs…’

Tristan Gooley is author of several internationally bestselling books about natural navigation, including, The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs. www.natural navigator.com

What got you interested in natural navigation? I’ve always enjoyed putting journeys together. From a young age, long before I knew the word navigation, I found it thrilling to think: I’m here, how can I get there? Small journeys to the top of hills and across lakes as a child blossomed into expeditions up mountains and across oceans as an adult. By my mid-twenties I was taking on thousand kilometre expeditions. But I found that as the journeys got bigger, they became no more interesting. Sometimes the opposite; you can ﬂy a small aircraft by looking out the window, but to take on big journeys you are legally forced to spend a lot of time staring at screens. This led to my taking on much smaller journeys, using nature as my map and compass. Can you give us some examples of how your view changed? I can honestly say that I found the ﬁrst attempt to cross a couple of kilometres of English woodland using the

the psychologist march 2021 lost

Do you have a favourite account of being lost? David Barrie: In Incredible Journeys I quote the great Italian writer Italo Calvino’s account of being lost in a Russian forest. That’s very gripping, but actually I’d rather talk about something different: the extraordinary navigational skills that enable some humans to ﬁnd their way where others would assuredly be lost – using only their senses and native wit. One such account comes from Hugh Brady’s wonderful book The Other Side of Eden in which he gives a spellbinding account of his experiences with Inuit hunters in the high Arctic in the early 1970s. He tells of a long journey by dog sled across the forbidding wilderness of northern Bafﬁn Island – without printed map or compass, let alone GPS. Three days out, high in the mountains, his Inuit companion paused to consider their route. He drew a map in the

snow. Then they set off again. Two days later they arrived at their destination. His Inuit guide asked Brody when he thought he’d last visited this place. Brody guessed three or four years. No, came the answer: I was last here in 1938. (In other words well over 30 years before.) Brody was astonished and asked him how he knew his way through the mountains. ‘Because Inuit cannot get lost in their own land. If we have done a journey once, we can always do it again.’ Sadly, I understand that many young Inuit are turning their backs on the traditional skills of their ancestors and relying too heavily on GPS – sometimes with disastrous results. There is a lesson here for all of us. As we become more

trees and clouds as my main compasses as exhilarating as ﬂying solo across the Atlantic. You work full time as a ‘natural navigator’, but what does that actually entail? My day job has two parts: research and communication. And these two parts have several guises. I have undertaken lots of journeys, but plenty of my research is delving into arcane places looking for clues and signs to how we can ﬁnd our way without electronics. I garner inspiration and information from our ancestors and from the latest research. At its best it is a process that feeds itself. I discovered a reference in Norse Lore to how the Vikings used whales and birds to establish their position at sea. This led to a small boat journey into the North Atlantic to prove it worked, which in turn yielded the academic article, ‘Nature’s Radar’. But that didn’t pay any bills and, since I’m not funded by a university, my daily income relies on popularising some of these techniques. That expedition formed a few paragraphs of a book I wrote called How to Read Water, which became a New York Times bestseller. I’m very fortunate that the books I’ve written seem have a global appeal; hopefully they speak to a universal curiosity. This allows me to continue doing what I do, which I am very grateful for. It turns out there are enough curious souls out there who want to know how to use a puddle as a compass! Have you been properly lost? My work has meant I have had to grow comfortable with the different shades of being lost, from pleasant sensation on a Sunday afternoon, to a terrifying feeling

and more dependent on our electronic gadgets for ﬁnding our way around, our natural navigational skills are fast decaying, and we are also losing touch with the world around us [see Bohbot, V.D. (2020). Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during selfguided navigation. Scientiﬁc reports, 10(1), 1-14]. This is not a healthy development.

that my life was in danger. Once when I was 19, I tried to climb a large active volcano in Indonesia with no navigation equipment at all. It was foolhardy. My friend got hypothermia near the summit and in the rush to get down to a safe temperature, I got us lost. We walked for three days without food and eventually found a remote village, more by luck than skill. What is the strangest navigation method you have uncovered? There are literally hundreds of strange signs we can use and that I have written about. For example, the size, colour and shape of tree leaves can all be used to make a compass. But the strangest approach was one I encountered in a rainforest. A few years ago I travelled to the heart of Borneo to walk with the Penan Dayak in order to study their methods. The Dayak can travel large distances across the interior with no map, compass, GPS or smartphone, which is what we’d expect. But what I found surprising is that they did not refer to cardinal directions at all. Their frame of reference, their methodology, revolves around topography, gradient and water ﬂow. They can orientate themselves and their landscape entirely through reference to uphill, downhill, upriver and downriver. It is so different to every other navigation approach I have ever studied that it still amazes me. I asked one of the Dayak what they did when they felt lost. They told me that they walked to the top of a hill or mountain for a better view. ‘But what if you’re still surrounded by jungle at the top of the hill?’, I asked. Their answer was simple, logical and beautiful. ‘We just climb the tallest tree on top of that hill.’

For this Voices in Psychology Programme, we asked what has been lost or found on the journey to (and through) psychology. We received creative submissions that considered complex issues such as ableism, (in)equalities, and the tricky business of rejection, as well as some uplifting stories about the lightbulb moments when psychology has helped to piece things together. Taken together, these winning entries show how psychology journeys are rarely linear, and there is great value in incorporating ‘the psychologist’ into discussions about ‘the psychology’. Madeleine Pownall, University of Leeds and Associate Editor for Voices In Psychology

Holly Risdon is an Assistant Psychologist (NHS Wales) and Welsh Representative for the British Psychological Society’s Division of Clinical Psychology Pre-qualiﬁed Group committee. ‘I have just submitted my sixth application for training in clinical psychology (and hope not to write a seventh!). I am particularly interested in body image and appearance-related issues. I currently work in a Primary Care Mental Health Support Service in South Wales. I hope to provide some insight into being a pre-qualiﬁed psychologist at the moment and to help others in my position understand that they are not alone in struggling.’

Pieces of the puzzle Along my psychology journey, which is not dissimilar to other pre-qualified psychologists, I have found confidence in myself and my own voice. On the first day of my undergraduate psychology degree, we were told not to bother applying for clinical psychology training because ‘you won’t get in’. While this motivated me to prove them wrong, it instilled in me that I was not going to be ‘good enough’. This did not really sink in until I started applying for jobs after graduating. I received 165 rejections from 165 jobs I applied to; I internalised the lack of success to mean that I, as a person, was a ‘failure’. The only explanation I could come up with at that time was ‘you are not good enough’. My inner critical voice latched onto this with all its might and maliciously whispered this to me for years. On reflection, I wonder if my family scripts may have had an impact. One of my family scripts is ‘if you work hard, you’ll achieve whatever you want to achieve’. In the case of the 165 job applications, I worked hard. Still, I had not achieved. My critical voice hissed at me ‘you haven’t worked hard enough; you are not good enough’. After further work, I was finally offered an interview. It was my first NHS interview, and it did not go well. They offered me detailed feedback on NHS interviews and encouraged me to keep applying. Two months later, I received a call offering me that very job. The person they had hired had left. I immediately accepted the job. Relief was easy to feel. Pride in myself was more difficult to accept. My critical voice shouted, ‘you only got offered this because the other person left; you are still not good enough’. Thankfully, this job included working within a supportive team alongside two psychologists. I started to gather information ‘puzzle pieces’ about clinical psychology to help me understand more about it. Indeed, I collected more puzzle pieces throughout my other positions although they did not quite fit together. My critical voice was whispering ‘you still don’t understand; you are not good enough’. Fast forward to my fourth job after graduating,

the psychologist march 2021 lost and found

What Very Important thing have you lost or found on your psychology journey? The winning answers to our latest question for our Voices In Psychology programme, identifying and nurturing new writing talent… I finally gained an assistant psychologist position in the NHS. My critical voice focused on the fact that I did not belong there, after four long years of applying. However, through supervision with two consultant clinical psychologists, I collected some puzzle pieces on reflective practice and clinical psychology. I was able to spend time reflecting and become aware of my critical voice, when it was likely to be triggered, when it can be helpful, and when is best to dismiss it. I started to learn how to control my critical voice and use it as a tool to improve my work. The puzzle pieces began to fit together, and I started to see a picture of myself in the context of clinical psychology. I could see that much of the puzzle picture was obscured by a dark cloud, my critical voice. Using reflection, I started to understand more

about myself as a person in the context of my family and friends. For the first time professionally, I was able to acknowledge my strengths and be proud of myself. This gave me ammunition to challenge my critical voice and, at times, silence it. Now, the puzzle is more complete than ever, with some pieces missing that I will be able to collect on clinical training and beyond. Without reflective models and tools, I would still be trying to fit the puzzle pieces together to the soundtrack of my critical voice. When I think back to the 165 job rejections, I am strangely grateful for this time as it served as a rich source for reflection and personal development. All of this contributes to my more measured, encouraging, and curious inner voice which I have found on my psychology journey.

LOST and grieving, rejected, despondent; for the past year or two I could only search for something I felt other people took claim of. I’d seen it fading with every life event, every avoidance of Clearing House, and I watched it hover over every line, I even wrote a poem and asked for it back: If anyone knows where I’ve left it, I begged, please contact me, please, please. Tell me you’ve spotted it somewhere and can go the extra mile to return it. But I also felt the pressure of I shoulds: I should be putting that poster up by now, and as I lay low, I heard its enemy speak: it probably wouldn’t get accepted. I thought about writing an article but would it be published? As I sat alone, I wondered about those I had sat next to [now in training], at events and conferences, in meetings and crowded spaces, had I left it there? Would someone remember it ﬁltrating the air between us as we talked about our interests. Had I poured out too much on the mic stand performing at the Fringe; had I had too much, was I not good enough? I doubted myself but I was sure I’d had it at one point, and I thought hard about where I’d been: I was still wandering corridors where health anxiety lingered, and I’d been present in Very Important discussions post-death; I accepted no one could return my mother but if you don’t mind, I hoped, package my [secondary] loss with professional love. I’d be eternally grateful if you’d write a note so I’d know who to acknowledge in my book, that one I mentioned years ago slowly dying from a lack of ink, and an unrecognised hook. And in the meantime, a long time; lines that would ﬁll this magazine

so often FOUND at the end of a warm sentence. Eventually I felt called to say -

thank you for returning it with kindness.

It was only weeks ago it finally got my full attention, I’d observed it travelling near me on my walk to work, I noticed it sitting in the space between my mouth and mask. I felt it in me as I saw a patient, it bubbled as I reflected back. During the first wave, I was recovering from burnout. By the second wave, I was ignited in the face of a burning world. My triggers were screaming with irony; illness and isolation had been extra titles long-bestowed as a young carer. My thinking changed as my posture strengthened: the heavy load I trudged to work became a bus ride to freedom. The year I wore a mask the most was the same one I let it slip, and my vulnerable status became my super power. This week I put it down on the application form, and my whole being waved back at me. I heard it cross the network, I recognised it in my own voice, I let it laugh in the face of more loss. The hardest task I will ever face now will be to keep it close. It will be Very Important to not lose it for so long next time. But I have learnt that if I do someone will help me look for it: a peer, a colleague, a supervisor, a manager, now I know they can help. Now I have confidence to say I have been disabled by trauma. Now I belong to multiple minorities and now I feel heard and seen. Now I know there is care for the carer. Now I’m no longer punctuating my life like I deserve it to end as a . Now I wait to take my own stride forward -

over and over, thank you to everyone who has helped me re-ﬁnd myself. I lamented how often it comes and goes; that elusive thing, 42

conﬁdence,

the psychologist march 2021 lost and found

Jillian Geary I reign [rain!] from Bury (and descend from Victor Hugo, according to my grandma). I work as Senior Assistant Psychologist by day and poet by night (send your costume designs). My writing career began at the tender age of nine with a column in the local newspaper (my stock answer to ‘tell us one interesting thing about yourself’). My inspiration for combining both Clinical Psychology and writing stems from experiences as an unidentiﬁed young carer. I currently work in stroke rehab, and I’m particularly passionate about giving voice to those adjusting to illness and their carers, reducing stigma around lived experience, and opening-up conversations on grief, loss and spirituality. My poetry has been published in the BPS Clinical Psychology Forum magazine and I can often be found on Instagram @thepoetfolio, combining my love of nature and photography, and growing conﬁdence to be more than a re-tweeter as Psychojournojill.

Gaining a new word in my vocabulary: ‘reflection’ My first experience of reflective practice was being on a Zoom meeting with no agenda apart from an invitation to ‘reflect’. I was drowning in the awkward silences and pregnant pauses, not knowing what to say or what the ‘rules’ were. As I understand it, reflection is the practice of looking at oneself: sometimes critically, sometimes analytically, always compassionately, and hopefully not self-indulgently. More than simply ‘looking’ and hopefully ‘seeing’, however, it is about making meaning out of what we see and using it to act more authentically and beneficially in the world. As hard as it is to define, it is harder to practice. As the old proverb says: the teeth cannot bite themselves; the eyes cannot see themselves; the fingertip cannot touch itself. How is it then that the mind can think about itself? How can we as humans think honestly and accurately about ourselves and what we think, feel and do? Multiple books and possibly a few religions exist to try and answer these questions, and I won’t pretend that I have any answers myself. What I do believe however, is that it is possible. Eyes can see themselves with the help of a mirror, and the mind can think about itself with the help of the right ‘mirrors’. Spaces, questions, silences, perspectives, and other people can all become mirrors. They can become mirrors, but it is not inevitable. The key ingredient that brings it all together is a personal willingness to see what is really there, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. A concept that has helped me start becoming somewhat reflective is the Jungian idea of ‘The Shadow’. In a nutshell, it is any part of us that we are unaware of, or are simply unwilling to acknowledge as ours. Accepting and integrating into our selfunderstanding is therefore an inherently uncomfortable process:

‘Having previously studied Theology and Religion, and worked a variety of different jobs, I am now seeking to change careers into psychology. I am currently doing an MSc Psychology (conversion) at the University of East London, intending to work in mental health services and one day train as a Clinical Psychologist. Having worked in Digital Marketing, I am well aware of how easily information can be disseminated online, both for good or ill. I believe that psychological concepts can be communicated online in a way which has enormous potential to beneﬁt our mental health, individually and collectively. Human beings are beautifully complex, but the truths and techniques which help us live to our fullest can be beautifully simple.’ Joshua Sewell, London

‘The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.’ Carl Jung, Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.14.

Being willing to intellectually acknowledge that there are aspects of myself with which I feel profoundly uncomfortable is not the same thing as honestly looking at them when they emerge in day to day life. It has, however, meant I am more open to the idea that moments of discomfort might give way to moments of learning and growth if I stay with them and try to use

them as a mirror. That Zoom meeting where I felt uncomfortable in the silence following an invitation to ‘reflect’ gave me an insight into my own unwillingness to look inside and share my private thoughts with others. Being part of an anti-racist book group has made me much more aware of how my ‘shadow’ is riddled with biases and prejudices about others (including but not limited to race). Being in a relationship with an extraordinarily courageous and strong woman has made me aware of how deep my misogynistic attitudes can be. The whole world can be a space to reflect if we want it to be, and are willing to endure the discomfort for as long as it takes. The paradox is, that far from being an exercise in self-denigration and chastisement, this kind of selfreflection has been steps on a path to wholeness and authenticity. When unacknowledged, the shadowy parts of me caused havoc and seemed to have a life of their own. As I look at them, they become distinct thoughts, feeling or potential actions that I can choose not to engage with or act upon. Most of the time, having acknowledged them, I don’t even want to engage with or act upon them anymore. By accepting my unpleasant internal realities, I become less harmful to myself and others. Like all important things we find, it is something I want to share. Sometimes, I imagine what a world

full of increasingly self-reflective people would be like. Consistent, sustained and honest reflection like this would be a human superpower. I am just a beginner. I hope I can continue to grow with practice. This is not without its hazards, however. I have found that the danger of becoming more ‘reflective’ is that sense of superiority or self-indulgent introspection can piggy-back in with the growing self-awareness, and hinder genuine reflection. One can start to feel like one can diagnose other people’s shadows. Even if one could, being aware of the shadows of others does not make me any more whole than I was before. As I continue my journey into Psychology, I expect that this tendency to lose reflective momentum will be something I need to be constantly mindful of. To complicate matters, just as individuals can have shadows, so can groups and whole societies: things that we all consistently allow ourselves and each other to ignore. What might the collective shadow of Psychology contain? How might I be tempted to collaborate in maintaining it? How can I be a part of a profession that is willing to look at itself and integrate any uncomfortable truths? These are questions I think about when I consider my future journey into Psychology. But for now, I simply commend reflection and the willingness to acknowledge uncomfortable truths as a path to wholeness and humanness.

Leah Orme: ‘This acrylic painting marked a year into my role as an assistant psychologist. Throughout my Psychology journey, I believe I have both lost and then subsequently found my passion for art and expressing emotions through the medium of painting. Whilst studying intensely at the University of Cambridge and the IoPPN, I lacked the time to paint. It was during the Covid-19 pandemic that I found myself with more time to rediscover my passion for painting. In particular, this image depicts the emotions that many of my service users reported whilst seeking treatment for their mental health during the pandemic.’

the psychologist march 2021 lost and found

“Simply put, it’s the best book out there.” – David M. Buss The ﬁrst to make evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics accessible to the clinician The New CBT is an illuminating resource for contemporary mental health professionals, students, and researchers. It is the first book to make evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics readily accessible to mental health clinicians and non-technical professionals. By explaining the role of heredity in all major DSM disorders, The New CBT can help readers reduce the stigma of psychological dysfunctions and help them better understand how the brain, the genome, and the body dynamically contribute to mental disorders. In addition, it provides new methods to treat most psychological problems.

Purchase through the Eurospan Bookstore: https://www.eurospanbookstore.com/the-new-cbt.html

"The New CBT ŝƐ ĂŶ ĂďƐŽůƵƚĞůǇ ƚĞƌƌŝĮĐ ĂŶĚ ŐƌŽƵŶĚͲďƌĞĂŬŝŶŐ ďŽŽŬ͘ /ƚ ƉƌŽǀŝĚĞƐ ĐƵƫŶŐͲĞĚŐĞ ƐĐŝĞŶĐĞ ĂďŽƵƚ ĐůŝŶŝĐĂů ĞǀŽůƵƟŽŶĂƌǇ ƉƐǇĐŚŽůŽŐǇ͕ ǁŝƚŚ ƉƌŽĨŽƵŶĚ ŝŵƉůŝĐĂƟŽŶƐ ĨŽƌ ƚƌĞĂƚŵĞŶƚ͘ /ŶĐŽƌƉŽƌĂƟŶŐ ĂŶ ĞǀŽůƵƟŽŶĂƌǇ ƉĞƌƐƉĞĐƟǀĞ ŽŶ ƉƐǇĐŚŽůŽŐŝĐĂů ĚŝƐŽƌĚĞƌƐ ŐŝǀĞƐ ƌĞĂĚĞƌƐ͕ ĐůŝĞŶƚƐ͕ ƐƚƵĚĞŶƚƐ͕ ĂŶĚ ƉƌŽĨĞƐƐŝŽŶĂůƐ Ă ƚƌĞŵĞŶĚŽƵƐůǇ ŝŵƉŽƌƚĂŶƚ ůĞŶƐ ĨŽƌ ƵŶĚĞƌƐƚĂŶĚŝŶŐ ĂŶĚ ƚƌĞĂƚŵĞŶƚ͘ ^ŝŵƉůǇ ƉƵƚ͕ ŝƚΖƐ ƚŚĞ ďĞƐƚ ďŽŽŬ ŽƵƚ ƚŚĞƌĞ͘ ďƌĂŵƐ ŚĂƐ ĚŽŶĞ Ă ƚĞƌƌŝĮĐ ũŽď ŝŶƚĞƌǁĞĂǀŝŶŐ ĐĂƐĞ ƐƚƵĚŝĞƐ ǁŝƚŚ ĚĞĞƉ ƉƐǇĐŚŽůŽŐŝĐĂů ƵŶĚĞƌƐƚĂŶĚŝŶŐ ĂŶĚ ƚŚĞ ůĂƚĞƐƚ ĞŵƉŝƌŝĐĂůůǇͲďĂƐĞĚ ĞǀŝĚĞŶĐĞ͘ / ƌĞĐŽŵŵĞŶĚ ƚŚŝƐ ďŽŽŬ ŝŶ ƚŚĞ ŚŝŐŚĞƐƚ ƚĞƌŵƐ ĂŶĚ ǁŝƚŚŽƵƚ ƌĞƐĞƌǀĂƟŽŶ͘Η David M. Buss, Author of ǀŽůƵƟŽŶĂƌǇ WƐǇĐŚŽůŽŐǇ͗ dŚĞ EĞǁ ^ĐŝĞŶĐĞ ŽĨ ƚŚĞ DŝŶĚ ͞DŝŬĞ ďƌĂŵƐ͛ ďŽŽŬ ŝƐ ƚŚĞ ĮƌƐƚ ƚŽ ƐǇƐƚĞŵĂƟĐĂůůǇ ĂƉƉůǇ ĞǀŽůƵƟŽŶĂƌǇ ĂŶĚ ŐĞŶĞƟĐ ƉƌŝŶĐŝƉůĞƐ ƚŽ ƚŚĞŽƌǇ ĂŶĚ ƚƌĞĂƚŵĞŶƚ ŽĨ ƉƐǇĐŚŽůŽŐŝĐĂů ƉƌŽďůĞŵƐ͘Η ƌ͘ ZŽďĞƌƚ WůŽŵŝŶ͕ DZ ZĞƐĞĂƌĐŚ WƌŽĨĞƐƐŽƌ ŝŶ ĞŚĂǀŝŽƌĂů 'ĞŶĞƟĐƐ͕ /ŶƐƟƚƵƚĞ ŽĨ WƐǇĐŚŝĂƚƌǇ͕ WƐǇĐŚŽůŽŐǇ ĂŶĚ EĞƵƌŽƐĐŝĞŶĐĞ͕ <ŝŶŐΖƐ ŽůůĞŐĞ London

͞ ůĞǀĞƌůǇ ŝŶƚĞŐƌĂƟŶŐ ĞǀŽůƵƟŽŶĂƌǇ ƉƐǇĐŚŽůŽŐǇ ĂŶĚ ďĞŚĂǀŝŽƌĂů ŐĞŶĞƟĐƐ ǁŝƚŚ ďĂƐŝĐ ƉƌŝŶĐŝƉůĞƐ ŽĨ ŽŐŶŝƟǀĞ ĞŚĂǀŝŽƌĂů dŚĞƌĂƉǇ͕ WƐǇĐŚŽůŽŐŝƐƚ DŝŬĞ ďƌĂŵƐ ƉƌŽǀŝĚĞƐ ƵƐ ǁŝƚŚ ŶĞǁ ŝŶƐŝŐŚƚƐ ŝŶƚŽ ŚŽǁ ǁĞ ŵŝŐŚƚ ŵŽƌĞ ĞīĞĐƟǀĞůǇ ĂůůĞǀŝĂƚĞ ƐƚƌĞƐƐ ďǇ ĐŚĂŶŐŝŶŐ ƚŚĞ ǁĂǇ ƉĞŽƉůĞ ƚŚŝŶŬ ĂŶĚ ďĞŚĂǀĞ͘͟ ůŝǌĂďĞƚŚ >ŽŌƵƐ͕ WŚ͘ ͕͘ ŝƐƟŶŐƵŝƐŚĞĚ WƌŽĨĞƐƐŽƌ͕ hŶŝǀĞƌƐŝƚǇ ŽĨ ĂůŝĨŽƌŶŝĂ͕ /ƌǀŝŶĞ͕ WĂƐƚ WƌĞƐŝĚĞŶƚ͕ ƐƐŽĐŝĂƟŽŶ ĨŽƌ WƐǇĐŚŽůŽŐŝĐĂů ^ĐŝĞŶĐĞ ΗDŝŬĞ ďƌĂŵƐ ŚĂƐ ǁƌŝƩĞŶ ĂŶ ŝŵƉŽƌƚĂŶƚ ďŽŽŬ ǁŝƚŚ ĂŶ ŝŵƉƌĞƐƐŝǀĞ ƌĂŶŐĞ ŽĨ ĐŽǀĞƌĂŐĞ͗ ĞǀŽůƵƟŽŶ͕ ĞŵŽƟŽŶ ƚŚĞŽƌǇ͕ ĐŽŐŶŝƟŽŶ͕ ƚŚĞ ŚŝƐƚŽƌǇ ŽĨ ƉƐǇĐŚŽƚŚĞƌĂƉǇ͕ ĂŶĚ ĐƵƌƌĞŶƚ ƐƚĂƚƵƐ ŽĨ ƚŚĞƌĂƉĞƵƟĐ ĂƉƉƌŽĂĐŚĞƐ ƚŽ ŶƵŵĞƌŽƵƐ ĚŝƐŽƌĚĞƌƐ͘ dŚŝƐ ǁŝůů ďĞ Ă ǀĂůƵĂďůĞ ƌĞƐŽƵƌĐĞ ŶŽƚ ũƵƐƚ ĨŽƌ ƚŚĞƌĂƉŝƐƚƐ ďƵƚ ĂůƐŽ ĨŽƌ ƐĐŝĞŶƟƐƚƐ ǁŚŽ ǁĂŶƚ ƌĞůĂƚĞ ƚŚĞŝƌ ǁŽƌŬ ŽŶ ďƌĂŝŶ ĂŶĚ ďĞŚĂǀŝŽƌ ƚŽ ŵĞŶƚĂů ƉƌŽďůĞŵƐ ĂŶĚ ƚŚĞŝƌ ƚƌĞĂƚŵĞŶƚ͘Η :ŽƐĞƉŚ >Ğ ŽƵǆ͕ ĞŶƚĞƌ ĨŽƌ EĞƵƌĂů ^ĐŝĞŶĐĞ͕ Ezh͕ ŵŽƟŽŶĂů ƌĂŝŶ /ŶƐƟƚƵƚĞ Ăƚ Ezh ĂŶĚ EĂƚŚĂŶ <ůŝŶĞ /ŶƐƟƚƵƚĞ

Call for nominations Members of the Society are invited to submit nominations for the following position on the Society’s main Boards to serve from July 2021 RESEARCH BOARD One Ordinary Member (two-year term) NOMINATIONS To ensure validity of nomination, you should use the standard nomination form, which gives details of the information and

signatories required. For nomination forms and further information please contact Kerry Wood: Kerry.wood@bps.org.uk. Nominations should be sent to Kerry Wood by Friday 30 April 2021. VOTING If more than one nomination is received, a membership ballot will be carried out immediately prior to the Annual General Meeting 2021.

Dropping the mask Eloise Stark experiments with mindfulness to ﬁnd her authentic, autistic self

He recognizes that it rests within himself to choose; that the only question which matters is, ‘Am I living in a way that is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?’ - Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person, 1961

Eloise Stark is a DPhil Candidate in Psychiatry, Green Templeton College, Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford. Twitter: @eloiseastark / @HedoniaResearch

n 2017 I received a diagnosis of autism. During my diagnostic assessment, the psychiatrist asked me a simple question with surprising consequences: ‘How do you feel about eye contact?’ ‘Well’, I explained, ‘I look at someone for a few seconds, then take my cue to look away for a second, then I look back at them. But sometimes it is painful to make eye contact so I can’t always do it.’ The psychiatrist explained to me that regulating eye contact consciously, using rules and algorithms gleaned from experience, is not the ‘neurotypical’ (non-autistic) way of doing things. Neurotypical people, she explained, don’t usually think about their eye contact, it just happens. Why do I feel the need to regulate my eye contact?

Social camouflaging The answer is, I am camouflaging. Camouflaging is a term which means modifying behaviour in an attempt to conform to conventions of non-autistic or neurotypical social behaviour (Mandy, 2019). You may have heard it referred to as ‘social camouflaging’, ‘masking’, ‘compensation’ or even simply ‘pretending to be normal’. I have engaged in social camouflaging ever since I can remember, starting at Junior School aged four. Filled with a desire to have friends and companionship, I remember studying intently to understand how other children my age dressed in cool patchwork jeans at parties, adorned their hair with colourful hair clips for school, and greeted each other with a ‘Hi’ rather than my preferred mode of opening conversation – with a question about my special interests (‘Did you see the latest My Little Pony called Firefly?’). Through carefully observing others, I managed to create a ‘normal’ self that I could present to the world. This façade only worked temporarily though, melting off me like an ice cream on a hot summer’s day as the day

the psychologist march 2021 camouﬂaging

and stress following an interaction where they felt a progressed and my energy subsided. pressure to camouflage. It is also commonly believed Of course, everyone, autistic or not, camouflages that camouflaging may prevent timely and accurate to a certain extent. In 1956, Erving Goffman penned the influential book The Presentation of Self in Everyday diagnoses of autism, thus precluding support and perhaps precipitating poor mental health. Life, using a theatrical metaphor to conceptualise I find camouflaging sometimes helpful, but often human social interaction. Just like performers in a encumbering. On the one hand, I camouflaged for the theatrical production, Goffman discussed how during first 27 years of my life, with a fair amount of success social interaction, both individuals will attempt to control or guide the impression that others might make along the way. On the other hand, it has sometimes been a debilitating strategy. In the first year of my of them through their behaviour. DPhil I suffered an ‘autistic burnout’, which has been I had a recent conversation with a non-autistic described as ‘having all of your internal resources person about camouflaging. They asked why I would exhausted beyond measure and want to stop camouflaging and being left with no clean-up crew’ come across as my autistic self, and “I have engaged in social (Raymaker et al., 2020). My whether appearing neurotypical might not be better for my camouflaging ever since well-being was at an all-time low due to keeping up a façade of friendships and career. To this I I remember, starting at normality for years, while internally answered an emphatic no, and this Junior School aged four” struggling with the feeling that harks back to the opening quote something was ‘different’ about me from Carl Rogers: camouflaging is that I couldn’t name. One potential not satisfying. Let’s explore why. solution for preventing autistic burnout is ‘an earlier Many autistic people report camouflaging as an diagnosis, which potentially could have meant less obligation, rather than a choice (Mandy, 2019). It is need to camouflage’ (Raymaker et al., 2020). often motivated by the need to avoid standing out, which may provoke bullying or ostracism, or simply by a feeling of being different and wanting to belong. Exploring authenticity All individuals, neurodiverse or not, face the conflict As a contrast to camouflaging (although some between authenticity and pragmatism, as Mandy individuals report positive consequences) being highlights, but for the autistic person, this conflict is authentic is viewed as a healthy attribute in both often heightened by living in a world as a minority. contemporary psychology and society (Smallenbroek, Indeed, the consequences of camouflaging can be Zelenski & Whelan, 2017). Authenticity is tricky very negative. In a qualitative study 92 autistic adults to define, but has been neatly conceptualised as the answered several questions about their camouflaging unimpeded operation of one’s true, or core, self in one’s behaviours, and its consequences (Hull et al., 2017). daily life (Goldman & Kernis, 2002). People with high The most consistent response from participants authenticity are believed to be able to act in accordance was that camouflaging is simply ‘exhausting’. In with their specific interests and values. As a result, the study, camouflaging was repeatedly depicted as these behaviours enhance their overall subjective wellbeing mentally, physically and emotionally tiring; being. Kernis and Goldman (2006) further separate requiring intense attentiveness, self-control, and the authentic functioning into four distinct components: continued management of a felt sense of discomfort. • Awareness and knowledge of one’s self Some individuals expressed feeling extreme anxiety

• Unbiased processing of evaluative information • Behaviour that is aligned by one’s true self • A relational orientation with close others that fosters openness and connectivity

Key sources

Carl Rogers, psychologist and one of the founders of the humanist approach to psychology, described a similarly authentic state as one of ‘fully functioning’ (Rogers, 1963). Importantly, Rogers defined this state partly by ‘movement’ or decisive action away from ‘facades’ and from ‘oughts’, from meeting expectations and from pleasing others (Joseph, 2017). In response to moving away from such pressures, the individual can move towards self-direction, openness to experience, acceptance and trust, thus following their own intrinsic motivations rather than acting for the benefit of others. It struck me that this wish for authenticity or a ‘fully functioning’ state is pretty similar to the desire that many autistic people have to stop camouflaging. With Professor Francesca Happé, one of the world’s leading autism experts, I discussed how camouflaging can prevent an autistic person from feeling that they have a strong sense of self-identity. She told me that this is something that she often hears about from autistic people: if you spend your whole life pretending to be ‘normal’, how can you know who you really are? Read more from Professor Happé in the box.

Goldman, B.M. & Kernis, M.H. (2002). The role of authenticity in healthy psychological functioning and subjective well-being. Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association, 5(6), 18-20. Hull, L., Petrides, K.V., Allison, C. et al. (2017). “Putting on My Best Normal”: Social Camouflaging in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), 2519-2534. Kernis, M.H. & Goldman, B.M. (2006). A multicomponent conceptualization of authenticity: Theory and research. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 283-357. Mandy, W. (2019). Social camouflaging in autism: Is it time to lose the mask? Sage. Raymaker, D.M., Teo, A.R., Steckler, N.A. et al. (2020). “Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew”: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132-143. Zheng, S., Sun, S., Huang, C. & Zou, Z. (2020). Authenticity and subjective well-being: The mediating role of mindfulness. Journal of Research in Personality, 84, 103900. Full list available in online/app version.

Using mindfulness to explore my social camouflaging In the summer of 2017, around the same time as my autism diagnosis, I embarked upon an 8-week Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy course at the University of Oxford, designed especially for busy students with a to-do list comprising 101 or more items and a brain full of facts and ideas. Mindfulness is most commonly defined as ‘paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally’ (KabatZinn, 1994). I had heard that mindfulness was the latest panacea and I was duly sceptical. One of the first exercises was to eat a single raisin over a period of about 10 minutes. We smelt the raisin, felt the raisin, explored it with our fingertips, held it in our mouths, and experienced a greater awareness of the raisin and its sensorial experience through reflecting on it in this way. Now I am not normally a fan of raisins, but I felt that I had been so focused

upon the experience and exploring every facet of knowledge that arose from the exploration that I had truly ‘lived’ those 10 minutes. As the course progressed, the number of attendees reduced, but during the meditations we practiced I was finding a new awareness. Rather than being consumed by my thoughts and feelings, I was stepping back and noticing them. It was certainly not plain sailing – I had many, many moments of frustration, such as when we meditated for 10 minutes and I realised that I had swam off into my own thoughts for the majority of the session. When completing the ‘body scan’, paying attention to each body part separately and the aligned sensations, I was often frustrated that I couldn’t feel my knees ‘properly’ or that my stomach was grumbling because it was almost teatime. However, for me, the pivotal point of learning was understanding the difference between ‘intrusions’ and ‘appraisals’. Intrusions can be thoughts, images, worries, or emotions that flood our conscious experience. But what I had crucially learnt is that regardless of the content of the intrusion, I could then choose how I made sense of the information in my consciousness and how I wished to respond. I sometimes forget to practice for days at a time when weeks get busy – I am very much still exploring and learning. One of my explorations into mindfulness struck me as potentially important. As a seasoned professional at social camouflaging who often questions my authenticity, I felt strongly that I wanted to learn how to ‘drop my mask’ and act more in accordance with my authentic, autistic self. If you are autistic too, you’ll probably understand this irritation. Camouflaging can be great, but it’s often burdensome and exhausting, and if I am honest, I have spent years, a lifetime even, not knowing how to stop. But the very mechanism that helps me to camouflage – learning rules, algorithms and processes to follow – may actually be the key here. For me, mindfulness offers one way to reach Kernis and Goldman’s (2006) four components of authenticity outlined earlier. If I am able to notice my instincts to camouflage through mindful awareness (authenticity

… not normally a fan of raisins

the psychologist march 2021 camouﬂaging

component 1), for instance, ‘Jane just made a joke, you should laugh’, then I can stop, pause, and evaluate the information with a non-judgemental eye (authenticity component 2). With the fortune of appraising my intrusion and instinct, I am then able to choose my subsequent behaviour to act according to my true self or true instinct (authenticity component 3), for instance, I might choose not to laugh because I didn’t understand the joke or find it funny. I could then ask Jane what the joke was supposed to convey and how the punch line operated, thus fostering a more open and connected relationship (authenticity component 4). This is nowhere near as easy as it sounds. I do not habitually go through the motions of adhering to these four steps, and then flawlessly drop my mask and proceed authentically. It takes practice, it even often takes just as much awareness as to camouflage in the first place. Sometimes, the process of being aware, appraising and evaluating the information, and then choosing how to respond, does not tally with the pace of conversation. Before you know it, the conversation has moved on and you haven’t had a chance to contribute or respond. I found this frustrating at first, but gradually I have learnt that it becomes a faster, more automatic process over time and with practice. The scientific literature does seem to support a relationship between mindfulness, authenticity and well-being. One study that combined crosssectional and time-lagged measurements found that the association between authenticity and subjective well-being was in fact mediated by mindfulness skills (Zheng, Sun, Huang, & Zou, 2020). Two specific facets of mindfulness were accountable for the majority of this association, namely, mindfulness-describing (the use of words to describe inner experience) and acting with awareness (attending to the present moment). This finding suggests that mindfulness, and specifically those two components, may underlie the psychological mechanism linking authenticity and well-being. The authors suggest that mindfulness-describing is linked to authentic self-awareness, while acting with awareness is more relevant to authentic self-expression or action. This is an important finding – although there may be multiple pathways from authenticity to wellbeing, mindfulness may offer one mechanism that can be tested experientially. Exploring further The relationship between mindfulness, authenticity and well-being may be far more complex than a simple mediation of mindfulness between the other two. Most research to date in this field has been with neurotypical participants. In my experience, mindful awareness and the stepping back that comes with it allows me to appraise my instinct to camouflage, and to be aware of my real, often conflicting, instincts. If I have time and capacity, I then have the choice about my behavioural response and whether or not it conflicts with the social norm. I can choose to try to reach a semblance of my

Eroding the sense of self – from Professor Francesca Happé

‘I have lovely friends, who are very supportive…but it’s not me they like, they don’t know me at all – just the mask that I wear.’ These words, from a 16-year-old girl who received her autism diagnosis a few years earlier, brought home to me the impact that camouflaging can have on autistic people. As well as being exhausting – like speaking a foreign language 24/7 – masking and camouflaging can erode the sense of self. And if no-one sees who you really are, how can you develop self-esteem? In our recent research on compensating and camouflaging, led by Dr Lucy Livingston (who recently won the BPS Neil O’Connor Prize), we’ve found that autistic young people who compensate a lot – i.e. appear more ‘neurotypical’ despite persisting difficulties understanding others’ minds (failing theory of mind tests) – report more anxiety than those who compensate less (Livingston, Colvert et al., 2019). Our qualitative study of compensatory strategies also highlighted the costs of camouflaging: ‘I feel like I am acting most of the time and when people say that I have a characteristic, I feel like a fraud because I’ve made that characteristic appear’, said one female participant in her 40s (Livingston et al., 2019). ‘Putting on a performance’, as many participants described compensation, was linked to ‘a diminished and uncertain sense of self’. The wider cost to mental health also emerged as a major theme; autistic people, and particularly women without intellectual disability, are at greatly elevated risk of suicide (Hirvikoski et al., 2019). Given that camouflaging is thought to slow recognition and diagnosis of autism, and therefore provision of support, helping autistic people to drop the mask – as Eloise discusses – seems important. That’s where we can all play our part, since camouflaging is often driven by negative responses, ostracism and bullying by neurotypical people. A greater understanding and appreciation of autistic differences might mean that autistic people could take off the mask. Livingston, L.A., Colvert, E., Social Relationships Study Team et al. (2019). Good social skills despite poor theory of mind: Exploring compensation in autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 60, 102-110. Livingston, L.A., Shah, P. & Happé, F. (2019). Compensatory strategies below the behavioural surface in autism: a qualitative study. The Lancet Psychiatry, 6(9), 766-777. Hirvikoski, T., Boman, M., Chen, Q. et al. (2019). Individual risk and familial liability for suicide attempt and suicide in autism: a population-based study. Psychological Medicine, 1-12.

authentic, autistic self, or choose to blend in and try again another time. Of course, we are all individuals, and what works for some may not work for others. I have learnt to be accepting of my efforts to socially camouﬂage – I cannot break the habit of a lifetime in a couple of years. But I am also learning to be open to new experiences, to try to drop the mask when it is safe to do so, and to appreciate that the consequences of not camouﬂaging, of being more authentic, can improve my overall wellbeing. Rogers asked, ‘am I living in a way that truly expresses me?’ I’m not sure, but I am excited to explore it further.

‘The aim of the game is to support kids’ Dr Rob Webster on working with schools to maximise the impact of teaching assistants on outcomes in children with special educational needs. As told to Annie Brookman-Byrne.

Between 2005 and 2010 we ran a large-scale multieffect of this high support for long periods of time is method longitudinal study at the Institute of that kids become dependent on it. They get used to Education called the Deployment and Impact of the TA telling them the answers. So it’s this model of Support Staff study, or DISS for short, which was inclusion that we have drifted towards over the last 20 commissioned and funded by the then Labour years, where it’s a common sense idea that TAs provide government’s Department for Children, Schools and individualised support for kids who need it most. It’s Families. The background to it was a policy drive well intentioned, and you can see the logic to it, but that had led to the increase in teaching assistants once you really put it under the microscope it raises (TAs) helping out in the classroom and outside of serious questions about whether that is in the best the classroom. This was an attempt to ﬁnd out the interests of the kids who are on the receiving end. impact of that policy in terms of teacher workload The other side to it is that there were positive and pupil outcomes. outcomes for the teachers in terms of their workload As far as we can tell – and the world has had about and job satisfaction. One of the drivers of this 10 years to prove us wrong – this is the largest study whole policy area was to try and stem the ﬂow of ever in the world on this particular topic. What we teachers leaving the profession. Whether or not found was that the kids who got the most support from it achieved that, we don’t really know for sure, TAs did less well in core subjects of English, maths and but we do know that it helped teachers with their science, compared to kids who didn’t have any support workload problems. So on the one hand, great policy at all or only a fractional amount of support. for teachers, but on the other hand, unintended The kids with Special Education Needs (SEN) are consequences for children. most affected, because they’re the ones that have the most support. It’s not because they have SEN that they don’t make as much progress as everybody else, nor is Applying the research in schools it because of other characteristics like prior attainment We knew where the fault lines were. We knew where or deprivation, and it turns out it’s nothing to do with schools were not getting it right. This is not a blame the TAs either – it’s all to do with game here; it is just to say that we unintentionally ineffective decision can see the problem for what it is. making around deployment. School “This is not a blame game The work I’ve done subsequently, leaders and teachers just don’t here; it is just to say that through Maximising the Impact of really know how to run the lesson TAs (MITA) has been underpinned we can see the problem with the TA in there – they just by the evidence and driven by for what it is” direct them to sit with the kids a practical application of the who struggle and hope for the best. research. How does a Special There’s no time for the teachers and Educational Needs Co-ordinator TAs to meet, so the TAs, who don’t have any particular (SENCo) or headteacher make sure they’re getting the training, are in quite a reactive position. best value and impact from TAs? We’ve been on this Years ago, quite often local authorities would run mission now for about nine years. We set up MITA an induction programme for new TAs. But we don’t about six years ago, and what we’ve been doing is see those anymore, and there’s nothing at the national formalising that as a process and trying to engage with level. If a school wants to do an induction programme schools to put it into practice. for new TAs then it’s almost entirely up to them, and of Another interesting parallel to this is the interest course it will vary. in using evidence in schools, and what the Education The other point was that TAs tend to focus on task Endowment Foundation (EEF) has done to bring completion and task correction, and the cumulative that to the awareness of school leaders. At the EEF

the psychologist march 2021 teaching assistants Russell Sach

Dr Rob Webster, Centre for Inclusive Education, UCL Institute of Education Find Rob’s article on the pivotal role of TAs in the coronavirus catch-up strategy at https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ teaching-assistants-are-pivotal-successful-catch-strategy

the phone was ringing off the hook about TAs, the evidence was completely at odds with what schools thought and what they experienced. They wanted to know how it could be that TAs were having a less than positive impact on learning, and what they could do about it. And so the EEF got in touch with us and we put this guidance together for schools. I now refer to it as our calling card. This guidance has been in the system for about ﬁve years now, and something like 80 per cent of headteachers are aware that this guidance exists and/

or have used it. It’s very practical and it stems directly from our research. The use of TAs causes this sort of separation between the supported pupil, and the teacher, the classroom and their peers – so the more support they get from the TA, the less they will have from the teacher. That’s a really important plank of the explanation for our results in the DISS project. Then the second main strut is the interaction – the TAs doing the work for the kids and not creating the space for independence. And then the third bit is if teachers

and TAs are not given the opportunity to meet together to plan, then the TAs are in this reactive position. They don’t quite know what they’re doing and the teachers are not planning with the TAs in mind. So there’s a three pronged attack if you like, and there were some very clear recommendations in the guidance. The guidance is actually very intuitive for school leaders because on reflection it’s not a huge surprise when you carefully unpack the findings. The main issue is that it’s really hard to do. And the point that we’re at now is that we’ve completed a randomised controlled trial (RCT) that was funded by the EEF and independently evaluated to test these methods. We provided in school support and we trained all the TAs and the teachers. We chuck a whole barrelful of resources at them and say, ‘this is what you need to do, and we will help you as best we can’. My main question is, can you move schools away from those practices we know are ineffective and harmful? We don’t just want to neutralise the problem, we want to try to get some benefits. We completed this trial, and the logic is to see whether or not any of this makes an impact on pupil outcomes via changing the processes. The EEF like to measure things in terms of academic outcomes, which is fine. But we see the direct impact of MITA in terms of improving pupil independence. That’s the bit we’re aiming for, that’s the bit we’re trying to change. The hope is that that will then knock on into pupil impact. In a nutshell, the aim of the game with MITA is to get TAs working with kids to support their independence, helping them to scaffold their own learning, and be in charge of the learning process. And that, it turns out, is not something you can do just by training TAs. You have to do a heck of a lot of work around it with school leaders to get the right conditions for that to happen.

Beyond ‘what works’ There has been a lot of attention on what works, rightly so. But one of the things that happens when the focus is on what works, is the pressure of resources, time and accountability forces schools to look for things that show impact quickly. It narrows the ﬁeld of stuff that they would perhaps want to do – something that’s cheap, that’s going to show an effect within six weeks. And what works is important, but what I have learned through MITA is that the how is equally, if not more, important. The way this revealed itself is that in our guidance we tried to answer the question ‘what works?’ but what started to emerge from school leaders was the question ‘how do we do it?’ And that started another line of inquiry within our RCT. We have 128 schools in treatment and a business as usual condition. Of the 60 or so schools who are in the treatment condition, they have all received the same thing. The same materials, the same training. Yet we can tell there is variability in terms of how far schools have gone for it. You’ve got schools who have really just got it,

A growing ﬁeld of research around TAs When I did my undergraduate degree, I got myself a part-time job in a secondary school as a TA. Then during my Master’s course in social policy I was TAing in a primary school, so I got a feel for the job. I was uncertain about what focus to take for the thesis, and I just thought – well, write about what you know. It still feels like research on TAs is maturing, but back then it was really quite scant, and I was struck by the fact that this is not something that has been looked at. And then it was just a case of being in the right place at the right time. I got into the research side of things through my Master’s, and not long after that, a research post on the DISS project came up. And I’ve been clinging on by my ﬁngernails ever since! The DISS project, from a research point of view, has been the gift that keeps on giving. There’s been so much in it and so much coming out of it, and so much has been developed off it. It’s kept me interested and kept me going.

absolutely bought into it and are giving it 100 per cent. In their own observations, outside of the formal evaluation, they are saying it’s having an impact. And you’ve got other schools who just haven’t really got out of the starting gate with it, and the question for me is, why is that? That cannot solely be a function of MITA, that has to be something else. So for me, what works is important but let’s not lose sight of how it works. ‘What works’ is driving the research agenda a lot, that’s where the money is. You’ve got to come up with something that shows you have impact. Yet descriptive research, which describes the classroom, the naturalistic picture, tells us how these pictures change over time and differ between settings. If we focus too much on what works, we might take our eye off the ball of the context in which things do or don’t work. There’s a very strong case that the not so exciting research that describes the world is also really important, and we should continue to make space for that. A dispiriting picture for SEN The reports from the National Audit Ofﬁce and the Education Committee that came out in 2019 are pretty damning assessments of the current situation and the impact of SEN reforms in 2014. Those reports really paint quite a dispiriting picture for SEN, although there is other evidence from parent/carer forums that does suggest there are families for whom the reforms are now working. We are not learning enough about where it does seem to have been successful. Whatever the response is, it’s got to involve more money, I can’t see any other way around it. But it’s not just about the money, it’s how you spend it, it’s to do with ethos and values as well. You cannot buy yourself into inclusiveness. Unless we get a cultural shift you can just throw money at this until the cows come home. The money is important but trying to tell a better story about inclusion, and why that matters and why schools should support it, is essential too.

the psychologist march 2021 teaching assistants

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By 17, my dream of becoming a ballerina was over. I had pursued grace and beauty, the perfect balance of gentle artistry and powerful athleticism. Now my hips were torn – along with my self-esteem…

the psychologist march 2021 dance

Joining the dance

Lucie Clements wonders why there aren’t more applied psychologists working with dancers

We are Minding, 2018). While cautiously noting the uring my early experiences use of self-report measures, these statistics seem to of dance, I had reaped all indicate a slightly higher incidence of mental health the documented benefits of concern in dancers than the general population. participation – musicality, selfWith 75 per cent of the US sample having no access expression and social cohesion to any form of psychological support through their (e.g. Lovatt, 2020). Eventually, dance school or company, it is clear that dancers’ my experience of dance had psychological needs are not being met (We are become one of autonomy Minding, 2017). suppression, as is often reported in research (e.g. Morris, 2003). By 2005, my once positive relationship with dance was changing. A need for applied psychologists That same year saw the publication of a UK survey Few schools or companies make use of regular of 1056 training and professional dancers’ health performance psychologists, and engagement with and wellbeing. It highlighted that somewhere in the psychology could be more embedded into the curricula process of moving from dance as a hobby to dance and culture. While some dancers do have access to as a professional pursuit, dancers were experiencing mental health support via a counsellor or psychologist, negative psychological effects from their investment. this is often not reflected in teaching behaviours, for Ninety-two per cent had experienced a concern with example. So, the question remains… Why are there their psychological wellbeing in the last 12 months, and 47 per cent had no access to psychological support so few applied psychologists working within dance schools and companies? (Laws, 2005). And importantly, in an industry I wanted others to truly which is highly represented by enjoy dance, to experience dance “…why is the field of self-employed or freelance dancers, teachers who understood and dance psychology not how can we provide support to drew on psychology. I still have the copy of my UCAS form, where I recognised the way sport those individuals? Much of the literature wrote of that passion for bringing psychology is?” demonstrating the psychological psychology to dancers. Over a challenges associated with ballet decade later I have achieved my participation at both the vocational secondary dance dream, as a Senior and professional level draws upon well-supported Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Chichester, theories and concepts from sport (e.g. Quested & with an expertise in dance psychology research, and Duda, 2012). Indeed, dancers and athletes face many applied work with dance schools and companies. But similar stressors – training for 40+ hours a week, applied psychology and provision of mental health performing multiple times a day, job instability, support is still overwhelmingly absent from the dance high risk of injury, pressure to remain a low weight, scene. You can see concern regarding psychological likelihood of a short career and many more workplace wellbeing in dance in the news; from a 2018 story stressors. According to the BPS, ‘Sport psychology’s in The Times citing the exit of a third of employees predominant aim is to help athletes prepare from English National Ballet due to ‘verbal abuse and psychologically for the demands of competition a hostile working environment’, to a 2019 scandal of and training’, yet few dancers outside of large ballet children being encouraged to smoke to remain thin in companies have this support for what are often very Vienna’s State Opera Ballet Academy. similar demands to those faced by athletes. While no UK-based evidence has been published Despite these similarities, there are also clear since the 2005 survey, findings from Australia and the challenges in drawing parallels between sports and USA suggest little progress. One in three Australian dance. Many sports can be reduced to objective values, dancers report a mental health concern, as do 75 per such as finishing position or rank, distance travelled, cent of US-based dancers (van den Eynde et al., 2016;

or time taken. Objective factors such as degrees of ﬂexibility or jump height can be used to assess optimal performance in dance, but dance is predominantly evaluated through less objective criteria. While dance undoubtably relies on the athleticism and strength of a sportsperson, success as a dancer also emphasises aesthetics and beauty; factors which make dance inherently subjective. These differences necessitate the growth of psychology for dance.

Dr Lucie Clements is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chichester l.clements@chi.ac.uk

Low locus of control The focus on the body for aesthetic purposes implicates an array of additional factors, including the dancer’s stage presence, emotional responses and fluidity of movement, many of which can be assessed in terms of the impact on the audience, rather than the individual’s specific, quantifiable attainment. All too often, casting decisions are made using a highly personal criterion, such as simply having the wrong hair colour or something entirely outside of one’s control (e.g. breast size, leg length). In some dance genres, the use of weigh-ins remains common, with dancers asked to lose weight or risk losing a contract. As a result, dancers often report very low locus of control over their successes and failures, which may contribute to poor psychological wellbeing or the likelihood of developing mental health problems. Unsurprisingly, with this scrutiny of the body, training and performing in tight Key sources clothing, plus continued exposure to mirrors, eating disorders develop Clements, L. & Nordin-Bates, in around 16.4 per cent of training S.M. (2020). Inspired or inhibited? and professional dancers (Arcelus et Choreographers’ views on how classical al., 2014). ballet training shaped their creativity. Journal of Dance Education, 1-12. Dance is first and foremost Laws, H. & Apps, J. (2005). Fit to Dance an artistic, creative endeavour. 2: Report of the second national inquiry My own research has highlighted into dancers’ health and injury in the UK. the benefits of childhood dance Dance UK. participation for developing creative Lovatt, P. (2020). The Dance Cure: The thinking (Sowden et al., 2015), surprising secret to being smarter, stronger, happier. Short Books. but in reality, many professional Minding the Gap. (2018). Retrieved dancers feel that their creativity is 28 June 2020. https://www. stifled. Ballet, in particular, is very wearemindingthegap.org/survey-results focused, emphasising technical Morris, G. (2003). Problems with ballet: drilling, repetitive practice or Steps, style and training. Research in imitation of a teacher, within a Dance Education, 4(1), 17-30. Quested, E. & Duda, J.L. (2011). relatively formulaic class structure. Antecedents of burnout among elite As such, many dancers experience dancers: A longitudinal test of basic perfectionistic concerns which needs theory. Psychology of Sport and in turn limits their creativity and Exercise, 12(2), 159-167. self-expression (e.g. Nordin-Bates, 2019). This emphasis on similarity Full list available in online/app version. and conformity also threatens

wellbeing, particularly for women. Dancers experience autonomy suppression, or thwarting – there is a clear hierarchy, where dancers are expected to be unquestioning of teachers and choreographers. A number of studies have identified that this is of particular concern in ballet. A recent media storm centred around the question, ‘Where are all the female choreographers?’, identifying the low number of female choreographers or women in positions of leadership. This led me and my colleague Dr Sanna Nordin-Bates to explore this issue in more detail (2020). We interviewed eight professional dancers turned choreographers to establish how their creativity had or hadn’t been nurtured, finding differences in experiences between genders. Women experienced substantial autonomy suppression throughout their training and careers, with ballet requiring females to be more obedient and disciplined than their male counterparts. One of our female participants said of her experiences of dance training: ‘The idea was wear black … and don’t stand out. Just look like the girl next to you as much as possible, be in line. Then you won’t get shouted at. You know, if you don’t hear your name, it’s good.’ Men also had little room to think creatively or to express themselves, and face psychological concerns regarding homophobia and bullying (Risner, 2014). Providing support There is hope for change in the provision of psychological support for dancers, particularly due to the work of One Dance UK’s Healthier Dancer Programme and the National Institute of Dance Medicine and Science. They bring academic psychologists like me into a diverse range of dance schools and organisations, where I give psychoeducational workshops to dance teachers, performers and students. In these workshops I share how to provide a task-involving motivational climate, how to manage symptoms of performance anxiety or how to reframe teaching pedagogy to minimise emphases on perfectionism. While much of this work remains within ballet and musical theatre schools and companies, I have recently worked with the hip-hop theatre collective Far from the Norm through the process of the Olivier Award winning production BLKDOG. This company is one of the first to access a psychologist for support through

the psychologist march 2021 dance

their tour. We have worked together to discuss how to prepare for and recover from intense rehearsals, how to manage the stresses of a hectic touring schedule and how to integrate self-care into their schedules. While many of these principles are ones that promote general health and wellbeing, the context is highly specialist and the ever-shifting artistic and creative demands are substantial. As a classically trained dancer myself, this has challenged my understanding of the demands on the company and creative director. This is a call to arms for researchers to recognise the need for psychology in dance, and to support dance in the same way that we support other performers. An uncertain future There are many areas of dance which are yet to be explored within the dance literature. Published works overrepresent employed ballet dancers, to the neglect of the wide variety of other dance genres, from hip-hop to musical theatre, and the vast number of freelance dancers. Each dance style comes with an accompanying history and culture that informs its practice. For example, while ballet emphasises replication and preservation of tradition, contemporary dance values openness and a greater acceptance of alternative body shapes. Many areas of dance, such

as musical theatre, tap, South Asian and commercial dance forms are entirely under-researched. There is still an absence of mental health and psychology support in dance. There needs to be greater awareness about the need for it, and greater investment in dance psychology in order to keep our dancers healthy and the art form alive. Working alongside One Dance UK, I am now replicating Laws’ 2005 survey to see just how far we have come in the last 15 years in dance and psychological wellbeing. Covid-19 has been particularly challenging for dancers, many of whom have been furloughed, and face continued uncertainty about their job security. I have seen a huge spike in dance schools and companies reaching out to me for education to support dancers who are currently experiencing high levels of anxiety. With many theatres not due to open until 2021, much of the workforce remains unsure whether they will have jobs to return to. Many graduating dancers, who have committed their entire adolescence to rigorous dance training, and have very little other identity, may face very low chances of ﬁnding employment. I have worked with them to understand how they can regain personal control over the situation and remain focussed on their professional goals. But those who have had support are few and far between. Now more than ever, we need to talk about psychology in dance.

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Pathways y og to psychol Part one

Interviewers Laura Oxley (University of York) Hannah Evans Lucy Atkinson (University of Roehampton) Elizabeth James (Counselling Psychologist in Training, Teesside University) Tom Bichard (Chartered Counselling Psychologist)

Interviewees Eve Smyth (University of Cambridge) Hannah Paish (University of York) Daniela Marinova (University of York) Jonathan Fancett Clare Wakenshaw (Teesside University) Bairavi Selvarajah (University of York) Hakan Sahin (University of Rohehampton) Alice Wharton (Oxford Brookes University) Oyindasola Famodou (UCL) 58

‘if you don’t want a career in clinical psychology, then you’re kind of lost… I knew I wanted to study psychology… I didn’t know where it was going to take me…’

Why psychology? Madeleine Pownall and Ian Florance introduce stories from the next generation When you’re 18 years old and faced with the task of choosing a career path, the business of deciding what to study at university is a tricky one. Psychology, as we know, is a wonderfully accommodating subject at undergraduate level, which typically attracts everyone from aspiring clinical psychologists, to wannabe teachers, to the ‘not-sure-what-I-want-todo’ students. To dig deeper into the future of our discipline, we spoke to nine final-year Psychology students who are (possibly) currently teetering on the edge of a psychology career. We recruited a pool of diverse interviewers who got to work discussing the experience of finding, exploring, and journeying through psychology with them. The interviews, which occurred in the early days of Covid-19 in 2020, provide useful, fascinating, and often unexpected insights into how and why psychology attracts so many undergraduates every year. We will revisit these final-year students in one year’s time and discover what the journey to and through psychology may look like for this new cohort of our discipline – the impact of Covid, students’ perceptions of the graduate job market, and the life shifts that occur during this time. To kick off the series, we share stories and insights on perhaps the most challenging and important question of all: ‘Why did you decide to study psychology?’ Job focus Perhaps unsurprisingly, a common answer throughout our interviews was, quite simply, ‘to be a psychologist!’. Several of the students who we talked to were drawn to psychology with relatively specific psychology career goals in mind, including final-year student Jonathan Fancett. For Jonathan, the interest in psychology as a degree subject was sparked by a keen interest in becoming a social worker. ‘My parents were foster carers at the time,’ he explained, and a degree in psychology helped to put him firmly ‘on the path to becoming a social worker’. Similarly, for final-year psychology undergraduate student Daniela Marinova,

the psychologist march 2021 careers

psychology’ with ‘being a psychologist’ (whatever ‘being a psychologist’ may mean) was echoed throughout the interviews. Eve Smyth, a final-year Cambridge student, shone some more light on this. She explained ‘when I first started studying, I think I definitely wanted to become a psychologist. I wasn’t really sure which one but probably something quite clinical. But as I studied it more throughout my degree, I don’t think I want to go down the route of becoming an “actual psychologist”.’ This idea that there are people who work in psychology as well as actual psychologists is an interesting concept. Eve went on to explain that her future dream graduate job ‘doesn’t need to be explicitly psychologist but something related to people and about human behaviour’.

Daniela Marinova

the journey was also inspired by a speciﬁc interest in one career path. Daniela said she ‘always saw myself as going into the clinical psychology ﬁeld after university, but that kind of changed.’ This experience of deciding to study psychology to become a clinical psychologist or mental health expert echoed throughout our interviews. Interviewees described at some length the process of being drawn to psychology with the preconception that a ‘career in psychology’ leads to a career as a clinical psychologist, before learning more about diverse career options. Bairavi Selvarajah also described the lure of clinical psychology: ‘if you’re not interested or you don’t want a career in clinical psychology, then you’re kind of lost, which is what happened to me. I knew I wanted to study psychology. I didn’t know where it was going to take me, so I didn’t think that far’. Despite her new-found open mindedness for her career, Daniela explained how being drawn to psychology originates from a desire to be a clinical psychologist, perceiving it as a ‘necessary component of that career path’. This idea of associating ‘studying

Eve Smyth

Open goals Whilst some of the students we spoke to had relatively clear-cut career goals, at least in the early days of their journey, others had a less clear vision. For many of the interviewees, the decision to study psychology Oyindasola at university wasn’t necessarily motivated by the lure Famodou of a specific career. As psychologists, we often think that attraction to the discipline must be motivated by lofty promises of ‘changing the world’ or ‘doing some good’. In fact, our interviews demonstrated how the open, transferable, applicability of psychology as a subject often lured students in, during those early days. For example, Oyindasola Famodou, a final-year undergraduate, reflected on their decision. ‘I didn’t really have an end-goal in mind,’ they explained, ‘I just don’t know what I want to do with my life’. This featured in an interview with a final-year MSc Health Psychology student, who explained how she perceived health psychology to be ‘…like a stepping-stone’. They explained that the decision to study a Master’s was motivated by a desire to have the ‘the skills, recognised qualifications’ to be able to ‘make changes that I want to make within Jonathan healthcare’. Fancett The transferable nature of a psychology degree certainly has wide appeal. For example, Hannah Paish, a final-year student, described her experiences of shifting interests throughout the degree after arriving to the subject with an open mind. ‘When I chose the subject, I chose it because I was interested, not because I had any future goals,’ she described. During the course of her studies, Hannah became interested in going into a career in mental health, but now she doesn’t see herself becoming ‘a psychologist’. She

explained ‘I used to think I wanted to be one. I used to want to go into mental health’ but ’can’t really remember why’ she changed her mind along the way. She now hopes to work in project management or data analysis. Hannah went on to describe how ‘people really underestimate the availability of jobs for psychology graduates… I think there are way more jobs available than people realise. It’s just realising what skills you’ve got and how you can utilise them in different areas.’ Personal motivations It was notable that throughout the interviews, the students we spoke to often discussed the end-goal of their psychology degree almost implicitly when asked why they chose to study the subject at university. However, some, particularly those who arrived at Higher Education on a less linear trajectory, were drawn to the subject for more personal reasons. For example, Hakan Sahin, who started his Psychology and Counselling degree later in life, had a more speciﬁc interest in pursuing psychology. Hakan explained how his main motivation was inspired by his disabled daughter: ‘by studying Psychology and Counselling I wanted to be able to understand my daughter better and thereby help her, and children like her with their psychological struggles through my possible future research projects.’ Hakan elaborated on this,

Alice Wharton

Hakan Sahin 60

Hannah Paish

then related this experience to other people: ‘I have noticed that other people come to study psychology and counselling because of their own issues, thinking they will heal themselves by gaining psychological knowledge.’ Similarly, Alice Wharton described her unique journey into psychology, which too was prompted by personal events. She initially planned to study medicine but, after a horse-riding accident, had to retake her exams. During this time, she began to notice changes in her cognition and mind. She explained how experiencing these changes sparked a fascination with ‘what might actually be happening. And quite how powerful the brain seemed to be.’ She then decided to change her planned career path and started ‘searching for new degree to pursue’. She explained: ‘I was looking around for something similar to medicine – in the sense of a scientiﬁc study about people. And then I came across psychology and really started to become very interested in the fact that essentially, as they say, it is the study of mind and behaviour.’ Sparking an interest The provision of psychology education at pre-tertiary level was, also perhaps unsurprisingly, a key factor in the decision to pursue a career in psychology. After all, how do students know to look for a psychology degree if they’ve never been introduced to the subject? Given that psychology is typically taught at A-level, but rarely before, the window of opportunity to engage students with the subject is relatively narrow. Bairavi Selvarajah, a ﬁnal-year student, described this experience: ‘when I was at school, it was only taken for A-level, and you only learnt it for two years. So, it was quite limited in terms of what they can teach you in two years. I think I realised I want to carry on studying this even more…That’s probably what sparked my interest’. This resonated with Hannah’s story; she explained how ‘they didn’t do psychology GCSE at my school. They only did A-level and I can’t really remember why I chose it. I think I just had some internal instinct that I was going to enjoy it, and I

the psychologist march 2021 careers

did.’ Alice also described how her school was ‘very helpful with encouraging an understanding of what psychology really was’. She explained that, without this encouragement and information, her perception of psychology was previously misguided: ‘In my mind, it was quite similar to, maybe, yoga! I really didn’t know that much about it. And then I started looking into it more. I found a talk by Elizabeth Loftus on false memory, and I really started to understand that this subject was actually so different to what I thought it was.’ For others, the lack of psychology representation at pre-tertiary level meant that their journey had to ‘ﬁnd its own way there’. For example, Daniela explained her experiences of schooling in Bulgaria: ‘psychology is not something that is advertised or promoted there as a degree, but it always struck me as something interesting since I was quite young. At some point I just decided that I wanted to study it and I thought that would be a really interesting course with a lot of transferable skills’. To add to this, Daniela shared her story of being implicitly discouraged to pursue psychology. She described her experience of expressing an interest in a psychology degree at school: ‘when you would say that you want to go and study psychology, people would… look down on you. It’s not something that’s as well praised as doing a law or a medical degree.’ People Our interviews also captured more nuanced journeys into psychology. For example, Clare Wakenshaw, a ﬁrst-year trainee counselling psychologist, worked for 20 years as a secondary school teacher before deciding to make the switch to psychology with a conversion degree. ‘I was always kind of in awe of nurses and doctors and occupational therapists and everyone in health really… I always thought “Oh wow,

Bairavi Selvarajah

Clare Wakenshaw

I wish I could work with those people”, but I didn’t believe that that was ever an option for me. I thought it was too late.’ Clare was then predominantly motivated by a desire to be a clinician, fuelled by an interest in developing the ‘person skills’ that she had fostered during her time as a teacher. She explained: ‘I really wanted to be a clinician and the primary goal was to learn specific skills and models and ways of working… I think that I felt that in my personal experiences and previous work I had developed some of the necessary skills and values… But I didn’t have the option to do more because there wasn’t enough time in the school system to really be able to engage those skills in the depth I wanted to. And I really felt strongly that I wanted more of an evidence base behind what I did.’ Many of the students we spoke to came to psychology due to a personal investment, a specific and well-defined career path, or, quite simply, a lack of other ideas. However, what united many of these stories was a fascination with people. For example, when Jonathan left education early he did not plan on engaging with any further study, but, to use his words ‘I felt like I had somewhat of an interest in people and I always had an interest in why they behaved the way that they behaved later on in my life’ and, therefore, this ‘burning interest in learning about why people behave the way they do’ made him decide to give psychology a try. Alice also echoed this sentiment: ‘I’m very interested in people; I love helping people, essentially. But also, I am very interested in what is actually happening in the individual and between individuals.’ Throughout our interviews, students spoke about ‘wanting to help people’, mental health, a desire to influence ‘policy and real change’, which were all influenced by a fascination with human behaviour. The next instalment in this interview series will uncover students’ thoughts of the future, and perceptions of the graduate job market.

‘We’ve got vacancies, and we’re missing out on the right people’ Catherine Dooley and Hannah Farndon introduce new advice on best practice in Psychology recruitment The British Psychological Society has produced new guidance on Best Practice in Psychology Recruitment. The document – aimed at anyone involved in the recruitment of applied psychology posts primarily within health and social care – rests on the assumption that fair and sensible recruitment will only happen with access to the widest pool of the candidates. In recent years there has been a welcome expansion of posts for psychologists, reflecting the wider range of areas where specialist psychological skills are valued and posts funded. These new roles may not fit the limited range of post titles used historically: a careful analysis of the necessary skills could increase the number of people who might best meet the requirements of the post. This is particularly relevant given that one in seven posts in the NHS are not filled. Psychologists were recently added to the shortage occupation list by the Migration Advisory Committee, indicating that there is a national shortage of psychologists, despite being one of the most popular subjects at undergraduate level. As well as reducing the access for service users to qualified practitioners, unfilled vacancies can also lead to posts being de-established or downgraded and the money taken out of psychology and used elsewhere, such as psychology sessions for a diabetes service being used instead for a specialist nurse. Best practice in psychology recruitment

GUIDANCE

6 January 2021

The problem A 2018 audit of psychology job adverts conducted for the BPS showed that 66 per cent of jobs in the NHS were advertised for clinical psychologists. Only 13 per cent of jobs were advertised so that psychologists of any domain could apply. In almost a third of advertisements, the job title did not match the essential criteria on the person speciﬁcation: for example, the title and job description indicated that an applied psychologist was needed, but only those with a DClinPsych qualiﬁcation were eligible to apply, or the title was clinical psychologist but in the essential criteria the role was actually open to other HCPC-registered practitioner psychologists. In over 90 per cent of cases, job titles did not include contexts of practice or an indication of the role other than ‘psychologist’. In addition, the Society’s 2019 member survey highlighted that 10.7 per cent of psychologists cite inappropriate recruitment practices as a barrier to entering the profession, and the Society has received numerous complaints regarding issues where psychologists are unable to apply for jobs due to the advertised title of the role.

Why is recruitment of psychologists complex? Recruitment in any field should be based on a competency framework reflected in the person specification and job description, and this should be followed through in advertising, shortlisting, interviewing and selection. For psychologists there are a number of reasons why this is more complex. Practitioner Psychology is a relatively new profession. Professionals working in health and social care were initially almost always clinical psychologists and the majority of registered psychologists are clinical. However, as the profession has evolved, its base has expanded leading to a broader range of professional training and areas of focus. The wider range of titles have been established for over 25 years and this was consolidated when the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) took over regulation in 2009. The HCPC approves postgraduate training programmes, completion of which confers eligibility to register with the HCPC and use one of the protected titles. NHS England historically recorded all psychologists as clinical psychologists, but from 2020 all practitioner psychologists are recorded under the Occupational Code ‘Applied Psychologist’ and under Job Role as one of the particular types of practitioner psychologists (e.g. health, counselling, clinical etc.). On their career pathways and in the years post qualification, many psychologists develop skills beyond their core training which fit them for a wider range of posts than may be assumed. This is recognised by HCPC in that registrants are not expected to maintain competence across all areas of initial training, but as required by their role – where they may have developed significant further competencies. Using one protected title in an advertisement may therefore directly limit the range of competent professionals able to apply for the post. Similarly, psychologists’ career pathways prior to qualification can be varied and may include experience relevant to particular roles. Another issue is diversity. Psychologists working in health and social care show limited diversity in areas that have been reliably measured – and specifically in ethnicity. Research is clear that a mis-match between staff and users of the service reduces the efficacy of the interventions. Those more recent areas of registered psychology do show a wider range of ethnic diversity and would be able to contribute to a more diverse workforce. This premise applies equally to other differences such as gender, sexuality or any other protected characteristic and beyond to any group who may be socially excluded.

the psychologist march 2021 careers

Recommendations The BPS and those in recruitment within its subsystems should work towards a long-term systemic solution to enable access to as wide a range of potential candidates as possible. This includes recommendations that: • Advertisements for psychologists use the appropriate title(s), based on the competences required to deliver the duties of the post. This will normally be an inclusive title such as applied psychologist/practitioner psychologist/ registered psychologist. • The advertised job specifies the context of the role (e.g. Child Mental Health, Diabetes Service, etc.). • The recruitment process includes a review of the essential and desirable criteria in Person Specifications to ensure they do not inadvertently exclude psychologists whose skills, knowledge and training would be appropriate. The guidance goes on to specify three options for the wording of advertisements: • an inclusive title as the default option, particularly where a service employs a range of psychologists and is able to accommodate a diversity of additional staff, where the post might be shaped around the skills and expertise of a range of psychologists, or where recruitment has been difficult and it is felt that training can support applicants from a range of backgrounds. • using multiple titles may be considered where there are obvious registered professions likely to be appointable, for example in mental health where posts are normally advertised as for clinical/counselling Psychologists, or in specialist services such as Children and Young People’s Development Disorders Assessment services where clinical or educational psychologists might be thought to be relevant professional groups. However, this may still exclude highly skilled candidates. • single titles, in the very few cases where only one title would apply. Neuropsychology is (for now) perhaps a special case as only specific titles can gain a qualification in this area, though this is expanding. This could be managed in the advert by specifying a qualification and/or experience in neuropsychology. Following the recommended advertising practices above will, in many cases, open applications to a wider pool of candidates. Including the context, appropriate knowledge, and experience, alongside the title will allow potential candidates to easily and rapidly select appropriate posts. This could match and complement the NHS England Coding structure – applied psychology posts would be advertised by the Occupational Code and/or Job Role followed by the area of work, for example ‘Applied Psychologist – weight management (Child Diabetes Service) Band 7’. People who recruit psychologists will demonstrate best practice by working to a competency framework and using inclusive job titles along with the context of the role within job advertisements. This will enable the most effective means of filling psychology posts with the best candidates. www.bps.org.uk/news-and-policy/ best-practice-psychology-recruitment

‘…the most efficient and effective way’ We heard more from Catherine and Hannah… What do you think tends to happen when recruiters in health and social care settings advertise a job? Most of the time you just get out a, standard person spec and you’re only allowed to tweak certain things. Psychology Managers are overworked, busy, and don’t have time to think it through. But what we’re talking about in the guidance is the most efficient and effective way of recruiting. We’ve got vacancies, and we’re missing out on the right people for them. Are different areas of Psychology really equivalent when it comes to working in health and social care? There’s a lot of prejudice around this issue, but there’s validity to some of it. Take clinical psychology: you know roughly what a clinical psychologist is. You know their training, placement, quality control, so they’re generally a consistent and reliable product. In some of the newer areas, it can be more variable. Some candidates may not have had a clinical placement in an NHS core service, and so may they may not have been exposed to the full range of clinical applications. This can create assumptions about the competence of different domains and there may be some gaps in relation to the full set of skills. But we need honesty around that issue, which we can then work on. There are now many options for addressing this with the expansion of online training and CPD. Aren’t we swimming against the tide though – in terms of the whole structure of the BPS itself, the discipline, training, protected titles? Are we even going to be able to practice what we preach ourselves? Having ‘Divisions’ and protected titles doesn’t go against the guidance, because that’s not what the guidance is. There’s a difference between saying that all the protected titles, the ‘domains’, are the same, and saying that some of them have overlapping competencies and therefore, individual psychologists may be suitable for a particular job, which is what the guidance is. We’re not trying to push people out… in fact, we’re trying to be inclusive, to make sure that psychologists with unusual career paths and the like are not inadvertently excluded, and that posts are filled. The only way we can practice what we preach is by sending the guidance to the place(s) where we advertise for psychology roles. It’s about long-term, systemic change. It’s about good recruitment. What are next steps? We are not going to sort this out immediately, and the Workforce Planning Advisors Standing Committee under the Practice Board is being used to oversee implementation. Membership is from the main domains of psychology and the devolved nations. Once that group is moving, we can be realistic about what we’re going to be doing – a dialogue to deal with the underlying issues. On a practical level, we’d look to write to recruiters, just to say ‘have you thought that by doing it another way you might open the role up to a wider pool of decent candidates?’ We could also develop a library of model job descriptions to assist recruiters.

Jobs of the month on www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk

Principal Clinical/Counselling Psychologist Essex County Council £51,510 to £55,000 per annum Colchester

Lead Clinical Psychologist Timeout Children’s Homes £53,000 - £63,000 Halifax, West Yorkshire

Clinical /Counselling Psychologist Dr Julian £42 per 60 minute session for the NHS and £75 for private patients United Kingdom

To view these jobs and more, please visit the BPS job site www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk

Remote HCPC registered Counselling / Clinical Psychologists and BABCP Accredited CBT Therapists We Have Full and Part Time Opportunities Salary: circa £39,000 - £43,000 dependent on qualifications and experience Hours: Between 22.5 and 37.5 hours per week – flexible to suit you! Base: Home location Our business is growing, and we are actively looking for Psychologists and CBT Therapists to join our home based, highly regarded award-winning team. When you join our group, you will become part of a growing team and wider network community of evidence-based clinicians delivering remote therapy interventions by telephone and secure video conferencing. We are committed to achieving excellent outcomes and our clinical leadership team will invest in you providing supervision and CPD to ensure that you grow as a clinician with us. We have an industry leading clinical governance & safeguarding structure, supported by a programme of continued digital innovation. If you are passionate about delivering clinical excellence and would thrive in a home-based role with high quality support, supervision and CPD we look forward to hearing from you! 64

Clinical/Counselling Psychologist My Online Therapy 55,000 - 65,000 United Kingdom

Job Role As a homeworking clinician delivering remote therapy interventions your primary responsibilities will include: Providing 1:1 clinical assessments and interventions via telephone and secure video to our customers. Managing an agreed caseload and a number of contacts per week. Ensuring that treatment is in line with NICE guidelines and evidence-based practice and tailored to each customer’s needs. Ensuring we continue to deliver excellence in clinical, work and satisfaction outcomes. Our Benefits include Flexible hours 33 days annual leave (including bank holidays) Contributory pension scheme IT equipment provided Life Insurance – 5x salary Enhanced maternity/paternity pay Company sick pay Opportunity to apply for sabbatical leave EAP Helpline Cycle to work scheme Referral payments for recommending staff To apply please go to: www.cbtclinics.co.uk/were-hiring/

www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk If you are looking for a change in career or just getting started, the BPS job site has the latest vacancies in all areas of psychology throughout the UK and overseas. Register on the site today to be notified of new jobs in your area. If you need to advertise your vacancies, please contact Krishan Parmar t: 01223 378 051 e: krishan.parmar@cpl.co.uk

‘…very welcome in Dorset’

Clinical Psychologist Part-Time (17.5 hours per week – flexible work pattern) Salary: Up to £51,000 pro-rata Benefits: 30 days' Annual Leave (rising to 35 days' with length of service) + Bank Holidays, Pension Scheme, Life Assurance & Employee Discount Scheme (all benefits to be pro-rata'd) Base Location: Wirral Covering Region: North West This is a fantastic opportunity for an experienced Clinical Psychologist to join a dynamic team who are committed to achieving positive outcomes for children’s and families. You will undertake specialised psychological assessments, treatments and other types of clinical intervention with young people and their families in their own home and other community based venues For an informal discussion please contact Myke Richardson-Hughes, Therapy Manager on 07967 381 035. Polaris Children’s Services is an Equal Opportunities Employer and we welcome applications from all backgrounds. We have also been awarded Disability Confident Employer status by the Jobcentre plus

Our team at The Chelsea Psychology Clinic are experienced psychologists and psychiatrists with long standing academic and NHS careers in addition to private work. We have grown from five psychologists and a consultant psychiatrist to over forty associate psychologists with several offices across Central London. We are experts in talking therapy and psychiatric medication. We are reliable and credible; our experience and values stand us apart from other practices. We are currently growing and developing the clinic space. As such, we are interested in enthusiastic candidates that wish to join our highly skilled professional practice. We currently have vacancies for fully qualified Clinical or Counselling psychologists, who are registered with the HCPC and wish to join the Chelsea Psychology Clinic as either a Specialist Psychologist or Highly Specialist Psychologist. We have 2 18.75 hour posts in total, pro rota salaries map on to NHS Band 7 and Band 8a equivalent. Whilst we are looking for psychologists that cover all specialisms and therapeutic modalities, we are particularly interested in candidates with experience of working with complex presentations, those with experience of or accreditation in Schema Therapy, eating disorders or couples’ therapy. It is an exciting time to be joining The Chelsea Psychology clinic as we developing both our clinical offer and associate model. Clinically, we are developing a group programme, starting with Schema and DBT groups, as well as setting up a research arm of the clinic, so there would be opportunities to develop your skills in these areas. In terms of the associate mode, we are also developing a CPD programme including Schema Therapy training as well as various supervision groups, including Schema, DBT and MBT. We offer monthly supervision, peer groups, team meetings and yearly events so you feel connected to a team and have various opportunities for professional development. Please contact Dr Zoe Knight, Clinical Lead, Registered Counselling Psychologist by email at recruitment@thechelseapsychologyclinic.com with a C.V. and cover letter to express your interest or for an informal chat. We plan to interview in February/March 2021.

Job Title: Clinical and Counselling Psychologists, CBT Therapists, and others Employer: Dorset Healthcare University NHS Foundation Trust ‘We’re looking for passionate and committed clinicians’ says Meherzin Das, Trustwide Professional Lead for Psychology and Psychological Therapies. Reading the role descriptions in ten different Dorset services certainly confirms that impression. What’s the culture of the Trust? ‘I’d describe it as forward-thinking, a PDSA cycle in perpetual motion! We have a strong clinical bent and use innovation to challenge traditional boundaries and processes. “Good enough” is a launching pad for us to aim for excellence. We have forums for leaders at all levels including our senior psychologists and also have bespoke networks for administration staff, BAME, faith-based groups and parents who are homeschooling, amongst others. As a listening organisation, ideas are always welcome and contribute to our clinical/corporate strategy. And while we work hard in the spirit of serving vulnerable people – some of our services are nationally recognised as centres of excellence – we support each other hugely as we do so because. Underlying all this is our commitment to empowering and caring for people – staff and service users alike.’ How has the pandemic affected your work? ‘Like most other organisations we had to improvise initially in order to keep providing high quality care to our patients. Within our psychological services, we definitely see some of our clients face-to-face, weighing clinical risk against the risk of infection as we do so. We’ve learned that doing therapy within a 2-D online world poses challenges, but has also facilitated engagement in hard to reach areas in unforeseen ways. Activities such as psychological assessment, are tougher to achieve online and despite the heroic efforts of our IT team, online platforms have a way to go in terms of functionality and access. We have a reflective practice group which facilitates thinking about our online approaches… creative solutions are very welcome! What’s Dorset like? ‘I love it! Dorset offers its residents a great quality of life. Because house prices may seem high for people moving into the area, we offer a substantial relocation package. With a population of 750,000 served by our Trust’s 5000 staff across approximately 200 sites, demographics and geography impact on the health of our population and are central to strategic planning of services. Dorset has strong communities – following a recent appeal, 2000 people volunteered to be community workers.’ You’re advertising a lot of jobs at one time. ‘It is often challenging to recruit psychological staff and as we continue expanding in line with our long-term plan, we are committed to working cohesively across services to synthesise our resources, of which the most valuable is… staff. Hopefully, our advertisement will help applicants understand the breadth and richness of our services. If you’re passionate about clinical practice, would enjoy working in a Trust rated outstanding by CQC, and get a rush from improvement and innovation, you’re very welcome in Dorset!’

Calling all practitioner psychologists and CBT therapists!

Steps To Wellbeing, IAPT CBT Therapists, Various bands Contact: Susie Marsh, CBT Lead, Bournemouth West Urban Locality Susie.marsh@nhs.net, 07920751677 Adult Psychology Service Practitioner Psychologist 8A Contact: Dr Lilian Garcia-Roberts, Clinical and Service Lead, lilian.garcia-roberts@nhs.net, 07766 364651 Early Intervention Service Clinical Psychologist 8A Contact: Simon Potterton Interim Service Manager, spotterton@nhs.net, 01202 584336

Dorset HealthCare is an Outstanding Trust to work for… and not merely because CQC awarded us that distinction! In line with our Trust vision, ‘Better Everyday’, our services are run by highly motivated staff who go the extra mile to care for vulnerable people at their time of need and work in partnership with our service users to empower them to live their lives meaningfully. Staff wellbeing is at the heart of all we do and we are leading on a comprehensive Wellbeing Hub for our Integrated Care System. Utilising national and local opportunities, we maximise training and supervision to upskill ourselves in line with latest evidence. You will have the opportunity to engage in QI, peer support, staff wellbeing and leadership programmes. We are closely linked to the Universities of Bournemouth, Southampton and Exeter, provide placements for under-graduate, post-graduate and doctoral programmes and are piloting the newly rolled out CAPs scheme. In addition to the usual benefits of NHS employment, Dorset Healthcare will offer you: O

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A generous relocation package of up to £5,000 to help you move to Dorset. For further details on relocation expenses please email dhc.careers@nhs.net Remote and flexible working to support your health and wellbeing The opportunity to work a split post across services to create richness within your role

Having attracted funding through local service reviews and national development of posts in a number of services, we are delighted to share the opportunities we have with you.

Rehabilitation And Assertive Outreach Team Clinical Psychologist 8A Contact: Dr Jon Boakes, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, jon.boakes@nhs.net, 07584 440888 Connection, Crisis/Home Treatment Teams Practitioner Psychologist 8B & 8A Contact: Tracey Marshall, Service Manager, tracey.marshall13@nhs.net, 07747 020136 Psychiatric Liaison Practitioner Psychologist 8A Contact: Tracey Marshall, Service Manager, tracey.marshall13@nhs.net, 07747 020136 CAMHS Clinical Psychologist 8A, Preceptorship available Contact: Dr Clare Young, Clinical Lead, clare.young2@nhs.net, 07342 076790 Older People’s Psychology Service Clinical Psychologist 8A Contact: Dr Sam Dench, Consultant Clinical Psychologist/Neuropsychologist, sam.dench@nhs.net, 01202 584440 Adult Learning Disabilities Service Clinical Psychologist 8A or B7, fixed term contract until 31.12.2021 Contact: Dr. Karen Sutton, Clinical Lead 01202 605875 Acquired Brain Injury Service Clinical Psychologist B7 Contact: Mark Smith, Service Manager, mark.smith68@nhs.net, 07585987873 Dorset Pain Management Service Practitioner Psychologist 8A, Psychotherapist B7 Contact: Mark Smith, Service Manager, mark.smith68@nhs.net, 07585987873

Please do check our jobs on https://www.nhsjobs.com/, or get in touch with our service leads to discuss individual posts or contact Mrs. Meherzin Das, Trustwide Professional Lead for Psychology and Psychological Therapies, MEHERZIN.DAS@nhs.net / 07748 952952 to determine just how rewarding it is to live and work in Dorset… we’re waiting to hear from you!

Changed at a stroke Frances L. Vaughan on writing with stroke survivor Jody Mardula

ody Mardula was the Director of the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice at Bangor University when she had a subarachnoid haemorrhage. We had got to know each other just a few months before, as university colleagues, when – by extraordinary coincidence – I was setting up a research project about acquired brain injury (ABI). The research looked at the impact of mindfulness, psycho-education and individual psychotherapy interventions on self-awareness and mood in people with an ABI and severely reduced awareness of their difﬁculties. Jody allowed me to use the centre’s mindfulness teaching materials and we discussed how they might be adapted for people with a brain injury. We had no idea that this was the start of a much longer and more personal conversation and journey together. The next time we met was another coincidence. I was working on the research project, seeing participants in the North Wales Brain Injury Service where I had worked as a clinician for many years. Jody was there to see one of my colleagues after her haemorrhage. I made a mistake and walked into the wrong room, the one they were using. Jody recognised me instantly, but had to tell me who she was. She looked so frail in the early days of

Frances L. Vaughan (left) and Jody Mardula

her recovery, and I was shocked to see how much she had changed. I started going to see Jody at home. We drank tea, talked, and laughed a lot; getting to know Jody was a total delight. There was no plan or purpose to this in the beginning, but I soon began to realise that our conversations offered a tremendous opportunity. Jody was unique. She was able to reflect so clearly on her experience and how things felt on the inside – undoubtedly aided by her long career as a psychotherapist. Relatively few people with a significant brain injury can do this, and I was captivated by her vivid descriptions. It took a while to persuade Jody that a book about her experience could be helpful for others in the same situation. She had no idea that she was unusual, but the idea grew on us both over time. Jody would write her story, based partly on the diary she had kept, and I would add my clinical neuropsychologist’s perspective. This commentary ended up in two sections. The first describes Jody’s cognitive difficulties, and provides some advice about the management of these problems – with attention, memory, executive function and perception.

the psychologist march 2021 books The second addresses emotional adjustment following a stroke or other brain injury: loss, grief and emotional distress, self-awareness, identity, acceptance, and the needs of the family after a brain injury.

‘I am in a different land’ Jody’s story revolves around a metaphorical journey, that we often refer to as ‘Over the Rope Bridge’. At this pivotal moment, Jody realised that she had been fundamentally changed by the stroke, and there was no going back. The rope bridge hung precariously between the old familiar world, and the strange, new world of post-stroke recovery that lay ahead. ‘I am in a different land – I realise that I cannot go back – I am changed – everything around me is changed – I can only go on.’ Jody’s powerful narrative takes us up into the mountains and down again into a new world, across a plain, into dark and foreboding woodland, and then to the edge of the woods where she built a camp and stayed for several years. Each part of the journey represents a distinct phase in Jody’s recovery, and then towards the end, the diagnosis of Jody’s vascular dementia. Jody illustrates her story with pen and ink drawings, she includes poetry that resonates with her narrative, and mindfulness practices that she developed to help her cope in daily life.

The hidden nature of brain injury Jody’s difficulties were more severe and more complex than I realised at first. In daily life at home, and later back at work, Jody struggled with things that could not have been detected by a formal neuropsychological assessment. Jody’s own awareness of her difficulties developed slowly, over several years. We were both oblivious to some of her problems when we set out on our book journey together – this so clearly illustrates the invisible, hidden nature of many aspects of a brain injury, an important theme in Jody’s story. Jody had significant problems with attention – she was easily distracted, and could not divide or control her attention. Conventional long mindfulness practices were impossible, especially at first. Jody’s new practices, which are included in the book (in print and as voice recordings) are shorter, simpler, less ‘wordy’ and based on elements that are more tangible. One of them, the Owl Practice, was created specifically for people with dementia, which Jody also has now. I could see Jody’s difficulties when things went wrong; Jody also understood them at the time, but could not hold onto that insight, describe it to others or avoid the same difficulty arising the next time. Jody’s narrative reflects the development of her self-awareness, and how challenging it was for her to construct a verbal understanding of her stroke. Despite this, Jody often describes her condition perfectly, using physical objects as powerful metaphors instead. She was a jigsaw in pieces, or an unravelled knitted jumper. Her working memory was an overflowing bowl of oranges; the

haemorrhage, a tsunami of blood ripping through the landscape of her mind and her memories. Many people are not fully aware of the consequences of their stroke or other brain injury. When this blind spot is severe, it can reduce the person’s motivation to participate in rehabilitation, and slow their recovery. Gently improving awareness can be an important part of neuropsychological rehabilitation. Fortunately, Jody had enough awareness of her difﬁculties to be highly motivated. Once her ability to plan and to organise herself started to return, Jody became an expert in her own rehabilitation. She had an intuitive sense of what would help at each stage, she combined mindfulness practice with cognitive rehabilitation in some very creative ways, and was determined to live as active and normal a life as possible.

Curiosity and acceptance Jody had a wide range of difficulties after her haemorrhage, ranging from a weak leg to subtle changes in executive control. Jody’s visual perception of faces, places and movement, many aspects of her memory, her capacity to filter and process sensory information, and to hold things in mind were significantly affected. Whilst Jody was sometimes bewildered and distressed by these multiple difficulties, she often brought an attitude of curiosity and acceptance to the changes she experienced. This attitude, which stemmed from her longstanding mindfulness practice, allowed her to turn instinctively towards an awareness of herself and her circumstances, even as she lay in hospital, in great pain. She paid conscious attention to her hands, her breath, or the coolness of the bed sheet, and this sense of being present, rather than caught up in panicky thoughts, brought some comfort at a very difficult time. Although Jody had the advantage of an established meditation practice woven into her life and work, we believe that people with a brain injury but no prior experience of meditation can also benefit from simple mindfulness practices. We have seen this whilst working with brain injury groups since our book was published, and I observed it many times in the research project. The practices can be soothing and relaxing, they can ground us, change our perspective, and break the loop of worry and concern. Jody’s story is eloquent, brave and moving, although not always easy to read. There is darkness and despair, there are uncomfortable truths about what recovery means, and about well-intentioned but misplaced reassurance from others. Jody was not ‘back to her old self’ or as recovered as people often assumed. But then, Jody’s capacity to empathise with people who did not understand her, to reflect on the emotional impact of setbacks and disappointments and start over again, is quite humbling. She brings her multi-talented life experience, including her career as a psychotherapist and mindfulness teacher, to a topic that speaks to us all… how to cope when a person – an identity and a set of abilities –is changed at a stroke.

www.pavpub. com/healthand-socialcare/healthmental-health/ mindfulnessand-stroke

‘The buried emotional tangle in the rag and bone shop’ Veronica O’Keane, Professor of Psychiatry and practising Consultant Psychiatrist at Trinity College Dublin, has her first trade book out now with Allen Lane: ‘The Rag and Bone Shop: How We Make Memories and Memories Make us’. Our editor Jon Sutton fired her some questions. When Psychologists are asked for the difference between themselves and Psychiatrists, they tend to focus on prescribing rights. From your own perspective, what’s the difference in how you approach the topic of memory compared with Psychologists? What a big question and one that we don’t ask very often. Starting with the general aspects, psychiatrists coordinate care and are by definition pragmatic, more focused on identifying brain pathology, whereas clinical psychologists dig deeper, bringing new insights to the personal aspects of disorders and illnesses, and help the team and the person understand in a way that is unique to the individual patient. Psychologists are very skilled at ‘translating’ whereas psychiatrists are primarily diagnosticians, prescribers and managers. In relation specifically to memory, my experience in clinical practice is that psychologists are skilled in understanding subjective problems in the context of the unique memory maps of the individual, and psychiatrists are skilled in differentiating primary memory problems from a cognitive difficulty secondary to psychiatric disorders. But I also see that both disciplines seem to battle away without great insight into the pervasive memory maps of psychotic experiences. Your metaphors around memory as a neurally coded experience – the flash of lightning that lights up a tree, the buried rag and bone shop of the past – are they essential in understanding memory as a conscious experience? Yes, I think so. Our conscious experience of memory is composed of multiple brain processes, many of which are automatically processed but are experienced as a unified whole, except if mentally ill when this unity of

conscious experience is broken down. If we want to understand memory, for example the pathological memories of PTSD, we need to encourage awareness of what is automatic, what is lighting up that they are not attending to, the buried emotional tangle in the rag and bone shop. This is really what introspective therapies like mindfulness and CBT teach us: to remove the outer clutter and focus on the underlying experience. You write that in writing the book you turned your back on intellectual explanations and eschewed theory. Was that for your own benefit, or that of the audience, or…? Thank you for pointing out this central aspect of the book. All our understanding starts with experience – this is how our brain formulates the world. Most theoretical explanations leave non-experts hanging in abstract formulations to which they cannot relate, and that includes also most experts, who stop questioning what it is that they are really exploring. It’s beautifully written, particularly for a first book… and for me it emphasises that to write an engaging professional book for a public audience you need to be a bit of a polymath, drawing on literature, film, poetry and art, on patients’ stories, on your own life… Was all that there in your mind from the start, or did one or other aspect come out more strongly during the writing? I didn’t write the book with any planned format: it emerged in this way because of how my memories have formed my way of seeing the world. The journey is a naturalistic one, I hope, for the reader. The mix of arts and science is completely natural for me. There was no mainstream neuroscience when I was doing my medical training, and only a limited piecemeal teaching in the neurosciences when I trained in psychiatry. Although subsequently I did a PhD in neuro-biochemistry, there

the psychologist march 2021 books

was no real vision of whole brain function. I knew intuitively that human experience originated in the brain and was drawn to the written and visual arts, music, and philosophy because the humanities describe and emote introspective experience. Did one aspect come out more strongly when writing? The poet has a special place in Irish culture, being traditionally seen as the memoralists of the times. Poetry is reﬂective and laconic and did emerge more than other art forms. You draw on fairy tales… do we risk forgetting a lot of ‘folk psychology’ understanding into our mental lives? I explain in the book that I was reared in the tradition of fairy tales and they were more real to me, and remain more real for me today, than the religious dogmas that were hammered home to Irish children in the uniform Roman Catholic education of 1960s and 70s Ireland. Ireland was a strange mix of catholic dogma and the unconstrained romantic expression of the living arts. I was drawn particularly to the fairy story form probably because it was pre-Christian, it was free from parable and meaning, and it was set in wild nature and local place. I still love the idea of the rag tree, where strips of cloth tied to tree branches, usually a hawthorn, signify a wish, a love, a person who is sick or who has died. There is a rag tree in Trinity College in the centre of Dublin where I work, and when I pass it I see the secret longings, losses and hopes of individual humans. Changeling babies is a common motif in fairy tales from around the world. The mother believes that her baby has been taken away by the fairies and substituted with a changeling, who usually has a similar appearance. Mother can tell that the baby is not hers, and knows that the fairies are tricking her. Another motif is that the mother is taken away by the fairies and replaced by an identical double. It struck me when treating women with postpartum psychosis that they often had delusions of substitution – that their babies were imposters, that their husbands had been replaced by identical doubles etc. – and this triggered memories of fairy stories about changeling babies. I have come to understand the hidden wisdom in ‘folk psychology’ and the real life value of fairy and folk tales as collective memory and wisdom being passed down intergenerationally. These stories make girls aware that bad things happen and to warn them that childbirth is sometimes associated with strange goingons. A central quote is from Louis Bunuel, ‘Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.’ Did writing the book increase your fear of losing your memory in later life? Reading it did for me! I think that everyone who works with the brain – whether a psychologist, psychiatrist, neurologist or neuroscientist – is fearful of losing their ‘mind’. This fear is justiﬁed because brain disease, like dementias, erode one’s

sense of self. It is also very painful for loved ones, and sometimes clinicians, to observe. In relation to non-pathological memory loss – mild cognitive impairment – I’m not terribly frightened about this because our abstract brain, our pattern recognition, improves with age, and more than compensates for memory efficiency. Our acceptance of inevitable decline, in my personal experience, improves with age because of expanding happiness, but perhaps I’m just lucky. You write of a memory of the warm summer of 2018, when you ‘swam in the sea and swam in memory’. Do you think it’s possible to have favourite memories that aren’t rich in the sensory aspects from the time? Does adding those details back in improve the memory? This question involves both the making and the recalling of memories. Yes, I do think that memories need some sensory animation to imprint and this has been well explored in the psychology of salience. It is important to add that sensory experience includes both external – exteroceptive – experience; and emotional – interoceptive – experience. You may light up internally at a relatively insignificant external event – this interoceptive event, the ‘lighting up’ is also a sensory experience. Sometimes we try to really remember how we felt when something happened and this does enrich the memory, it makes the event special because we are really creating a new experience from the memory. You write it is ‘becoming more apparent that brain and mind are one and the same’, yet many psychologists might argue that the underlying biological basis of many mental disorders remains elusive, along with breakthrough medical treatments. You do say in the postscript that ‘Psychiatry will be last to arrive at this point…’ I do believe that it is becoming apparent that the brain and mind are one and that this is the final frontier of dualism. It is also apparent that the biology – the biochemistry, the neurophysiology, the anatomy, the connectivity – remain largely unknown. We are trying basically to understand processes that are not available to consciousness. Yes, medics can give better treatments to repair pathology in the brain although processes remain elusive. Regardless of whether we will ever fully understand brain processes, it will remain impossible for a human to fully understand their own processes, one’s own mind. To do this one would have to be outside looking in. The best that we can do, and psychology excels at this, is to try, as far as possible, to observe the brain processes of another and help them see their own brains from the outside, as it were.

Professor Veronica O’Keane

Telling a human story

The Pattern Seekers Simon Baron-Cohen Allen Lane; £20

This latest offering from Professor Baron-Cohen goes further than contextualising autism as a strengths-based difference and begins to develop our understanding of the autism neurotype within the evolution of human ingenuity. Baron-Cohen advances his theory that the ‘systemizing brain’, an evolutionary shift that he dates to circa 70,000 years ago, in tandem with the ‘empathizing brain’, is responsible for the leaps in human capacity for complex tool-making and driving civilisation. The book is situated in an empirical mindset, in which ‘if and then’ logic (the systematizing thought structure) is at the top of the hierarchy of evidence and the ultimate expression of our intelligence as a species. The evolutionary timeline has been disputed by archeologists and primatologists: the Radio 4 podcast ‘Start the week’ has a good overview of the counter arguments in Baron-Cohen’s timeline and an outline of alternative theories. Cross-disciplinary refutation aside, celebrating the strengths of autism is ﬁrmly aligned with the goals of acceptance and being valued for difference, as opposed to pathologised. Minority acceptance is a core tenet of the fashionable Neurodiversity Movement, which was started by self-advocates and most famously researched and published by the sociologist Judy Singer in the 1990s. Baron-Cohen’s diligent work in exploring the genetics

And, but, therefore and more Science and storytelling are a powerful combination. In Telling Science Stories: Reporting, Crafting and Editing for Journalists and Scientists (Routledge), Martin W. Angler shares tips and techniques to improve your writing and presenting through telling stories. My favourite is a simple one – Randy Olson’s ABT (and, but, therefore). Angler shows how moving from AAA (and, and, and), a boring list of facts with no story, to ABT, creates an engaging narrative. Here’s my attempt in one sentence… Scientists need to share their work with a wide audience and in an engaging way, but this is a challenge when we haven’t explicitly been taught how to do this, therefore Angler’s book is a great place to turn for some guidance. Reviewed by Dr Annie Brookman-Byrne, Deputy Editor

Books online: More at www.thepsychologist.org.uk, including: Agents and anarchists: James Tresilian How you feel: The story of the mind as told by the body extract The snake on the cave wall: An extract from How to Be Animal by Melanie Challenger Hope for alienated parents: Parental Alienation – Science and Law by Demosthenes Lorandos and William Bernet, reviewed by Dr Sue Whitcombe A dystopian future: Water Must Fall by Nick Wood, reviewed by Sara Pisani Uncovering human nature through neuropoetry: Multilingual Neuropoetry by Jayanthiny Kangatharan, reviewed by Billan Omar

and neuroscience of autistic exceptionalism supports the goals of aspiration for the many autistic people who are disproportionately marginalised in homogenous educational traps. The National Autistic Society report that only 16 per cent of autistic people are employed, leading to lifelong poverty and poor health outcomes. The suicide rate of autistic people is significantly higher than the general population. Having spent nearly 100 years on the list of mental disorders, it is high time our profession recognised the value of autistic thinking as part of our natural human diversity. Baron-Cohen makes a compelling case that our entire profession should heed. Baron-Cohen helpfully renounces his previous ‘Extreme Male Brain’ terminology, and clarifies the difference between cognitive and affective empathy. However, he then reprises his psychometric tool research, the systematizing and empathizing quotient assessment (SQ & EQ), and the disproportionately high prevalence of SQ in males and EQ in females. Sex differences in autism research is at a critical juncture, since we are realising that many females are failed by psychological services, and more likely to be incorrectly diagnosed with anxiety or personality disorders. Professor Francesca Happé’s work has indicated that behavioural differences in presentation are not matched at the genetic level, hence the importance of understanding cultural determinism factors. Further, alternative etiological theories point to gender neutral differences such as connectivity and cooccurrence with ADHD, dyslexia and more. Autism gender discrimination has consequences for mental health, appropriate disability adjustments and career success, and the shift from extreme male brain to EQ/SQ does not go far enough to begin improving practice. Professor Gina Rippon’s work provides a balance to the sex difference arguments presented in The Pattern Seekers from the neurological point of view, and psychometrically one should consider the Barnum Effect and Stereotype Threat. Autism in general is becoming very dominated by high-powered STEM industries in which white, cis, straight, middle class males are already privileged. In this wider context, any assertions of biological determinism could inadvertently halt the acceptance of autism before it starts to improve the lives of women, LGBTQ+ and those from communities marginalised by race or poverty. The core strength of The Pattern Seekers is the telling of a human story, one in which being a few standard deviations from the norm should not infer disorder. Without a doubt, psychology and psychiatry need to move away from the self-fulfilling prophecy of deficitbased diagnosis, based on socially normed behavioural judgments. I hope that our psychology colleagues will be inspired to join the strengths-based research and practice agenda and further, help develop a more intersectional approach towards systemic inclusion of neurodiversity. Reviewed by Dr Nancy Doyle, CEO and founder of Genius Within CIC. Read the full review on our website.

the psychologist march 2021 books

The only series to be approved by the BRITISH PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY

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Life in the labyrinth Candice Williams and Sarah Beadle, trainee clinical psychologists at the University of Hertfordshire, discuss their podcast series, Life in the Labyrinth, with Associate Editor Chrissie Fitch How did your podcast come about? Candice: The idea came from discussing the commutes into university. As we were both unable to relocate for training, we noticed similarities in our daily routines in doing bits of work after the kids are in bed and thought about how to make use of our travelling time related to psychology in a more informal way. Sarah helpfully directed me to a well-established podcast based in the US called ‘Psychologists off the clock’. I enjoyed listening to the topics covered as they included personal experiences and reﬂections on their roles as parents and psychologists [Candice is Parenting Lead for the Division of Clinical Psychology’s Minorities in Clinical Psychology Subcommittee]. We joked at the time that this would be something cool to aspire to do when we are qualiﬁed, and now, here we are.

Sarah: I noticed that I always felt better after our chats. I felt less alone in the challenges of parenting alongside

training. Other people tried to ‘get it’, but unless you are on the course, it is hard to imagine the pressure that comes with training. I messaged Candice saying that we should write a book for parents who are also on DClinPsy training. We laughed because we knew parents wouldn’t have the time to read it. Then we thought about a podcast; something accessible to listen to on the commute or whilst doing other things on the evergrowing to do list. We chose ‘Life in the Labyrinth’ because we felt the numerous complex tunnels within a labyrinth symbolised how different people’s experiences of DClinPsy training can be. All of the courses vary slightly, and we would never have thought that we would have to endure a national pandemic during training! Our training journeys may differ in comparison to previous trainees or to trainees on other courses, but we all end training at the same central point of the labyrinth, when we complete training and qualify as Clinical Psychologists.

the psychologist march 2021 culture Have you got a favourite episode from what you have produced so far? Candice: The introduction episode – although it took a couple of attempts to record (due to working out tech stuff and laughing at one another), it set the scene for us and tapped into our many shared hopes and goals. It touched upon my personal values and it just felt so motivating to have snippets of this unique journey captured. Sarah: I love them all, but it would have to be a split between episodes one and three which covers maternity leave on training. Creating connections between trainees who can feel isolated by having a minoritised identity feels really powerful. Most trainees are of child-bearing age, so it felt important to reduce the stigma around taking maternity leave whilst training on a DClinPsy course. You both mention that you are parents of young children. Have the discussions you have had influenced your parenting in any way? Candice: Yes, definitely. As the kids are of similar ages, we have found ourselves often sharing experiences and things that have been helpful or unhelpful for each other. It has meant so much to be able to confide in someone who really understands the juggling of commitments and the systems in which we are working including academic and placement duties. In episode two we spoke a lot about points of similarity and difference in navigating schooling and overall wellbeing during the pandemic. Sarah: Definitely. For me, our discussions feel therapeutic. I find it easier to be more selfcompassionate. This helps me to be more present in the moment; to be able to ‘switch-off’ from the course and to be more patient. This has been hard whilst juggling competing pressures in my personal life and from the course, amidst a pandemic. This podcast has helped me through! Many, like myself, have been going through the process of applying for doctorates or PhDs whilst having to juggle various family commitments. Do you have any tips on this? Candice: The main tips for me are around owning your position, including points of strength and limitation. I have found that parenting in general unravels you as a person and helps you grow in ways you didn’t know were possible. Before having a family, you can think about all of the things you would want and hope for, but the reality can be very different, and I feel it has prepared me in many ways. I think this is similar for training: enter the process willing to go with the flow and discover things about yourself, ask for help if you need it and be compassionate to yourself. Things may not go to plan but do what you can and be proud no matter what. Sarah: Push back and challenge the view that having children could hinder your chances. A useful and important reframe is that parents have developed an array of valuable skills that are directly transferable to training and clinical psychology. Be confident and reflect on how

parenting will enrich your experiences. Clients, services and cohorts will be richer for having parents as part of their learning journey. Reflect on this in your application and interviews. Choose courses that value diversity. There are so many positives to being both a parent and a trainee (not just challenges!). It is so important that training cohorts reflect the populations that they serve. Over the last 7 years between 5-8 per cent of trainees identified as having dependents when they accepted a training place. It would be great if that figure started to increase! What do you hope to discuss on the podcast series in future? Candice: We are hoping to discuss experiences with guest speakers including the DClinPsy part-time training route, perspectives from trainee clinical psychologists who are fathers, our research journeys and hopes for qualified life. But we are also open to hearing and implementing our listeners’ views and ideas. It would be great if we can connect with as many people as possible and discuss wider narratives within the profession about parenting, so we really encourage people to get in touch with us! Sarah: We will also be talking to a single parent with lived experience of mental health difficulties who will reflect on her experiences of re-locating and starting her studies in the midst of the pandemic. Another trainee will be reflecting on how her chronic health condition and faith affects her experiences of parenting whilst studying. We have also been contacted by two clinical psychologists who would like to share their IVF journey. Another episode that we have planned will be focusing on tips for trainees who are single parents. It feels important to highlight that we aren’t representing any views from the course or the University. Our experiences are unique to us and our circumstances. Our aim is to continue connecting with other trainees who are parents, which feels so important due to ongoing social distancing, the lack of face to face contact with other people and the uncertainty around provision of childcare and education for our children.

Watch this space… We’ve started a monthly virtual space for DClinPsy parent trainees: email dclin.labyrinth@gmail.com or tweet @DClin_Labyrinth to join. We plan to develop a website to share relevant research, information such as ﬁnancial support for single-parents, trainee top-tips and podcast links. We hope to start a monthly blog for trainees to share parenting journeys during training. Linked to the podcast, the DCP Minorities in Clinical Psychology Subcommittee have launched a Slack channel to offer peer support for parents: contact us for details or tweet @MinoritiesGroup. Another useful resource for parents is the paper ‘considerations for people from minority groups in the covid-19 pandemic’. The podcast series, Life in the Labyrinth, in the form of 20-minute episodes, is available on Anchor and Spotify.

Sound of mind Jackson Musker on six mental health podcasts for psychologists (and anyone, really) For more than a decade, I’ve made my living in the land of podcasts. I write them, I research guests for them, I hem and haw over hums and half-botched edits. Back in 2007, when I began, I never would have guessed that this medium I love would grow into a signiﬁcant source of mental health conversations and information. Here are six podcasts that showcase the ﬁeld in surprising ways, and that might bolster your psychology practice (or simply make your afternoon a bit more bearable).

Food Psych There’s much to admire about Christy Harrison’s Food Psych, which tackles our relationship with food – from eating disorders, to body image, to diet culture and its perpetuation of shame. You could home in on Harrison’s mix of intelligence and compassion, as she draws upon both current health studies and her own history with disordered eating. You could laud her range of guests – people of all body sizes, races, genders, and mental health histories – which lends the show intersectional perspectives and nuance. (One example of many: guest Joy Cox unpacks how growing up in the Black church shaped her feelings toward food.) You could even applaud the show’s cheeky bleeping of calories and other metrics that often lead to unhealthy comparisons and selfloathing. But maybe the most impressive aspect of Food Psych is its relentlessness: in episode after episode (a whopping 250+ now), the show adds another salvo to its impassioned argument against diet culture, insisting that dieting’s emphasis on food deprivation does more harm than good. Browse the menu and select a few topics that might nourish you – or help you relate better to a loved one, or to a patient who’s struggling with these realities. And then have your ﬁll.

No Feeling is Final Some podcasts about psychology can feel, well, clinical: an expert in a given ﬁeld offers third-person advice. Honor Eastly’s No Feeling is Final (ABC) couldn’t be further from those. In her ‘memoir show’, the young Australian throws us into the thick of her struggles with suicidal ideation, self-harm, and anxiety (or, as she puts it, ‘ﬁretown in all my gooey insides’). Eastly carries her microphone everywhere. She records conversations in bed with her boyfriend – the one who hides her meds so she won’t overdose. She tapes phone calls with her twin sister – the one who brings her a framed photograph to liven up her hospital room.

(A nurse confiscates the glass, for safety reasons.) She even brilliantly re-enacts ‘The Voice’, as she calls it – the one inside her head that insists that she’s a failure and not worth saving. If this sounds like difficult listening, it is… but it’s also disarmingly funny, whimsical (that’s Eastly on the ukulele), and damning of a flawed system. To convey how maddening it can be to navigate mental health services, Eastly creates a nightmarish game show in which ‘winning’ simply means receiving a severe diagnosis. This episode, ‘The Vast Wasteland’, should be required listening for psychology professionals. What a way to walk a mile in a patient’s shoes! Again and again, Eastly admits that her podcast is simply ‘one person’s story’ and not to overgeneralise from it. But its specificity is also its superpower: it lets one person’s inner world – in all its messiness and mundanity and marvels – explode to sonic life.

Therapy for Black Girls Dr Joy Harden Bradford’s Therapy for Black Girls is part info hub and part safe haven for Black women of all ages. The licensed psychologist (and gifted conversationalist – is there a license for that?) delves into a staggering array of mental health topics with her guests. In one episode, she discusses how video games (hello, Animal Crossing) help players deal with pandemicinduced isolation and uncertainty – and how Black gamers can find kindred groups online. In another, she pins down definitions of ‘polyamory’ and ‘consensual nonmonogamy’ so that people considering entering into those relationships can have informed conversations with their partners. She hops from practical topics (how insurance plays into therapy payment), to political ones (how to manage anxiety during an election), to psychological primers (‘exploring bipolar disorders’). Though she occasionally offers up her own insights, her deep curiosity and unstuffy questions of guests do the heavy lifting, carrying these episodes to unexpected places. And throughout, it’s clear that she’s game to learn new things right alongside her listeners; her expertise doesn’t close the door to new discoveries. In fact, a door might be a fitting metaphor for this whole podcast: Dr Joy flings one wide open for a community too long shut out of mental health conversations – and welcomes her listeners into a remarkable shared space.

Terrible, Thanks for Asking Nora McInerny’s podcast was born of a simple idea: we

the psychologist march 2021 culture

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don’t talk enough about the tough stuff. We bury our insecurities, we muddle through grief, we claim we’re ‘fine’ when we’re actually, as the title says, ‘Terrible, Thanks for Asking’. (Full disclosure, I once worked for the podcast’s parent company, American Public Media.) To normalise not being okay, McInerny offers her mic to all manner of people ‘going through it’: the mother of an autistic Black boy fighting to find support for him, a ‘frat guy’ whose best friend and platonic soulmate died of cancer, an ex-Mormon who survived brutal gay conversation therapy. (The episode ‘Nathan’ remains a gut-wrenching stunner.) McInerny has a preternatural gift for commiseration. She listens with a sympathetic ear, chimes in with big-hearted humor, allows ample space for guests to cry or leave a sentence unfinished. Tuning in is like attending the ultimate support group. It’s worth mentioning that McInerny’s interest in tough subjects – and her skill in navigating them – come partly from her backstory: in the span of six weeks in 2014, she lost both her father and her young husband to cancer and miscarried a child. Now in the midst of a powerful second act, McInerny supports whole communities who are tired of pretending that they’re not in pain. No matter how you’re feeling right now, steep in these stories and find solace.

Heavyweight Time is a funny thing, but few people make it funnier – and more moving – than Heavyweight host Jonathan Goldstein. In each episode, the affable, eccentric Canadian helps someone investigate an unresolved question or deep regret from their past. Some of his forays are downright zany (one ends in the musician Moby’s living room, of all places), but they run the emotional gamut. In ‘Jesse’, Goldstein brings together a guilt-riddled driver and the bicyclist he struck, who surprises everyone with his response. In ‘Scott’ (maybe the best episode of all) an addict who once pawned a family heirloom for drug money hopes – with Goldstein’s help – to track it down and prove to his father he’s a changed man. Neat stories, you might be thinking, but what does this have to do with mental health? Apart from the fact that these narratives touch on depression, trauma, loss, and other psychological minefields, Goldstein’s relationships with his subjects are case studies in empathy and affirmation: he hears people for who they are. Therapy practitioners will find inspiration in his humane and selfdeprecating approach. (By the way, the show’s website also recommends professional therapy, claiming that Goldstein is ‘but a well-intentioned Canadian fumbling his way through dark and murky territory…he doesn’t really know what he’s doing’). But let’s not sell his work short, either: the stories we tell ourselves about the past

One hour of 120 bpm Diana Omigie experiences the virtual tour of ‘Electronic: From Kraftwerk to the Chemical Brothers’ from the Design Museum. All families are dysfunctional in some way Chrissie Fitch reviews Netﬂix science ﬁction thriller series, The Umbrella Academy. If you’re interested in writing ‘Culture’ reviews, keep an eye on Twitter @psychmag – where we often post opportunities.

can be immensely powerful – and frequently misleading. Sometimes it helps to have a kind Canadian get to the bottom of things and reframe those narratives for us.

The Sea in the Sky A bonus recommendation from yours truly! When I set out to tell the story of a marine biologist exploring a moon of Saturn, I didn’t think I’d be writing about panic anxiety syndrome. Then life intervened: midway through scripting The Sea in the Sky, I suffered a series of panic attacks that left me gasping for air. My face and fingertips remained numb for hours afterward; my body felt as if it’d been pummeled by Manny Pacquiao. I talked to my doctor and family members and finally to a clinical psychologist. She surmised that anxiety (long untreated), a recent life change (I’d come out as queer), and isolation had rendered my mind fertile ground for panic. With therapy and medication, the attacks dissipated, thankfully. But I didn’t want to stay quiet about them: I decided that my protagonist, Bee, would experience similar attacks, even as she boldly explores new worlds and makes scientific breakthroughs. I liked demonstrating that each of us (real or fictional!) contains multitudes, and that we benefit from opening up about our mental health with someone we trust. When Bee finally divulges her panic history, her co-pilot’s reaction takes her aback: he walks her through a breathing exercise he learned as a nervous young jet jockey. (The first-ever mindfulness technique performed in Saturn’s orbit?!) I hope that those of us dealing with anxiety, queer identity issues, loneliness, or any number of earthly situations might hear some helpful echoes in Bee’s predicament on her faraway moon… and realise that we’re not quite as alone as we fear. Happy listening! Jackson Musker is a Los Angeles-based writer and producer of public radio shows and podcasts. His audio drama, The Sea in the Sky, was named one of the Top 10 Audiobooks of 2020 on Audible, alongside work by Neil Gaiman and Mariah Carey (at which point his head exploded). Twitter: @jacksonmusker

Right time to remember the forgotten epidemic tv It’s a Sin Channel 4

Russell T. Davies doesn’t do happy endings. His fivepart series It’s a Sin, shown weekly on Channel 4 from 22 January, covers the first 10 years of the AIDS epidemic in the UK. It follows the lives of a group of young gay men, their friends and families, as news of a novel mystery disease starts to filter out through gay networks, the mainstream press, and then explodes in front of a largely unprepared and uncomprehending society. While the series cannot be described as happy in a conventional sense, it is full of laughter, sex, and fun, as well as loss and pain. The tears are mainly shed by the viewers at home, if these reviewers are in any way representative. It is however remarkable in showing the resilience and strength of individuals, communities, and families facing an evolving HIV epidemic. These human stories – as this authentic, masterful piece of television shows – could not be heard by everyone 40 years ago, especially by the parents of many young men. The series follows mostly the lives of three engaging 18-year-old gay men, Richie, Roscoe, and Colin, discovering their sexuality, abandoning their narrow worlds, and escaping into the bright lights of London. In the process, they discover sex, new communities, and friends – in fact, creating their own families of choice. It is the ordinariness of these young people’s lives that makes them so striking: there are no heroes, no successful activists, celebrities, or scientists, just people – initially somewhat self-absorbed – trying to make sense of a life that becomes increasingly more complicated as the episodes progress. A threat hangs over the characters from the first episode: could life come to an abrupt, perhaps even agonising end? There is a disturbing randomness to the way AIDS strikes down different characters. Acquaintances and friends ‘go home’, to use the euphemism of the series, to the bafflement and unease of their friends and colleagues. The main characters are soon heavily drawn into this unlucky roulette. Anticipating who will become ill or worse, and when, adds to the dramatic power, and the distress that many viewers, including ourselves, were left with. As we argue in our new book HIV in the UK: Voices from the Epidemic, it was along with allies like the wonderful

Jill in the series, that gradually this world began to change for the better. While initially allies were thin on the ground, and ignorance and a collective lack of humanity ushered in the beginning of the epidemic, powerful stories emerged about the involvement of the affected communities. Along with activism and sensitive care from healthcare workers, improvements were on the horizon, including medication, prompting one of the participants in our book to declare, ‘I now believe in miracles’. These stories continue to move us, sparking an outpouring of compassion that was in short supply back then. Themes familiar to us now in our Covid world are clearly visible: myths about the origins of the mystery disease; the void created by lack of information and confusing messages filled with misinformation; political incompetence; stigmatisation; initially unprepared health services; uncertainly about treatments; and guilt and shame, amongst many others. But most powerfully, horror at the unexpected and unwanted death of people at what should be the very start of their lives. For a death-denying society, these obscene and unnecessary deaths provoked powerful responses, not just of sadness and grief, but also of determination to fight for justice against discrimination and for the well-being of all people affected as well as their families. As the epidemic progressed and worsened, further creative responses to memorialise and celebrate the lives of those who hadn’t survived became part of the process. SILENCE=DEATH, and so our stories sparked life itself. Developing death literacy, the ability to acknowledge, face and discuss death, and as a result better value life, was an obvious creative consequence. The TV series shows the beginnings of the positive community responses of families and friends. Perhaps this is the only sign of a happy beginning, if not happy ending, at this early stage of the AIDS story. Communities came together to fight for and support those who became ill, as well as their families and friends, planting the seeds of significant shifts in public attitudes to sexuality and the affected communities to follow as the decades progressed. Appropriately, government and authority figures do not get much credit in the series, symbolised by the fate of Margaret Thatcher as fantasised by Davies. The performances are all excellent, but the tour de force of the acting of Keely Hawes in the final episode is something to watch out for. Perhaps Russell T. Davies could be persuaded to chronicle in a new series the following 20 years of the HIV epidemic, and draw parallels with our current pandemic. We are yet to learn many of the lessons of HIV, and the national calamity of the current pandemic will surely provide ample material. Jose Catalan and Damien Ridge are, together with Barbara Hedge, the authors of HIV in the UK: Voices from the epidemic (2021), Routledge, which examines the epidemic from the accounts of those who were there. See also Lessons from the ‘forgotten epidemic’ on our website.

the psychologist march 2021 culture

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Bringing professional training to your screens We miss seeing you in real life! Since the pandemic, industries and businesses nationwide have struggled, and the events industry is no exception. But we were keen to continue as many of our events as possible. And over 25,000 of you seemed just as keen, taking part in 156 online events since March. So we’re not stopping now. In 2021, our calendar of online events continues to grow, providing virtual learning across the many areas of psychology – check our website for the latest updates.

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We dip into the Society member database and pick out… Dr Cerith Waters, Clinical Lead Psychologist for Perinatal Mental Health Services in Cardiff and Vale University Health Board and a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University.

One book I vividly remember reading Children of the Dust by Louise Lawrence as a 10-year-old. It is a story about life on earth after a nuclear war, detailing the lives of successive generations of the same family who survive by mutating to their poisoned world. It is about loss, fractured family relationships, and ultimately survival. Whilst it terriﬁed me, it also opened my mind to the fragility of the earth and the human species, as well our innate drive to adapt and survive. On reﬂection, and putting the increased anxiety aside, I think it opened up a new compassion for the earth and all of its inhabitants, sparking an interest in environmental and social justice issues. One song At the beginning of the pandemic the NHS Wales Choir produced a rendition of A Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel. Hearing this while driving home from work one day was a completely overwhelming experience that somehow connected all of the emotions that I had been experiencing in response to the pandemic. I don’t think I will ever forget this day. I often listen to this song to help me process all that comes with being a parent of young children during a pandemic and working in the NHS and University sectors (https://youtu.be/WXISBPKrf2E). One inspiration That has to be the founder of the NHS, Mr Aneurin Bevan.

One thing psychologists could do better I don’t think we nurture or utilise the potential

one on one

of our graduates enough. Many become disheartened by the unclear career pathways and ﬁerce competition for opportunities – often spending many years trying to get a ‘foot in the door’ of a psychology profession. The expansion of the ‘psychological wellbeing practitioner’ and ‘graduate psychology’ roles in the NHS presents hope for talented and passionate psychology graduates who want to improve the lives of others. Now more than ever we need to forge clear pathways from psychology degrees into the health, education and social care workforce. One podcast The back catalogue of Desert Island Discs is a real treasure that never fails to provide me with much comfort and entertainment.

One nugget of advice for aspiring psychologists Pursue the initial interests that led you to psychology. Email researchers and clinicians whose work speaks to you, even if it is just to share your appreciation! It’s scary, especially if you are from a background where the concept of University is pretty alien! Be brave, reach out, and create opportunities, you never know which door will open. One proud moment Being part of the NHS response to the pandemic and ensuring the continuation of vital services for vulnerable parents and babies has to be up there. I felt so proud of how the families I worked with, my trainees and colleagues responded to the crisis. If you told me in 2019 that I would be delivering psychological interventions to parents and babies via the internet in 2020 I would probably have fallen off my chair laughing! One ﬁlm Into the Wild is based on the true story of a traumatised, disillusioned young man who sets off to live in the wilderness. Its awesome soundtrack, curated by Eddie Vedder, really conveys the emotional climate of the ﬁlm. More at thepsychologist.bps.org.uk

coming soon… time; cycles; plus all our usual news, views, reviews, interviews, and much more... contribute… reach 50,000+ colleagues, with something to suit all. See www.thepsychologist.org.uk/ contribute 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 at bargain rates: see details on inside front cover maybe you missed… …March 2013, Ross White, ‘The globalisation of mental illness’ …Search it and so much more via www.bps.org.uk/thepsychologist the

psychologist vol 26 no 3

march 2013

The globalisation of mental illness Ross White questions recent developments

Incorporating Psychologist Appointments £5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society

news 170 careers 216 reviews 226 looking back 234

how power affects the brain 186 involuntary autobiographical memories 190 the long reach of the gene 194 children and technology 200

Society Trustees www.bps.org.uk/about-us/ who-we-are

Find out more online at www.bps.org.uk

President Dr Hazel McLaughlin President Elect Professor Nigel MacLennan Vice President David Murphy Honorary General Secretary Dr Carole Allan Honorary Treasurer Dr Roxane Gervais Chair, Education and Training Board Vacant Chair, Practice Board Alison Clarke Chair, Membership Board Professor Carol McGuinness Chair, Research Board Professor Daryl O’Connor Trustees Chris Lynch, Dr Esther Cohen-Tovee, Christina Buxton, Dr Adam Jowett

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