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If you’ve read my Clinical Psychology Reflections , then you might be aware that The Psychologist Magazine by the British Psychological Society is a major source of inspiration from time to time. Yet The Psychologist never normally inspires podcast episodes, but in December 2024, they mentioned financial psychotherapy. I had never heard of this type of psychotherapy before but it focuses on improving people’s relationship with money amongst other important behavioural and psychological processes. Therefore, in this clinical psychology podcast episode, you’ll deep dive into what is financial psychotherapy, what does a financial psychotherapist do and much more. If you enjoy learning about mental health, the psychology of money and more then you’ll greatly benefit from this episode. Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Introduction To Psychotherapies: A Clinical Psychology Introduction To Types of Psychotherapy . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. Note: as always absolutely nothing on this podcast is ever any sort of official relationship, financial or other form of advice. What Is Financial Psychotherapy? This form of psychological therapy combines financial coaching and behavioural therapy to help clients improve their feelings, thoughts and behaviours around money. Also, this therapy helps to address the very real gap between a person’s financial health and money and their emotional health, and this is a very new discipline which is why a lot of people haven’t heard of it. The Financial Therapy Association was only established in 2010 so it is very new. To help clients with their attitudes towards money, financial therapists help people to understand their fears and worries around money, so this guides the client towards a lightbulb moment. As well as the difference between a financial therapist and a financial advisor is that a therapist explores the beliefs and feelings that a client has behind their financial habits whereas a financial advisor focuses on helping a person reach their financial goals. In addition, to become a certified financial therapist, both financial and mental health professionals can become one by meeting specific requirements in financial planning, financial counselling, financial therapy as well as you need to have therapeutic competencies. Also, in the United States, this certification comes from the Financial Therapy Association. However, I must note here that a financial therapist is NOT a protected title so anyone can call themselves a financial therapist regardless of the amount of training that they have done. This is good because it means there are financial professionals who aren’t credentialled therapists but they can still help clients with their money. Therefore, whilst this is not always a problem because there are a few behavioural therapists that focus on finance and do not have financial qualifications, it can be a problem because people without behavioural therapy or financial qualifications can and do call themselves financial therapists. You need to be careful of that. How Does Financial Psychotherapy Help People? Typically, a client who wants financial therapy has limiting beliefs about money and this can stop them from reaching their financial goals. Yet there are other impacts too. For example, sometimes these limiting beliefs stop people from enjoying the fruits of their labour too because they have fears round spending money or buying non-essential items. As a result, a financial therapist can help a client to identify their limiting beliefs and their emotions. For instance, some people, especially individuals who grew up in marginalised communities, have certain money stories that they tell themselves that developed in their childhood. These stories can hold them back or push them towards their goals. Personally, because of my childhood trauma and my social environment telling me that if certain people found out I was gay then I would be beaten, killed or made homeless. I was always very careful with money because in my mind, I needed to save it as much as possible so I could survive once I was homeless. That summed up my childhood, and even now, I don’t really want to dip into my savings at all, just in case I need it to survive once more. Equally, I come from a very poor and deprived area and have a lot of friends at university, so our attitude towards money is we need to be careful. Money has always been something that must be used wisely, but money is a tool to get us closer to things and activities that we enjoy too. Money is a balance. As a result, financial therapy can help clients to focus on their money story to identify their limiting beliefs, emotions and whether or not these emotions and beliefs are pushing them towards or away from their financial goals and improved emotional health. Financial Therapy Helps Start Small and Considers Passive Investing A smaller aim of financial therapy is to help clients take small steps towards changing their financial habits. For example, within financial therapy, a client could do research into whatever is making them uncomfortable. Like, in the United States, if a client wanted to get information about a 401K or a Roth IRA then they could investigate those options and then decide what their goals are based on that information. This would allow the client to move forward in a way that feels right for them, their life and their financial goals. Additionally, financial therapy can help clients understand passive inventing, a long-term strategy for building wealth by buying securities that mirror stock market indexes for the long term. For clients, passive investing might be a great way to take the pressure off themselves, even more so if they’re struggling to understand the complexities of the finance world. Since it’s a hands-off form of investing that means clients do not have to learn complex processes or take high risks that naturally come from investing. Forms of passive investing can include index funds, mutual funds or ETFs. In other words, passive investing allows compound interest to do the work for clients, because if they put a small amount of money into a mutual fund then it can be very energising to see their money start to grow. This can enable the client to take another step forward in their financial plan. Financial Therapy Helps Clients To Envision Retirement Finally, other clients can be very stressed about retirement and other clients still might not be thinking about retirement, because it is decades away. In these sorts of situations, recurring expenses take priority and other clients prefer to use their money to help them live in the moment. Again, if we bring this back to helping clients focus on their financial goals, if they struggle to take steps towards their goals, it might be because they struggle to focus on the future. This is where financial therapy can help them. Typically, financial therapy stresses the importance of compound interest because this helps clients to grow their money, and whilst inflation reduces the spending power of their investment over time. The longer a client saves for retirement, the better. One strategy that financial therapists might use to help clients in this regard is getting a client to imagine a person who is at retirement age and how they’re currently living. This can help a client to connect to the future so the client can envision what they want for themselves as well as put a plan together so they can achieve that retirement goal. Equally, it can be helpful for clients to think about future generations too. For example, getting them to think about steps they could take now to help their children and grandchildren be set up for success in the future. Clinical Psychology Conclusion In the Further Reading section of the blog post at the bottom of the page, there’ll be references for you to read more about this, but there is a relationship between poverty and mental health. Of course, financial therapy is not about poverty, it is about helping people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours round money to become more adaptive so the clients can reach their financial goals. Yet I am mentioning this poverty fact to stress that money does have a major impact on our mental health and emotional health. If a parent cannot feed their children, if they cannot afford to heat their homes, if they cannot afford to do fun things for their children when all the children’s friends can, that will negatively impact their mental health. That is only one example. I know from how bad Postgraduate Loans are in the United Kingdom that I am stressed and I am concerned about my ability to pay rent, food and my university’s tuition fees. Yet there is a reason I cannot mention publicly why I am stressed about the university. This is why I work a lot of Outreach work opportunities so I can get money to live on, because even though the business is going well thanks to you wonderful readers and listeners. I am still building the business so I really do not want to take money out of it for living at the moment. Money has a massive impact on our mental health. Therefore, at the end of this psychology podcast episode, I want to mention that financial psychotherapy, whilst it is something I would never focus on or want to be trained up in. I am glad there is a psychological intervention for people who are struggling with their cognitions and behaviours around money. As well as they can get help learning about passive investing, envisioning retirement, identifying their limiting beliefs and their emotions, and taking small steps towards their financial goals. I think the question I want to leave you with is, What are your thoughts about money? Are they pushing you towards or away from your financial goals?   I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Introduction To Psychotherapies: A Clinical Psychology Introduction To Types of Psychotherapy . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. Patreon for exclusive access and rewards Have a great day. Clinical Psychology References and Further Reading Archuleta, K. L., Mielitz, K. S., Jayne, D., & Le, V. (2020). Financial goal setting, financial anxiety, and solution-focused financial therapy (SFFT): A quasi-experimental outcome study. Contemporary Family Therapy, 42(1), 68-76. Blea, J., Wang, D. C., Kim, C. L., Lowe, G., Austad, J., Amponsah, M., & Johnston, N. (2021). The experience of financial well-being, shame, and mental health outcomes in seminary students. Pastoral psychology, 70(4), 299-314. Burns, J. K. (2015). Poverty, inequality and a political economy of mental health. Epidemiology and psychiatric sciences, 24(2), 107-113. Frankham, C., Richardson, T., & Maguire, N. (2020). Psychological factors associated with financial hardship and mental health: A systematic review. Clinical psychology review, 77, 101832. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/how-financial-therapist-shift-your-money-mindset Marbin, D., Gutwinski, S., Schreiter, S., & Heinz, A. (2022). Perspectives in poverty and mental health. Frontiers in Public Health, 10, 975482. Simonse, O., Van Dijk, W. W., Van Dillen, L. F., & Van Dijk, E. (2022). The role of financial stress in mental health changes during COVID-19. npj Mental Health Research, 1(1), 1-10. Smith, M. V., & Mazure, C. M. (2021). Mental health and wealth: depression, gender, poverty, and parenting. Annual review of clinical psychology, 17(1), 181-205. I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon  page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click  https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley  for a one-time bit of support.

Normally as an aspiring clinical psychologist, I don't really focus too much on how our biological processes and the nervous system impacts our mental health. I should focus on this area a lot more than I do because our physical reactions to trauma, anxiety and depression are very important. Instead I tend to focus on the psychological processes that interact with our physical processes to produce behaviours. Yet as I deal with my sexual trauma more and more, I've realised I can no longer ignore the impact our nervous system and the role it plays in our mental health. Therefore, in this clinical psychology podcast episode, we'll be focusing on window of tolerance, hyperarousal and hypoarousal during psychological distress. And how importantly we can get back within our window of tolerance to improve our mental health. If you enjoy learning about clinical psychology, biological psychology and the nervous system then you'll love today's episode.  Today's psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Biological Psychology . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. What Is The Window of Tolerance? This is a topic that has been critical in my rape counselling and once I understood this psychological concept, things started to get a little easier. You or your clients understanding the window of tolerance isn’t a magic bullet that will suddenly make everything better but it can be immensely useful in healing from trauma, including sexual violence. Therefore, Window of Tolerance was a term coined by Daniel J. Siegel who was a clinical professor at the UCLA School of Medicine. He created Window of Tolerance to describe the optimal emotional “zone” that people can best exist in so they can thrive and function in their everyday lives. When someone is within their Window of Tolerance then they have a sense of groundedness, openness, curiosity, presence, flexibility, an ability to emotionally self-regulate and a capacity to tolerate any stressors that pop up in their everyday life. However, either side of the Window of Tolerance are two different states where we do not function and thrive in our daily lives. These states are called the hypoarousal and hyperarousal states. When someone is in hyperarousal then they are in an emotional state that we can characterise as panic, anger, high energy, anxiety, irritability, overwhelm, chaos, hypervigilance, startle responses and fight-or-flight instincts. For example, I know I’m in a hyperarousal state running my panic attacks, anxiety and my thoughts running a million miles an hour about how unsafe I am and how I need to escape or I am going to die or get raped again. On the other end of the spectrum is the hypoarousal state where someone effectively shuts down and experiences numbness, withdrawal, depressiveness, flat affect, disconnection, shame amongst others. For instance, when I’m in a hypoarousal state (like an hour before I started writing this post), I was severely depressed, shut down and I didn’t want to move. I effectively wanted to play dead so I couldn’t be hurt again like he did to me that night. Why Is The Window of Tolerance Important? If we are outside of our Window of Tolerance then we cannot function and thrive in our everyday lives. For example, when my mental health died in August and September (and probably October) 2024 because of my rape, most of the time I was too hypervigilance, anxious and terrified to function on most days. I was always in a state of hyperarousal, or I was too depressed and shut down to function (hypoarousal). Therefore, when we’re in our Window of Tolerance, we can access all the prefrontal cortex as well as executive functioning skills we need to be able to thrive. Like, our ability to organise, plan and prioritise complex tasks that we need to complete. Also, being within our Window of Tolerance means we can emotionally self-regulate, start projects and actions and focus on them and practice good time management. These executive functions are critical to our functioning because they allow us to work, problem-solve whatever issues and challenges we face and they allow us to be present and work in our relationships. This is a major problem I had during my mental health crisis. I was too anxious, terrified or depressed to do much work, problem-solve and I wasn’t able to have or maintain many social relationships. I wasn’t able to do much Outreach work at my university because a lot of it was brand-new students and staff that I had never worked with before, and the specific type of Outreach activities, because it was the school holidays, were so different to what I was used to. I couldn’t deal with it. Then it was even worse for my own business. I couldn’t write as much, I couldn’t do a fraction of the business tasks that I needed to do and I can see the impact it has on my bottom line and the podcast audience. This is why being within our Window of Tolerance is so important. Moreover, we lose access to these skills when we’re outside of our Window of Tolerance   because we lose access to the prefrontal cortex and our executive skills. Since instead of relying on these brain areas, we default to panic, action or a freeze response. Sometimes this can even manifest as self-sabotaging behaviours so we might gravitate towards choices and patterns that undermine or erode our relationship with ourselves, others and the world. Ultimately, it’s important that we try to stay within our Window of Tolerance so we can support ourselves, function and live in a healthy way. Yet there will always be times in our lives when we fall outside our Window of Tolerance and we end up in some non-ideal emotionally regulated way. Thankfully, this is just a part of human behaviour and it’s natural and normal. Therefore, the ultimate goal of this podcast episode isn’t to make sure we never ever fall outside of our Window of Tolerance. That is never going to happen, but instead I want to show you why it’s important to expand our Window of Tolerance. This allows a person to effectively bounce back quicker and be more resilient over time, so we can better deal with being outside our Window of Tolerance. In my opinion, this is a critical area of mental health and trauma work because as my Window of Tolerance has expanded I have been able to deal with more and more. For example, I used to have thousands of triggers (probably not a joke) but everything has been toned down recently in terms of my PTSD. Like a few months ago, if I even saw a reference of sex in a film or book, my mental health completely died and I would have major intrusive thoughts and flashbacks. Now I can tolerate sex references and even the odd light sex scene in a film or book and I only experience mild intrusive thoughts and flashbacks. It's still a little distressing but it is nowhere near as bad as in the past few months. How Do You Increase Your Window of Tolerance? Whilst there are several effective therapeutic techniques and activities that can over time increase your Window of Tolerance, everyone’s Window of Tolerance is rather different because of a range of biopsychosocial factors. For example, whether or not you have childhood trauma and social support can impact the size of your Window of Tolerance as well as your physiology, personal history and your temperament. All these factors and more interact with each other to make your Window of Tolerance, and no two Windows of Tolerance will ever be the same.  As a result, it’s important to mention that people, like me, who come from trauma backgrounds will have a smaller Window of Tolerance than people who have not experienced trauma. This shrinking of the Window of Tolerance isn’t unique to any type of trauma, like physical, childhood or sexual trauma, your Window of Tolerance doesn’t discriminate. Trauma is trauma and it is the unfortunate gift that keeps on giving. The reason why trauma shrinks your Window of Tolerance is because trauma gives you triggers that are more likely to rapidly and more frequently push you outside your Window of Tolerance and into hypoarousal or hyperarousal. Consequently, it’s important that as part of trauma work (even though anyone can benefit from this knowledge) is that we work to expand a client’s Window of Tolerance. This allows the client to practice resilience and bring themselves back into their Window of Tolerance when you’re in a hypoarousal or hyperarousal state. The only reasonable difference in this regard between people with and without trauma is that a person with relational trauma might need to work harder, longer and dedicate more time and effort into expanding their Window of Tolerance. Personally, I can relate to this because it is normal for a person’s Window of Tolerance to expand as they get older, experience more things and stressors, and they learn more techniques without realising it about to bring themselves back into their Window of Tolerance. However, ever since I was raped and up until 7 months later when I learnt how to feel safe in my own body. I just couldn’t bring myself back into my Window of Tolerance and it required a lot of therapeutic work, a lot of effort and a lot longer than I wanted to to be able to bring myself reliably back into my Window of Tolerance. There are still times I cannot achieve this but 90% of the time I thankfully can. In addition, there are two main ways how someone can recognise that their Windows of Tolerance are unique and how to expand it. Ultimately, we need to understand the foundational biopsychosocial elements that contribute to a healthy nervous system and that’s why I flat out love Healing Sexual Trauma Workbook  by Erika Shershun because it handles this topic very well. Also, we can give ourselves this knowledge by providing our minds with supportive experiences. This can include providing ourselves with good amounts of stimulation, focus and engagement whilst we balance this with good amounts of play, rest and spaciousness. This was a mistake I made this week at the time of writing because I overbooked myself with Outreach work at my university so I had plenty of stimulation, focus and I was really engaged with helping students change their lives, but I didn’t give myself enough rest time. Hence, I found myself very outside my Window of Tolerance on two occasions this week. Moreover, we need to provide our bodies with supportive self-care. For example, we need to get enough sleep, exercise, eat nutritious foods, attend to our medical needs and avoid substances that damage our health. Since if our bodies aren’t looked after then our nervous system won’t be healthy and it will be easier to go outside our Window of Tolerance. As well as we need to provide ourselves with supportive experiences like being in a connected relationship and being connected to something bigger than ourselves. I know this sounds like religion and I suppose some people find this helpful, but you can be connected to other things greater than yourself. For example, I connect to my Outreach work at my university because I’m helping to inspire and show young people that it doesn’t matter what background or area they come from, if they want to they can go to university and thrive. As well as I connect to my books and my podcast because I am providing people with a psychology education, entertainment and hopefully I’ll inspire some people to enjoy mental health and clinical psychology as much as I do. You can connect to anything that you are passionate about. Finally for this first part, you can tend to your physical environment to set yourself up for success. You can do this by working and living in places and ways that reduce your stressors instead of increasing them. As well as you can design an external environment that nourishes you instead of depletes you. I did this when I moved into my shared house with my best friend back in June because as one of our housemates wasn’t moving in for another 3 months, I made their room my office (with their permission) and that was great for me. It gave me a stress-free, non-triggering environment for me to do what I loved. Secondly, we need to work with ourselves to cultivate and use a wide range of tools to bring ourselves back inside our Window of Tolerance when we inevitably find ourselves outside. You can do this by developing tools, habits, practices and internalised and externalised resources that help you to self-soothe, self-regulate and ground yourself. I’m smiling as I write as I write this because these are aspects of Window of Tolerance that I’ve been reading about lately in Erika Shershun’s book, and it’s very helpful to learn about. Maybe I’ll dive into these aspects of Window of Tolerance in a future podcast episode. Clinical Psychology Conclusion I cannot stress enough the importance of Window of Tolerance in trauma work, because it actually did change my life. There are a lot of concepts in clinical psychology that are useful to some clients but not all, and there are certain concepts that are useful to the vast, vast majority of clients. Window of Tolerance is certainly one of the latter, because it is a very useful tool for psychoeducation and explaining to clients why their body is reacting in the ways that it is. It was a relief to understand why my body was doing all these extreme trauma responses and it was nice to put a name to the psychological framework. Therefore, it meant now I understood what I was dealing with it, I could research, read and practice how to expand my Window of Tolerance and how to reduce the volatility of my nervous system. If I didn’t know about Window of Tolerance, I certainly wouldn’t be as far along in my recovery as I am now. Ultimately, the Window of Tolerance might “only” be a psychoeducational concept but it is an extremely powerful tool to use in clinical trauma work. Therefore, I unofficially suggest to my fellow aspiring and qualified psychologists that you embody this Window of Tolerance in your own life and especially in your clinical trauma work. Your clients and yourself will openly find it more useful and life-changing than you ever thought possible. I know I did, and that’s one of the entire points of our profession. Clinical psychology is all about changing one life for the better at a time.     I really hope you enjoyed today’s forensic psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Biological Psychology . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. Patreon for exclusive access and rewards Have a great day. Clinical Psychology and Biological Psychology References and Further Reading Brown, S., Rodwin, A. H., & Munson, M. R. (2023). Multi-systemic trauma and regulation: Re-centering how to BE with clients. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 1-18. Corrigan, F. M., Fisher, J. J., & Nutt, D. J. (2011). Autonomic dysregulation and the window of tolerance model of the effects of complex emotional trauma. Journal of psychopharmacology, 25(1), 17-25. Craparo, G. (2014). The role of dissociation, affect dysregulation, and developmental trauma in sexual addiction. Clinical Neuropsychiatry, 11(2). Gunter, E., Sevier-Guy, L. J., & Heffernan, A. (2023). Top tips for supporting patients with a history of psychological trauma. British Dental Journal, 234(7), 490. Hershler, A. (2021). Window of tolerance. Looking at trauma: A tool kit for clinicians, 23, 25-28. https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/making-the-whole-beautiful/202205/what-is-the-window-of-tolerance-and-why-is-it-so-important Jenkins, S. (2018). Increasing tolerance for calm in clients with complex trauma and dissociation. In Equine-assisted mental health for healing trauma (pp. 44-53). Routledge. Luby, R. R. (2024). Sexual violence: a trauma-informed approach for mental health nurses supporting survivors. Mental Health Practice, 27(4). Siegel, D. J. (2010). The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology). WW Norton & Company. I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon  page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click  https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley  for a one-time bit of support.

For the first time ever on The Psychology World Podcast, we are actually going to focus on business psychology and the great topic of job interviews. In the current job market, you simply cannot escape job interviews because a lot of people believe that they are good indicators of future job performance. Yet modern research published in 2024 shows how this is far from the case and more often than not, job interviews absolutely fail to predict a person’s ability to be an asset to the company, fit within the current team and how they’ll perform on the job. Therefore, in this business psychology podcast episode, you’ll learn how job interviews are failing us, the three main reasons why job interviews are not good indicators of future job performance and how can we improve the effectiveness of the recruitment process. A major purpose of business psychologists. If you enjoy learning about organisational psychology, the recruitment process and careers in psychology then this will be a great episode for you. Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Applied Psychology: Applying Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology and More to the Real World . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. How Are Job Interviews Failing Us? When we really start thinking about job interviews, we have to admit that they are really, really strange. For example, imagine you’re a world-famous singer being asked to judge a singing competition. The only catch is that you cannot listen to the singers actually sing, instead you can only interview them about their songs. That’s it. You cannot hear their singing performance, you can only talk to them about songs. It makes no sense, does it? That is effectively how job interviews have worked for the past 200 years. For some reason, employers believe that they can get to understand and predict future job performance by simply talking to someone about their skills. Or to use an example more relatable to the audience of this podcast, if we’re a mental health service looking for a new psychologist so we want to see how effective they are at delivering psychological therapies to clients, the only way to test their skills is to have them deliver a therapy to a client. Yet instead, our base level is to simply talk to them about what they might do and we’re only interviewing them about their skills. That doesn’t exactly give us much of a measurement of their actual skills in the real world, does it? Also, I should note here that I am not some jarred person who’s been rejected by interviews and failed them, so I don’t hate them. In fact, I get most of the interviews I’ve been for and I know how to sound good in an interview thanks to helping other students do interview preparation through my university’s Outreach work. Instead, I am just an aspiring clinical psychologist taking a look at the research behind job interviews. In addition, Wingate et al. (2024) published a meta-analysis with over 30,000 participants and found that job interviews do not predict future job performance. In other words, interviewing a future worker might not be a useful way to make better hiring decisions. Job Interviews Create The Myth of the Perfect Interview Question One of the main problems with the job interview is that a lot of people believe that if you simply ask the right questions then you will uncover the truth about a job candidate. This leads HR departments and bosses to create situational judgemental scenarios, behavioural questions as well as technical assessments that the employers believe reveal the perfect person for the job. In reality, the research tells a different story because whether or not you’re trying to assess a candidate’s behaviour, task-related skills or their interpersonal skills, interviews are still problematic. Since interviews show a low level of accuracy because structured as well as unstructured interviews don’t predict a candidate’s future performance. Moreover, you should know that job interviews are “okay” at best in terms of predicting broader contextual behaviours and task-specific skills. This suggests that the standard interview format might not be effective at best, or too blunt of a tool at worst, to capture the nuances that diverse jobs require. And I think if we apply this suggestion to our own profession of clinical psychology. The typical clinical psychologist never has two days the same, and they work with lots of different types of clients, some days are high-stress, other days low-stress. Some days a psychologist has to do lots of back-to-back sessions and other times they might be out of the office doing assessments or interventions in other settings. Also, some days they might be doing a lot of systemic work because of a particular client and another day they might be dealing with safeguarding issues. How can an interview possibly capture how a psychologist would handle all those different tasks? How could you possibly design interview questions to accurately understand how a psychology candidate would respond to each of these situations? Where is the measurement precision? On the whole, the problem with job interviews is that they are typically seen as a one-size-fits-all instrument for assessing a candidate’s capacity to do a job. Yet in reality, it isn’t possible to design interview questions that accurately demonstrate how a person will respond in the diverse situations that they will face in the job. Such as, what interview questions could you possibly create that would accurately measure how an engineer would investigate a Parcel Sorter failure or a sales representative’s client relationship skills? You cannot. Job Interviews Create An Illusion Of Accuracy Another important reason why job interviews fail people is because in a job interview, you sit across from a potential candidate for 60 minutes. Within these 60 minutes, you ask them a whole bunch of inaccurate questions designed to gauge their future performance and in reality, their job interview performance only accounts for 9% of variance in future job performance. That leaves 91% of variance uncounted for. In other words, job interviews fail to explain the other 91% of how well a candidate will do in a job in the future. This is completely overlooked by the interview process and you can compare it to trying to predict the outcome of a football game by watching the players talk in the locker room. As you can tell, I don’t know much about sports. Anyway, this failure to account for the vast, vast majority of the variance only goes to show that interviews are not valid ways to assess a candidate’s capabilities to do a job. As well as it is a complete and utter illusion that job interviews are accurate tools, and this can cost businesses dearly. Recently, me and a friend of mine were talking about his placement interviews and how they were going at the moment, and I learnt two things looking back. Firstly, I know he has the skills for a clinical psychology placement because he’s done audits, he’s worked with his mum at an IVF clinic and he has medical experience, at least a little. Also, we bonded over our love of clinical psychology so I know he has the skills, the passion and the potential to grow and benefit from a placement in an NHS mental health setting. Yet he hasn’t gotten a placement yet and he sent me some of the interview questions and they are just shockingly bad at gauging how he would respond in a real-world work environment. This is why interview questions are so inaccurate and bad indicators of how people would do in the real world. You only need to look around at your own workplace to see a few people who passed their interviews but are so, so bad at their jobs that you don’t understand how they’re working here. You know I’m right about that. Job Interviews Create A “Fit” Fallacy The main reason why I wanted to do this podcast episode was because my dad does a lot of interviewing as part of this engineering job. He is basically a manager in all but name and he tells me about his interviewing from time to time. Whenever he talks to me about “fit” and the person’s skills, I have to admit that I am always sceptical because I don’t understand how he can understand how people “fit” within his team when the candidate doesn’t always meet the other people. Sometimes my dad does take the candidate round the workshop, so that is slightly better. However, a final issue with job interviews is that there is a massive overemphasis within companies on a cultural fit. At first, this sounds like a very good idea because you want someone who aligns with your company values, believes in what you’re doing and fits the team dynamics so there is less conflict and people can focus on their work (and making the company money). Although, the issue with the idea of “fit” is that it leads to homogeneity instead of company diversity. Ultimately, this leads to the company workforce looking, thinking and acting alike whenever a company focuses on cultural fit. Again, this makes perfect sense because we are more comfortable round others who are like us in terms of similar backgrounds, interests as well as ways of working and thinking. On the other hand, this is a problem because it can certainly create an easy-going and harmonious workplace but just because someone fits into a company it doesn’t mean they should be working there. Cultural fit does not prove the candidate has the skills, abilities and experience to be working in the role they’re applying for. On the whole, whenever a company focuses on cultural fit, the company risks creating an echo chamber where new ideas and perspectives are very rare and this can make an organisation neglect the actual capacities required for an individual to perform, and for the organisation itself to grow and develop. A person’s true performance doesn’t rely on cultural fit alone, it actually relies on a mixture of cultural fit and most importantly, the candidate’s current skills and capacity to do the job well and their ability to grow in the future as they learn and develop their skills. For example, in my own experience, when it comes to other Student Ambassadors, every single one of them are near perfect cultural fit, but it certainly doesn’t make them good ambassadors. They might want to support students but they aren’t social, they don’t talk with the students and engage with them. Those are core aspects of the job. Most of the time ambassadors have to be pushed to engage with students or they just stand in the corner talking with their backs to the students. Thankfully, there are a lot more good ambassadors than bad ones, but still. If job interviews were so great then all these ambassadors who cannot do their jobs would not be getting in. Bringing this back to job interviews, this is only further proof that job interviews might be able to evaluate cultural fit, but they are very weak in predicting potential and future job performance. How Can We Improve The Job Recruitment Process? One of the main duties of a business psychologist is helping organisations with their recruitment processes, so I want to have a quick look at some ways to improve an organisation’s hiring processes to help overcome these issues. Firstly, an organisation can focus on past performance as a more accurate indicator of future job performance. An organisation can do this by digging and examining a candidate’s concrete accomplishments and how a candidate achieved these in the first place. This is drawing on real-world experience so you can see how a candidate has actually managed in the real-world workplace. Secondly, an organisation can use a diverse range of assessment tools in their recruitment process. For instance, they could use an assessment centre that uses a wide range of job stimulations, skills assessments and work sample tests to evaluate a candidate based on their actual job-related tasks. Also, the added benefit of doing this is that this method evaluates candidates on their job-related skills instead of their ability to perform well in an interview. Finally, organisations can focus on cultural contribution instead of exclusively on cultural fit. I mention this because an organisation could look for a candidate that fits their current organisational culture whilst making sure they can contribute positively and even go as far as enhance your organisational culture at the same time. Business Psychology Conclusion As much as I never look at business psychology, I have to admit that I think I will be investigating this subdiscipline of psychology over the course of the next year. I’ll be finishing my Masters in September and then I’ll be off into the world of work, hopefully a mental health job, and I love psychology because you can apply it to everyday life. Therefore, as much as I say I am not interested in organisational psychology, I actually think as I start moving into the working world and I can start to place some of the research findings into the world around me, I think my interest will only grow. For example, it’s been interesting learning about how job interviews are failing us because they create an illusion of accuracy, the myth of the perfect interview question and the focus on cultural fit. These are all problems that not only negatively impact job candidates, but the organisations themselves too. Thankfully, there are ways like focusing on past performance, focusing on cultural contribution instead of cultural fit and using a diverse range of assessment tools that can help organisations overcome these problems. And I think the most exciting thing about this topic is that jobs are meant to nurture a person’s potential, their skills and their experiences. As I try to gain more work experience in mental health settings, I am really looking forward to the future because I get to learn a lot, develop my skills and take another step closer to hopefully becoming a fully qualified clinical psychologist. Therefore, I’ll end this podcast episode by saying that all of us could be potential game-changing employees for a business as much as we might doubt it because of our current skills. Yet I want you to remember that always try to improve your interview skills because of the current state of the job market and recruitment processes, but just remember something for me. You, as the game-changing employee, might not interview the best, but your true potential is just waiting to be unlocked, developed and nurtured. You are probably so much better than you think, so keep applying to jobs, keep trying to become a psychologist and keep taking steps towards your dream career. It might seem impossible but you can get there. I believe in you, so please believe in yourself.   I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Applied Psychology: Applying Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology and More to the Real World . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. Patreon for exclusive access and rewards Have a great day. Business Psychology References and Further Reading Basch, J. M., Melchers, K. G., Kurz, A., Krieger, M., & Miller, L. (2021). It takes more than a good camera: which factors contribute to differences between face-to-face interviews and videoconference interviews regarding performance ratings and interviewee perceptions?. Journal of business and psychology, 36, 921-940. Oh, I. S., Postlethwaite, B. E., Oh, F. S. I. S., Postlethwaite, B. E., & Schmidt, F. L. (2013). Rethinking the validity of interviews for employment decision making. Received wisdom, kernels truths, and boundary conditions in organizational studies. Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040. Tippins, N. T., Oswald, F. L., & McPhail, S. M. (2021). Scientific, legal, and ethical concerns about AI-based personnel selection tools: a call to action. Personnel Assessment and Decisions, 7(2), 1. Wingate, T. G., Bourdage, J. S., & Steel, P. (2024). Evaluating interview criterion‐related validity for distinct constructs: A meta‐analysis. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 33(1), e12494. Zhang, D. C., Highhouse, S., Brooks, M. E., & Zhang, Y. (2018). Communicating the validity of structured job interviews with graphical visual aids. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 26(2-4), 93-108. I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon  page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click  https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley  for a one-time bit of support.

Dyspraxia is the last diagnosis that I received recently and it explains so much about my life, my “clumsiness” and a wide range of struggles in my life. Struggles that I was bullied for, judged and mocked for as a child and teenager. Yet even though I’ve done a little research into the condition before I got diagnosed, I don’t understand Dyspraxia at a deep level. Therefore, in this clinical psychology podcast, you’ll learn what is Dyspraxia, what are the symptoms and causes of Dyspraxia and how is it treated. If you enjoy learning about learning difficulties, clinical psychology and neurological conditions then this will be a great episode for you. Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Cognitive Psychology: A Guide To Neuropsychology, Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. What Is Dyspraxia? Dyspraxia is a neurological condition that impacts a person’s coordination and planning of their gross and fine motor skills. Although, it can impact perception, memory, information processing, judgement and other cognitive abilities too. As well as because the condition impacts so many different areas of the brain and body, Dyspraxia looks different in different people. Also, Dyspraxia is often used interchangeably with Developmental Coordination Disorder  because this is the most common type of Dyspraxia. Furthermore, Dyspraxia is typically recognised in early childhood when a child experiences delays in achieving “normal” motor milestones, like sitting up and crawling. Then the symptoms tend to last into adolescence and adulthood. For example, I needed extra lessons before school started to learn how to throw and catch, and as a teenager, I was mocked for being clumsy and having no coordination. In terms of coexisting with other conditions, Dyspraxia can exist by itself but it is often seen alongside conditions like dyslexia and autism, like I do, and ADHD too. And it’s important to note that Dyspraxia is not a learning disability but it can negatively impact a person’s ability to engage fully in social, professional and academic activities. For instance, Dyspraxia can impact a child’s working memory so they can experience a poorer performance in class. Therefore, it’s important for children with Dyspraxia to get a diagnosis so the school can provide specific and targeted accommodations so the child can succeed and thrive in education. In addition, according to the Dyspraxia Foundation, Dyspraxia is believed to affect anywhere between 6% and 10% of children to some extent with 2% of children being severely affected. As well as males are more likely than females to develop the condition. What Causes Dyspraxia? Overall, the cause of Dyspraxia isn’t known, but we do understand some of the risk factors. For example, according to the DSM-5, having a premature birth, low birth weight, exposure to drug or alcohol use during pregnancy and a family history of the condition all increase the likelihood of a person developing the condition. Also, if the client has another condition like ADHD, then this has a major impact on how Dyspraxia presents itself. What Are The Symptoms Of Dyspraxia? In terms of the symptoms of Dyspraxia, symptoms tend to appear early in life because babies with Dyspraxia can have problems with feeding and be overly irritable. Then when the babies reach toddlerhood, the child can continue to have problems with feeding and they can show other developmental delays. For example, people with Dyspraxia tend to have difficulties with toilet training, being unable to throw and catch a ball as well as they can refuse to play with toys or puzzles that require construction. For me, I flat out hated throwing and catching a ball because I was so bad at it. My primary school even required me to have extra lessons before school started because my coordination was so bad. Also, I was surprised that construction was a difficulty for people with Dyspraxia, because as a kid I loved Lego but I didn’t build it myself until I was about ten years old. For the first five years (or perhaps longer) of me playing with my Lego, my Dad had to build it all himself because I couldn’t understand how to do it. Furthermore, another set of symptoms for Dyspraxia is that children with the condition might frequently drop things and have difficulties that involve hand-eye coordination. This can lead to issues with managing zippers and buttons. Also, it isn’t uncommon for children with Dyspraxia to avoid physical activity because they don’t want to feel the shame and embarrassment associated with being “bad” at it, because their Dyspraxia can lead to a lack of muscle development that only compounds the difficulties they face with physical activity on top of their lack of coordination. Building upon this, the weak muscle tone associated with Dyspraxia doesn’t only impact a child’s ability to take part in sports and gym-based activities, it can even impact their ability to stand for any length of time. In my experience of Dyspraxia, my hand-eye coordination has always been difficult and it took me ages to learn how to tie my own shoelaces, get dressed and I definitely avoided physical activity. I think for a time I did enjoy sports but because I was so bad at it, people would make comments and point out how useless I was at sports, I just ended up hating and avoiding it. Also, I am not 100% sure that this is connected to Dyspraxia, but building upon the point about weak muscles, as a child, I had a very, very weak neck according to my parents. I couldn’t actually support the weight of my own head with my own neck muscles so I needed physiotherapy as a kid to strengthen them. Additionally, children with Dyspraxia tend to have writing and speech delays, lose things, forget things and they can have trouble picking up on nonverbal social cues. Also, Dyspraxia can cause issues with motor coordination, perception, memory, speech and language skills, emotional control and following directions. All these other symptoms can cause a lot of difficulties with concentration, organisation and planning as well as accuracy. Interestingly, the overall result of these symptoms is impulsive or erratic behaviour, or people with Dyspraxia avoid unpredictable or new situations or even scenarios that require teamwork. Ultimately, leading to a wide range of behavioural and emotional difficulties that can include anxiety, depression, stress, fears, phobias, addictions and low self-esteem. Personally, I can see why some people with Dyspraxia tend to get misdiagnosed with autism because there is an overlap here but autism has a lot of characteristic features that Dyspraxia does not. Like autism has the lack of eye contact, hyperfixations, repetitive behaviours amongst others that Dyspraxia lacks. Also, I would say that my lack of ability to follow directions, have good motor coordination and have good speech and language skills definitely has impacted my mental health over the years. Not because I have an issue with the symptoms I experience because of Dyspraxia, but because of other people being mean, making negative comments and judging me for not being perfect at these skills that everyone else takes for granted. How Is Dyspraxia Treated? Whilst there is no cure for Dyspraxia, it is still perfectly possible for people with the condition to live a good and full life where they can thrive and succeed in whatever they want. Although, there are some treatment options to help with some of the symptoms of the conditions and to help improve muscle tone and their coordination. I’ve already mentioned I received speech and language therapy and physiotherapy as a child to help me, but children with Dyspraxia can receive occupational therapy, other special services and accommodations through their school too. In the home, children with Dyspraxia can be encouraged to take part in physical activities and active play that helps to strengthen their muscle tone as well as improve their physical coordination. Typically, cycling and swimming are often helpful to keep children with Dyspraxia physically active and this helps to reduce their risk of obesity. That was something I struggled with a lot as a child. Also, children with Dyspraxia can work on puzzle activities and skills, like throwing a beanbag to improve their hand-eye coordination. As well as using pencil grips, learning to type and other simple interventions can help improve their communication skills. Clinical Psychology Conclusion Personally, I have really enjoyed learning more about Dyspraxia because now that we’ve looked at what Dyspraxia is, what are symptoms and causes and what are the treatment options for Dyspraxia, a lot of things make sense. I can see how a lot of difficulties in my life were caused by Dyspraxia and thankfully, a lot of the treatment options I received have worked and has decreased a fair amount of difficulties that my Dyspraxia has caused me. Whilst at this stage in my life because I’ve been through school, I’m basically done with university and I passed my driving test a few years ago, this diagnosis doesn’t change anything majorly for me. Yet it is nice to know that there was a neurological reason why I had so many difficulties as a child and that it wasn’t because I was useless like so many other people said. I had Dyspraxia and that is why I wasn’t great at sports, had awful motor coordination and it was responsible for a lot of other things that people didn’t like about me. And now I can go forward in my life knowing and being able to explain why I have such difficulty with certain things in case someone calls me a problem. I am never a problem, I am just a person with a neurological condition that might need a little more support and help compared to others. That doesn’t make me a bad person, and this is one of the few times where a diagnostic label can be empowering instead of debilitating and stigmatising. I have Dyspraxia and I am proud to finally know the truth behind my difficulties.      I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Cognitive Psychology: A Guide To Neuropsychology, Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. Patreon for exclusive access and rewards Have a great day. Clinical Psychology Reference and Further Reading Bidwell, V. (2022). Developmental coordination disorder (dyspraxia): what helps, what hinders in the school years for later achievement and wellbeing? (Doctoral dissertation, UCL (University College London)). Castellucci, G., & Singla, R. (2024). Developmental Coordination Disorder (Dyspraxia). In StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing. Dyspraxia USA Foundation Edmonds, C. (2021). An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of the Lived Experiences of Children with Dyspraxia in UK Secondary Schools (Doctoral dissertation, University of East London). Leonard HC, Hill EL. Executive difficulties in development coordination disorder: Methodological issues and future directions. Current Developmental Disorders Reports. June 2015;2(2):141-149.   National Health Service (U.K.) O’Dea, Á., Stanley, M., Coote, S., & Robinson, K. (2021). Children and young people’s experiences of living with developmental coordination disorder/dyspraxia: A systematic review and meta-ethnography of qualitative research. Plos one, 16(3), e0245738. Patino, E. Understanding Dyspraxia. Understood.org. Reviewed by R. Goldberg MD. Pemberton, M. (2022). All about Dyspraxia. The School Librarian, 70(3), 38-38. Waber, D. P., Boiselle, E. C., Yakut, A. D., Peek, C. P., Strand, K. E., & Bernstein, J. H. (2021). Developmental dyspraxia in children with learning disorders: Four-year experience in a referred sample. Journal of Child Neurology, 36(3), 210-221. I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon  page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click  https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley  for a one-time bit of support.

Recently, I got diagnosed with dyslexia after struggling with reading, writing and understanding the different sounds that different letters make. Especially, when these letters are combined in words. Therefore, in this clinical psychology podcast episode, you’re going to learn what is dyslexia, what causes dyslexia and how is dyslexia treated amongst other facts about the condition. If you’re interested in learning more about clinical psychology, learning difficulties and neurodevelopmental conditions then this is a great episode for you. Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Developmental Psychology: A Guide To Developmental and Child Psychology . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. What Is Dyslexia? Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental condition that causes people to have difficulty with spelling, reading comprehension and word recognition. As well as whilst it is closely related to other learning disabilities like dyspraxia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia, this condition does affect people with normal and above-average intelligence too.  Additionally, dyslexia is believed to be the most common learning disability with the prevalence rate being around 5% to 17% of the population depending on the criteria being used. As well as it is possible for someone to have more than one learning disability, which is why a comprehensive evaluation is used during diagnosis. When learning disabilities are co-morbid, health professionals treat each condition separately because the different treatments that are effective for one condition might have no or little effect on another one. Like a dyslexia treatment might be useful for dyslexia but it might be useless for dysgraphia.  Personally, I knew I had dyslexia because I have always struggled with spelling and sounding out words. I just cannot do it and I found out recently I learn a word in “whole word blocks” so people normally learn by phonetics. For me phonetics are useless so I need to know what a whole word says then I remember the whole word instead of the sounds. This is why I struggle with learning new words and knowing how to say new words. What Are The Symptoms Of Dyslexia? Whilst this wasn’t the case for me, the symptoms and signs of dyslexia are typically seen in childhood but they do appear in adults too. For me, I did a dyslexia test when I was about 14 years old but I “failed” so I couldn’t receive a diagnosis but in the past few years my dyslexia has become more severe so I passed the screening test and the diagnosis. Moreover, a dyslexic person’s reading ability is lower-than-average for their age but symptoms can still vary from one person to another. This is why we’ll look at some of the most common symptoms now, and remember not all these symptoms will appear within everyone with dyslexia. Generally speaking, children as well as adults with dyslexia might struggle to summarise stories, remember phrases or words and understand jokes, idioms and other forms of wordplay. They might find it difficult to learn a second language too, but please remember that if no other symptoms are present, this is not an indicator of dyslexia. Furthermore, with dyslexia being a neurodevelopmental condition, it is common for those with dyslexia to reach common developmental milestones like walking and talking, later than their peers. Then as they get old and grow up, children and adults with the condition might struggle to participate in activities that require coordination, like those with high levels of hand-eye coordination or activities that require concentration and focus. I have a lot of these difficulties but mine can be explained slightly better by dyspraxia (a word I cannot actually spell without autocorrect on). A final general symptom for this section is that because reading is a challenge for people with dyslexia that makes people feel like they’re a “failure” at reading, it can make children and adults anxious or upset about the idea of reading. Or they go to a lot of effort to avoid reading activities. Interestingly, this can unfortunately impact children’s self-esteem that can last into adulthood. Especially, if their dyslexia continues to go undiagnosed so they might even be called “lazy” or “slow” because they don’t want to read or they struggle with it. This is why accurate timely diagnosis is so important because it can restore a child’s and an adult’s self-esteem as well as allow them to develop strategies that work best for their particular challenges. Also, with reading being considered a critical skill for academic success, this is why a lot of people with dyslexia believe they aren’t intelligent, when in reality, they are intelligent. They might just need a little more support and more strategies to help them learn and thrive. What Are Some Specific Dyslexia Symptoms? Firstly, a dyslexic person experiences delays or difficulties in learning to speak, read, the alphabet or how to spell. For me, I struggled so much with learning how to speak because I needed speech and language therapy for years just so I could form any words at all, as I was a mute child. As well as I struggled with reading words because I just couldn’t sound them out so I had to have extra lessons that focused on sounding out words. It wasn’t useful but still. Secondly, one aspect of a dyslexia assessment is you need to recall sequences of numbers, words and letters in a forwards and reverse order. That is very difficult for people with dyslexia and I hated that part of the assessment because I was seriously not good at it. I am pretty sure the psychologist doing my assessment actually stopped the reverse order sequences earlier because she could see how bad I was at the task. Therefore, difficulty recalling sequences of numbers, letters and/ or words is another symptom of dyslexia. Thirdly, dyslexic people tend to misread one letter for another. This can include u for an n, a p for a q and so on. I don’t have any experience of this symptom. Fourthly, this is how I actually knew I was dyslexic because my friends and housemates would lovingly bully me for my challenges with pronunciation. I have an amazing ability to randomly add and subtract letters of new words. I often get asked “Where’s the t, s, r in the word” because I randomly add so many extra letters. Or I get asked “There’s an r in the word, where’s that?”. My pronunciation is rubbish. In addition, people with dyslexia typically struggle with distinguishing the sounds of one word from another. Now I didn’t think I had any experience of this but my best friend who is half-French mentioned how I don’t have an ear for different sounds in French, but I remember something else too. I was talking with a housemate and we were talking about English as a language and they said a whole bunch of words and to me they sounded too similar for me to know the difference. Finally, people with dyslexia can struggle with recognising what are known as “sight words”. For example, and, the or it. What Causes Dyslexia? Whilst researchers aren’t entirely sure what can cause a child to develop dyslexia, given how it can run in families, it is commonly believed there is a genetic component. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if my Dad has dyslexia but that is just a pure guess. Also, neuroimaging studies have found that the brains of children with dyslexia develop and work differently to the brains of children at the same age as those without dyslexia. This could explain why people with dyslexia have phonological difficulties that make it harder for them to distinguish between the sounds of individual letters and letter patterns in similar words like bag, ban and bat. In addition, dyslexia isn’t always a neurodevelopmental condition because it is possible to “acquire” dyslexia following a brain injury, stroke or another example of traumatic event. Then people with acquired dyslexia or alexia, lose their ability to read because the rear part of the left hemisphere of their brain is damaged, so this causes difficulties identifying individual numbers and letters. How Is Dyslexia Treated? Currently, there is no cure for dyslexia but in the majority of cases, it can be managed through compensatory techniques. In children with dyslexia, it’s important to recognise the symptoms and then start taking remedial steps as soon as possible within their journey through education so they can thrive and not risk falling behind. For this to happen, a formal evaluation is needed to uncover the specific deficit areas that the child has in reading and writing and this differs for every child. For example, I can read books and I have no problems enjoying reading, but I cannot read new words, I cannot sound out words and I have massive issues with not wanting to take notes in lectures because it takes me a while to write my notes out. As well as if I’m reading and I come across a new word, I don’t even try and read it, I just acknowledge there’s a weird word there and move on. Furthermore, there are brain-based and environmental differences between children with dyslexia that can make it easier for some children to learn compared to others. Dyslexic children tend to be taught by educators that use methods that are modified to meet an individual’s needs. As well as family support can be massively important to improve a child’s self-image and prospects for success. The same individual evaluations as well as reading interventions are necessary for adults with acquired dyslexia too. In addition, as dyslexia is recognised as a disability, it is possible for a person with dyslexia to request workplace accommodations for their condition. This can include assistive technologies, like text-to-write software, having long documents summarised for faster interpretations and replacing written directions with oral ones. Also, for some reason, people think there is a medication option for dyslexia, this isn’t true. There is no medication that is recommended for dyslexia, but if a child has another condition like ADHD alongside their dyslexia then Adderall and Ritalin can be useful for reducing ADHD symptoms but they will not help with the underlying dyslexia symptoms. Finally, in terms of academic accommodations, these can be immensely useful for students with dyslexia and they are normally a collaboration between the school staff and parents. In the United States, dyslexia is considered a disability so it is protected under the Americans With Disabilities Act, so children with dyslexia are normally able to secure an Individualised Learning Plan that includes accommodations that help them to catch up in the classroom with their peers or perform better. These accommodations depend on the severity of the child’s condition and their specific symptoms, but they can include: ·       Extra time on tests ·       Options to dictate answers instead of writing them ·       Use of audiobooks Clinical Psychology Conclusion After struggling with reading, pronunciation and being the joke for so long because I struggled with sounds so much, it is great to finally have an understanding and a diagnosis that can explain why I struggle so much with things that other people take for granted. Also, with a dyslexia diagnosis, I feel a little validated in a way because it means I am officially dyslexic, if that makes sense. It isn’t their excuse or condition that I am trying to use to explain away my difficulties, because now I actually have  the condition instead of me thinking   and hoping  that I have it. I would have preferred to have the diagnosis when I was back in school because that would have been really, really useful for me but I have it now. I can ask for accommodations when needed and whilst I don’t know how me having a dyslexia diagnosis will impact me in the future, I am glad that I have during my university. Because you never know when a diagnosis that can get you more support than stigma might be useful especially as I enter the world of work after the final year of my degree.     I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Developmental Psychology: A Guide To Developmental and Child Psychology . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. Patreon for exclusive access and rewards Have a great day. Clinical Psychology Reference and Further Reading International Dyslexia Association website. Accessed September 6, 2017. Lorusso, M. L., Borasio, F., Mistò, P., Salandi, A., Travellini, S., Lotito, M., & Molteni, M. (2024). Remote treatment of developmental dyslexia: how ADHD comorbidity, clinical history and treatment repetition may affect its efficacy. Frontiers in Public Health, 11, 1135465. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Dyslexia Information Page. Accessed September 6, 2017. Peltier, T. K., Washburn, E. K., Heddy, B. C., & Binks-Cantrell, E. (2022). What do teachers know about dyslexia? It’s complicated!. Reading and Writing, 35(9), 2077-2107. Shaywitz, S. E., Shaywitz, J. E., & Shaywitz, B. A. (2021). Dyslexia in the 21st century. Current opinion in psychiatry, 34(2), 80-86. Snowling, M. J., Hulme, C., & Nation, K. (2020). Defining and understanding dyslexia: past, present and future. Oxford review of education, 46(4), 501-513. Starrfelt R. Alexia: What happens when a brain injury makes you forget how to read. The Conversation. University of Copenhagen, Department of Psychology. July 14, 2015. Toffalini, E., Giofrè, D., Pastore, M., Carretti, B., Fraccadori, F., & Szűcs, D. (2021). Dyslexia treatment studies: A systematic review and suggestions on testing treatment efficacy with small effects and small samples. Behavior research methods, 1-19. Vaughn, S., Miciak, J., Clemens, N., & Fletcher, J. M. (2024). The critical role of instructional response in defining and identifying students with dyslexia: A case for updating existing definitions. Annals of Dyslexia, 74(3), 325-336. Vouglanis, T., & Driga, A. M. (2023). The use of ICT for the early detection of dyslexia in education. TechHub Journal, 5, 54-67. Wagner, R. K., Zirps, F. A., Edwards, A. A., Wood, S. G., Joyner, R. E., Becker, B. J., ... & Beal, B. (2020). The prevalence of dyslexia: A new approach to its estimation. Journal of learning disabilities, 53(5), 354-365. Watter K, Copley A, Fitch E. Discourse level reading comprehension interventions following acquired brain injury: A systematic review. Disability and rehabilitation. Published online February 18, 2016.   I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon  page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click  https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley  for a one-time bit of support.

On the 3rd December 2024, I had a two-hour-long Specific Learning Difficulties online assessment, so I could get a diagnosis of dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia or dysgraphia. I was assessed for all of them because I went through my university to get a dyslexia diagnosis and instead I had a Specific Learning Difficulties assessment that allowed me to be assessed for all of them. After the assessment (which was actually funny in its own right because I was able to be diagnosed quicker than she expected), I was diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia. We’ll cover these two conditions in the next two podcast episodes. Yet as an aspiring clinical psychologist, I found the assessment process fascinating and I really enjoyed how she adapted her process, her thoughts and what her approach as she got more information and test results so she could make a diagnosis. I learnt a lot during the assessment. Therefore, in this clinical psychology podcast episode, you’ll learn what happens during a Specific Learning Difficulties assessment, how I got the assessment in the first place and what I learnt as an aspiring clinical psychologist. If you enjoy learning about mental health conditions, psychological assessments and applied clinical psychology then this will be a great episode for you. Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Developmental Psychology: A Guide To Developmental and Child Psychology . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. Why Did I Want A Dyslexia Assessment In The First Place? As a quick note to start off this episode, I want to mention that the difference between a learning disability  and a learning difficulty is that to have a learning disability your IQ has to be below 70 points. You have dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia or dysgraphia but it doesn’t mean you have a learning disability. Especially if you’re IQ is above 70. I have always suspected that I am dyslexic because my ability to read new words has always been awful. I have always struggled with sounding out words, learning new words and understanding how to say words. It doesn’t matter if they’re English, Spanish, French, whatever language. I always struggle to say them because I don’t know how sounds work in words so unless I know what the entire word sounds like, I always add and subtract random letters that make no sense. However, this academic year because I’ve been living with housemates and words have come up as well as my ability to read them has been mentioned. I quickly became the joke in the house that I cannot pronounce words at all, my sense of direction is awful and my sense of left and right is troubling too at times. Therefore, I looked into it more and I did fit the criteria for dyslexia as well as dyspraxia. Yet I was resistant to getting diagnosed for a while because I’ve been through secondary education, my undergraduate degree and I am basically done with my Masters now. I didn’t really see the point of being diagnosed and it doesn’t impact my life massively. I can still read, write and learn to a good level, so I was resistant. Also, I had a dyslexia screening back in Year 8 so when I was around 14 years old, and that screening “showed” I didn’t have dyslexia so I didn’t really want to go through the whole process again. However, I was working an information evening at a college in Canterbury for my student ambassador work with my best friend and a girl that I always enjoy talking. We were talking and my ability to say new words popped up again and we were all joking about how bad I am at saying words, reading words and that sort of thing. Then I joked that I should do a dyslexia screening online (because that’s always accurate) so I did one then another then I realised the answers both said it was likely I was dyslexic. Afterwards, I didn’t really think about it for another day then I looked up what my university offers in terms of specific learning difficulties. I found out that offer diagnosis and screening tests. Now the thing you need to know about me is that I love a freebie, you should also know that even though a lot of my childhood and sexual trauma has been dealt with, I like surviving. And getting a diagnosis might help me to survive and make my life easier in the future. Sometimes you do need to use childhood trauma to manipulate yourself so you don’t miss very good opportunities like this one. I emailed my university asking for the screening, so they sent it to me and I did it later that night. I thought it was going to be a silly little quick thing. 90 minutes later I finally got my results and the screening test suggested that I had a mild form of dyslexia and the next day my university emailed me. I had to pay £175 for the dyslexia assessment and they covered the rest which was at least £200. If you’re undergraduate and you have a household income under a certain amount then you don’t need to pay, but because I’m postgraduate I had to pay for it. I wasn’t entirely happy about that, but I wanted this diagnosis. I booked the assessment for 3 until 5 pm on 3rd December 2024. Once that was firmed I did the pre-screening questionnaire that asked me a lot of questions that covered different areas of dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia and dysgraphia, and I sent it off. What Happens During A Specific Learning Difficulties Assessment? I have to mention the funny thing leading up to the assessment was that the company my university uses loves to send reminders. Every day at 3 pm for the 3 days leading up to my assessment, I got a daily text message reminding me about my assessment. Then on the day itself, I get a text message an hour before the assessment and 15 minutes before I get a text reminding me to get set up. For an online Specific Learning Difficulties assessment, in my experience, you will need: ·       Laptop or computer (you CANNOT use your phone) ·       Lined paper and a pen ·       A quiet space If you don’t have any of these requirements then the assessment will be cancelled and you or your university will be charged a fee. My university would have been charged £75 as a consequence of me not meeting these requirements. At 3 pm the woman who was doing my assessment popped into the Zoom call, and at first, I’ll admit I wasn’t sure how friendly she was going to be. She didn’t really do any small talk or really ask how I was or how my day had been. I might have preferred something to make her seem less intimidating, because ultimately as a client, I know she has the power to give or deny me a diagnosis. For this reason, I was relatively tense for the first 30 minutes into the assessment and I didn’t really offer up or think about any additional supporting information until after that point. Therefore, as an aspiring clinical psychologist, ideally I would like to spend 5 minutes just talking to the client first. This would allow me to build a little bit of a rapport, they could see me as a relatable person and this could decrease some of the power differential between me and the client. Of course, I know she might not have done this because of time and she is probably under pressure to get through assessments as quickly as possible so she can do more, write up their reports and keep her bosses happy. That is all just a guess but it is how mental health services work, even private works probably work like that to some extent. Anyway, she introduced the assessment that she is going to be assessing me for dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia and/ or dysgraphia. We’re going to do some psychometric tests, talk a little about my history and she explained how breaks work because it is a lot to ask someone to sit in front of a computer for 2 hours. Even though the funny thing was that she specifically highlighted the fact that these assessments tend to go on for 2 hours but they can go over if needed. Next we started the assessment itself. Firstly, she asked me what I was hoping to get out of the assessment and diagnosis. I explained how I’ve struggled with words, sounding out words and that I was a joke in my friend groups because of it in a banter-y way and that a diagnosis would allow me to be able to explain why I struggle to say, read and pronounce words. Secondly, we started doing about a range of different tests on the laptop. Originally, I could only remember 4 of these tests but as I wrote this podcast episode, I remembered more and more of them. I don’t entirely remember the order but I think we started with a “number sequencing” test. You’ll see in the next two podcast episodes but people with dyslexia struggle with sequencing numbers because of my working memory difficulties. Therefore, she said sequences of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and maybe 7 numbers then I needed to repeat the numbers as she said them. Afterwards we did the same but I needed to say them in the reverse order. For example, if she said 4, 5, 6, 7 then I needed to say 7, 6, 5 and 4. Personally, I think she stopped the reverse order sequencing earlier because I was so bad at it and I don’t think I managed to get past 4 or 5. That told her that I struggled with sequencing and indicated possible issues with my working memory. The second test was a pattern or shape manipulation task. I thought I was going to flat out hate this task because the dyslexia screening version I did two weeks before was so bad and so awful I definitely failed that. Yet the version used in the assessment was relatively “easy”. It was timed so I wouldn’t have been surprised if I spent slightly “too long” compared to people without a Specific Learning Difficulty trying to figure out how the shapes fit together. The specific task was that on the screen there was a big shape then below you had different shapes that could fit together to create the big shape, and each smaller shape had a number. You needed to say the number of the shapes aloud as your answer. I only made one or two mistakes there but I am not sure what that told her. The third task was horrific and this must have screamed dyslexia at the woman. The first set of words were real words that I needed to read out. There must have been about 20 to 30 words that increased in difficulty, so I read them out and managed all of them in the end. This was a timed test and then we switched to nonsense words. However, the words were made up of sounds that should have been easy to put together so you knew how to pronounce these fake words. I might have made it to the 6th or 9th word and she could see how badly I was struggling and how I just wasn’t able to say these sounds and she basically stopped the test. If I was struggling to put together “easy” sounds then I don’t think she needed any more information that she would have gotten from the “harder” sounds. That was so painful for me. In addition, there was a letter-based task where I needed to say letters that were on the screen, because dyslexia can cause people to mix up certain letters. I later told her that I have an issue with letters that I cannot say  letters without tracing them in the air or writing them, that I think only confirmed her suspicions about me being dyslexic. Yet this is a great lesson in the importance of making sure a client is comfortable with you and you have a rapport so they open up to you about things that you haven’t asked but could be relevant to the diagnosis. Afterwards, we did do two final tests but she wanted to talk to me first. How Did The Dyspraxia Conversation Go? This was a very valuable moment for me as an aspiring clinical psychologist because after the word task, I saw how interested the woman got in me. Me failing the word task clearly meant something to her, and judging by the conversation she was sure she was close to being able to make a diagnosis of something but first, she needed some extra information. Personally, it was seeing her get excited and she had a sort of “detective look” in her eyes. Like I was a case that she wanted to help and solve, so she could give me some peace about what specific learning difficulty I had. Then this would allow me to get the support I needed. As a result, she started talking to me about my gross motor skills because I had mentioned a lot of difficulties with throwing, catching and hand-eye coordination in the pre-screening questionnaire. She got me to talk about the extra lessons I needed to have as a child because I was so bad at throwing and catching. Also I spoke about my amazingly bad and rather shocking sense of direction, inability to read maps and even the sat-nav I find difficult at times. Me finding the sat-nav difficult seriously isn’t funny because I have added an hour extra onto journeys before. All because I missed a single turning and it was an awful junction that took me a while to drive back to, then I missed it again because of my inability to read a sat-nav. In all fairness, the sat-nav’s description of this junction isn’t ideal, but if I had simply read the signs (remember reading is difficult) then I would have been fine. Although, I have to admit that one thing I did disagree with her on but I didn’t openly challenge her because I wanted a dyspraxia diagnosis and even though this single piece of information wouldn’t have changed anything with all the other overwhelming evidence. She did imply that dyspraxia impacted my driving ability and that’s why I failed four times. In all fairness because I’ve written a podcast episode on dyspraxia now, I don’t disagree with her assumption, but at the time of the assessment I did. After I revealed all that information to her, she nodded her head as if everything must have clicked into place, and then she said to me “you do meet the criteria for a dyspraxia diagnosis, if you think that would be useful to you,”. I was never going to argue against a dyspraxia diagnosis because that is the condition I think best fits me anyway so I was very happy to receive that diagnosis. Next she wanted to talk about dyslexia because she wasn’t entirely sure that I only had dyspraxia or if I had dyslexia as well. Since dyspraxia explained a good chunk of my history and symptoms but not all of them. Leading us onto the final task that was always going to happen anyway. Spelling, Reading Comprehension and Writing Test In A Specific Learning Difficulties Assessment The first of the final three tests that we did was spelling. I knew I was going to fail this badly but what happened was, on my lined paper I wrote down how I thought words were spelt. She would read out a word and I would write it. The following were the words she asked me to write, and for our audio listeners, if you look at the blog post I’ve written out the correct spelling first then I explained how I wrote it next. ·       Beautiful- beautiful ·       Chaos- choas ·       Calves- Calaves ·       Whining- Whinning ·       Inoculate- Inknowculate ·       Aerobic- Aeorobic ·       Circumference- circumference ·       Quay- quay ·       Installation- Instation ·       Pheonix- Phoneix ·       Salmonella- Samella ·       Rhythm- rymthm Audio listeners, please go and look at the blog post, you will have a good laugh at my awful spelling. Furthermore, as a result of dyslexia making it difficult for some people to remember information and understand what a text says, you need to do a reading comprehension test. For example, one of my lecturers he needs to read and reread an essay at least five times to remember what’s going on. And often by the time he has reached the end of the essay, he has well and truly forgotten what happened at the beginning. For my specific learning difficulties assessment, I had to read three different extracts that were getting more and more complex as we went on. This was a timed, silent reading activity so I needed to tell the woman when I started reading and when I had finished reading. Also, instead of doing my normal “trick” of if I didn’t know a word I simply looked at it, didn’t read it and skipped it. I did honestly try to read it so I could show a more realistic reading time to the woman. Next she asked me questions about the extract after she flicked to another screen. Personally, because I have a good working memory and good reading comprehension the questions weren’t hard for me, but they might be for other people with dyslexia. As well as I did struggle with questions about place names and answers that involved words I didn’t know how to say. Again, I suppose this was further support for my lacking an ability to say words, but evidence showing I can read okay. Even though you could argue the lack is evidence “against” dyslexia, actually I think it’s better to argue that it helps you make more correct recommendations for the support that I get in the future. The final test that we did was a writing task because I had 10 minutes to write as much as I could on my lined paper about a particular topic. I did the advantages and disadvantages of mental health labels and I had one minute to prepare my answer. I wrote for 10 minutes then I needed to take photos and upload them to the weblink that she sent me. She spent five minutes reviewing them and the first thing she said when she came back was something along the lines of “I could read most of it but has anyone ever mentioned your handwriting to you,” Now I like to say that I have doctor handwriting meaning I am very smart but you can’t read it. In all fairness, the majority of people can read my handwriting but it can be hard at times. I said “yes, I have never met a person who hasn’t mentioned my handwriting”. Of course, she had checked my writing for spelling, grammar and punctuation. She didn’t tell me those results but I know I had made a good few mistakes because I didn’t know how to say certain words, and she mentioned a sign of dyslexia is avoiding certain words too. That I confessed to, I do that all the time. Following this, she wanted to talk to me about my fine motor skills because dysgraphia is basically the opposite of dyspraxia and you can have both. Dyspraxia focuses on gross motor skills whereas dysgraphia is all about fine motor skills. We spoke for a little bit about that because dysgraphia does impact handwriting but as soon as I mentioned how I can write 2,700 words an hour through typing she dismissed that diagnosis because it shows my fine motor skills are fine. Therefore, she gave me the dyslexia diagnosis because it explained my difficulties with sounds, reading and pronunciation as well as it explained my bad handwriting too. I was very happy to finally have that diagnosis. However, you might remember that earlier I mentioned how these assessments typically last two hours and they rarely finish before that. My entire assessment only took 85 minutes because I suspect my symptoms were that clear and I knew what to say about my life to help you make an informed diagnosis. I just found it funny how I managed to knock off 25% of the assessment timewise because my symptoms were that obvious. What Happens After a Specific Learning Difficulties Assessment? In my experience, what happens after a specific learning difficulties assessment is that the psychologist or whoever did your assessment will write up a full report and send it to you and your university (or whoever you did it through) within 14 days. This will be a very detailed and thorough report that will go through all the different elements of the assessment, what parts of the condition you meet and all the different ways how you might need additional support in the future. After you and your university have both got the report, your university will schedule a meeting with you to discuss what accommodations you need. For example, when I get the report in the next two days, I’ll be assigned and meet with a “Learning Disability Advisor” (yes, I flat out hate the name) so we can create an Inclusive Learning Plan that will help me get accommodations. I don’t really need them but it’s an interesting idea. I know some of the accommodations we spoke about include: ·       Extra time in exams ·       I cannot be marked down in presentations for taking a moment longer to think before answering. ·       There were others but I forgot. Clinical Psychology Conclusion Whilst the diagnosis I really want is an autism diagnosis because that will help me tons, I am really happy to receive my dyslexia and dyspraxia diagnoses. Since I have struggled so much with reading, pronunciation and speaking in my life that I am so happy that I am finally able to say and show other people that there is a real reason why I struggle with these areas and it isn’t because I’m “thick” like some people suggest. On the other hand, as an aspiring clinical psychologist, I have learnt three main things from this assessment. Firstly, I have learnt that if there is time, I will always try and spend a few minutes just talking to the other person I am assessing so they are more comfortable, they know I am a friendly face and I can try to decrease some of that natural power differential that exists in this situation. I think it would have been nicer and me and my assessor would have revealed more to each other a lot sooner if we had simply taken a few moments to talk beforehand. Secondly, I have learnt how much I want to do assessments in the future. I know I would because it’s just a part of clinical work. Yet seeing that detective look and sheer sense of curiosity in my assessor’s eyes has made me excited for the future. I want to meet clients, be curious and I want to be a detective as I try to find a diagnosis that matches and explains as many of their symptoms as possible. Of course, in an ideal world, I wouldn’t need to rely on the DSM-5 and I know after the assessment process barely any modern clinical psychologists actually use the diagnosis label because then it becomes all about the client and formulation thankfully. I am still excited though to effectively be a detective to help a client. Finally, I have learnt that I really am excited about continuing my clinical psychology journey. Sometimes there are moments that I consider whether I have the excitement, passion and interest to actually go all the way to become a clinical psychologist then I do something and something happens in my personal life and I realise I truly am. I actually had to be a bit of a detective the other day on the phone with a friend as I tried to work out what therapy option would be best for another friend. That was a fun conversation but that’s beyond the scope of this episode. Ultimately, I have these diagnoses, I now know what it’s like to undergo a psychological assessment and I realise I seriously do have the passion to have a career in clinical psychology. I couldn’t ask for a better and more useful assessment, so if you’re thinking about undergoing a Specific Learning Difficulties assessment because you think you might have dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia or dysgraphia, I would say go for it. Nothing bad can happen. The worst outcome could be you don’t meet any criteria but given how you would have done a screening beforehand, the chance of that is unlikely. If you’re an aspiring or qualified clinical psychologist, I would say enjoy psychological assessments. They seem fun, interesting and of course, they will lose their charm over time as you do them every week, but just remember that each assessment is a chance to transform someone’s life. And ultimately, you’re potentially giving them a tool to let them access specific services, support and coping mechanisms that will help them improve their life and decrease their psychological distress. There’s certainly nothing better than that for a clinical psychologist.     I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Developmental Psychology: A Guide To Developmental and Child Psychology . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. Patreon for exclusive access and rewards Have a great day. Clinical Psychology Further Reading Benavides-Varela, S., Callegher, C. Z., Fagiolini, B., Leo, I., Altoè, G., & Lucangeli, D. (2020). Effectiveness of digital-based interventions for children with mathematical learning difficulties: A meta-analysis. Computers & Education, 157, 103953. Graham, C. (2020). Can we measure the impact? An evaluation of one-to-one support for students with specific learning difficulties. Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning, 22(2), 122-134. Kormos, J., & Smith, A. M. (2023). Teaching languages to students with specific learning differences (Vol. 18). Channel View Publications. Lombardi, E., Traficante, D., Bettoni, R., Offredi, I., Vernice, M., & Sarti, D. (2021). Comparison on well-being, engagement and perceived school climate in secondary school students with learning difficulties and specific learning disorders: An exploratory study. Behavioral Sciences, 11(7), 103. Prior, M. (2022). Understanding specific learning difficulties. Psychology Press. Sewell, A. (2022). Understanding and supporting learners with specific learning difficulties from a neurodiversity perspective: A narrative synthesis. British Journal of Special Education, 49(4), 539-560. Wotherspoon, J., Whittingham, K., Sheffield, J., & Boyd, R. N. (2023). Cognition and learning difficulties in a representative sample of school-aged children with cerebral palsy. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 138, 104504. Zolfi, V., Hosseininasab, P. D., & Azmoudeh, P. D. (2022). The Effectiveness of Training in Cognitive-Metacognitive Strategies upon the Cognitive Load and Working Memory of Elementary School Students with Specific Learning Difficulties in Reading. Quarterly Journal of Education, 38(3), 37-50. I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon  page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click  https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley  for a one-time bit of support.

Whilst I have to admit releasing a forensic psychology book about terrorism might seem weird in December but I haven’t thought about it. Yet whenever we see news about a terrorist attack, we always wonder why something would commit such a horrible attack but we wonder what makes a terrorist as well. Is a mental health condition? Is it biological in nature? Are there social or cultural factors at play? And does society make someone a terrorist or not? We need to know the answer. Therefore, in this criminal psychology podcast episode, you’ll learn about the large range of factors that can make someone into a terrorist. If you enjoy learning about the psychology of crime, terrorism and more then this will be a great episode for you. Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Forensic Psychology Of Terrorism and Hostage-Taking . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. What Makes A Terrorist? (Extract from Forensic Psychology of Terrorism and Hostage-Taking by Connor Whiteley. COPYRIGHT 2024) The general consensus is that it takes time to convert a vulnerable person into a terrorist (Luckabaugh et al., 1997) because this is a process and different terrorist recruits have different motivations. For example, a need to belong, the development of a satisfactory personal identity, social alienation and boredom leads to dissidence and protests on a small scale, then over time terrorism, as well as histories of child abuse, trauma, humiliation and social injustice are common in a terrorist’s background as well. Although, Borum (2004) doesn’t feel like this is helpful in explaining terrorism, because these factors are vulnerabilities and they don’t make someone a terrorist on their own. Also, Merari (2007) may be suggesting general vulnerability factors when he suspects susceptibility to indoctrination is key to understanding suicide bombers. Due to most of the suicide bombers Merari studied where young and unattached people which are perfect types for all sorts of violent organisations. As a result, Merari believed suicide terrorism could be understood as consequences of a terrorist system, with people being recruited through interpersonal connections that then supported the recruit all the way through to becoming a suicide bomber. This is important to learn about because highly committed members of an organisation will spend hours talking to recruits, promoting the idea of martyrdom as will of the God and they focus on the illustrious past of Islam. Then the recruits become enmeshed in the group contact that is designed to help the recruit prove their allegiance to the organisation. Afterwards this “formal contract” creates a final personal commitment before a suicide bomber attack. In addition, Merari compared terror groups to suicide bomb production lines using empirical support from Palestinian suicide bombers. The stages of these production lines according to Merari include indoctrination. This is where members of terror groups with high authority constantly indoctrinate potential bombers to maintain their motivation to engage in the terrorist act and to prevent them changing their mind. For Palestinian indoctrination, the themes were nationalism. For instance, Israel’s humiliation of the Palestinian state and religious guarantees, by saying things like the suicide bomber will go to paradise after committing this act. As well as getting the recruit to commit to the group is done too at this stage where any doubts about committing to the attack are dealt with and the motivation for the attack is increased to maximum levels, or “maxed out” to use more urban slang terms. Then the last stage is personal commitment and this can take the form of video recordings were the terrorist describes their intent to do the suicide bombing. This is partly done for their family, but it is also done as a way of getting irreversible commitment. As well as the bomber prepares farewell letters for friends and family too for later giving. Also, at this point in the production line, Merari points out these would-be bombers are called “Living-Martyr”, and this whole approach is sympathetic with Horgan and Taylor (2001)’s view that terrorists don’t actively choose to become terrorists. Instead becoming a terrorist is a gradual process where a potential terrorist is socialised with the recruiters having the ultimate goal of making them preform a terrorist act. Of course, this is a process and not an absolute. People can leave the process at any point and this is to be expected given the high turnover rate in terrorist group membership (Crenshaw, 1986). Moreover, Taylor and Louis (2004) suggested young people find themselves wanting a hopeful future and they engage in meaningful behaviour that helps them get ahead and will be satisfied with their life. Also, these young people’s objective circumstances include no opportunity for a good future or advancement, and whilst they might find some collective identity in religions, living in a poor state and community makes them feel marginalised and lost without a clear group. So it’s easy to think how terror acts are result of group processes with Taylor (2010) asking can terrorism truly be understood as a phenomenon of group behaviour. Since Taylor (2010) distinctives between getting involved in a terror group and actually carrying out attacks. Since group processes could be important as a backdrop in terrorism when cultural, political and social factors have a role to play. But these group processes fail to explain the act or episode of terrorism itself. Taylor suggests there are two main issues with the “terrorism as group processes” argument. There is a lack of a good definition of what is terrorism besides from what terrorists do, and there isn’t a clear idea of what is meant by group processes in relation to terrorism. Since there are times when group processes seem to play no or little role in a terrorist attack. Lone-wolf attacks spring to mind here. Another extreme example is the reclusive Theodore John Kaczynski who’s terrorist campaign lasted for 17 years with 12 bombs and 3 deaths for his environmental agenda that he largely made-up alone without a group behind him. What Are Life Story Studies? I do enjoy qualitative research and I think given how hard terrorism is to research, qualitative research methodologies might be useful. Of course, you will still have a lot of the same problems as the rest of terrorism research as I wrote about in the first chapter but qualitive research can still be useful. Especially as Borum (2004) argued that a terrorist’s life experience includes common themes. He suggests that these common themes aren’t sufficient causes of terrorism, but they might be helpful to researchers to identify people susceptibility to being influenced by terrorist groups. In some ways this argument fits with the narrative studies being done with terrorists because they reveal other factors are needed to understand what turns someone into a terrorist and it helps to show that not all terrorists are made because of their similar circumstances. That notion doesn’t really have research support anymore. In addition, since 1992, terrorism has been a feature of “Israel’s relationship with Palestine” and Soibelman (2004) subscribes to the group processes idea over individual’s psychology like personality. Due to the researcher rejects the idea that suicide bombers are simply young religious fanatics and instead believes less extreme personality characteristics make up bombers. This was based on his research and interviews with 5 suicide bombers that were arrested before they could carry out the attack or the bombs failed to detonate (something that happens in another 40% of suicide bombings). The results of his interviews show there wasn’t a single explanation for why they became terrorists and instead there was a mixture of factors that were responsible but even this mixture was different for different terrorists. Yet it seemed that group solidarity and having a shared ideology were two overriding factors in becoming a terrorist because most of the interviewed suicide bombers had at least some shared ideology and solidarity. Furthermore, political factors were given as reasons for becoming suicide bombers, as well as having bad or secondary experience of dealing with the Israeli defence force. Such as the Israelis shooting one of their friends or beating them. And this is what I find interesting, most of the suicide bombers had been involved in protests or another form of assembly beforehand they were involved in terrorism. That means these people once wanted change through peaceful means and something changed to make them believe terrorism was the only option. To explain this, Soibelman (2004) suggested as the situation escalates, a person’s beliefs get more extreme. As well as given the nature of the sample, these suicide bombers were a part of the secular Fatah movement, so religion wasn’t a factor in them becoming terrorists. And despite this terrorist group don’t tend to have criminal histories, a few of them could have. Another study that offers up a more detailed account of the range of factors impacting someone’s chance of becoming a terrorist can be found in Sarangi and Alison’s (2005) and their study of the left-wing Maoist terrorists in Nepal and India. This terror group believe the state is an instrument of the rich and needs to be violently overthrown. The researchers interviewed 12 terrorists and 3 men and 3 women that were no longer involved with their average age being 26 years old and they generally lacked a formal education. These interviews were validated by checking court and police records. In this study, rapport building was a priority and the researches achieved this by having the terrorists talk about their childhood and matters not directly tied to terrorist activities. Then the researchers suggested common rhetorical structures in the interview. The results of the interviews showed that the terrorists had created a strong sense of “Us” (which included their Self-Image) and they saw themselves as a central character for themselves in their life story as brave, good, simple, logical and so on. Instead of the reality when the terrorist spoke about themselves, their family, friends and other people in their community being poor simple, naive, exploited, short on goods and water and cheated by others. Also, the interviews showed interpersonal figures were important and included rhetoric about outgroups and others. For example, one rhetoric found was about their beliefs surrounding the government being characteristic of rich, powerful, villain, uncaring and inhuman. Overall, this study found that terrorists believe themselves to be heroes and very good people that are fighting against an outgroup that is evil and foul and needs to be defeated. This sense of them being heroes helps them maintain their positive self-image and they see their friends and family and local communities as suffering at the hands of the outgroup. Hence, why the outgroup needs to suffer for this perceived injustice. In conclusion, if these past two chapters have taught you anything, I think we have to conclude that there really is no single factor that causes someone to become a terrorist. It is a mixture of individual, group and political factors that interact together to help make people into a terrorist. So now we understand how terrorists are made, how do terrorist ideologies and mental processes supporting these extreme ideologies develop?     I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Forensic Psychology Of Terrorism and Hostage-Taking . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. Patreon for exclusive access and rewards Have a great day. Criminal Psychology Reference Whiteley, C. (2024) Forensic Psychology of Terrorism And Hostage-Taking . CGD Publishing. England. I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon  page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click  https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley  for a one-time bit of support.

As we reach episode 300 of The Psychology World Podcast, I cannot deny I am so excited to reach this brilliant milestone because we reached episode 200 around April 2023, and typically most podcasts fail before episode 30. That means we have reached ten times the number of episodes before podcasts typically end and that is brilliant. I am still excited for the podcast’s future, I have a lot of ideas for future episodes and I flat out love the learning opportunities that this podcast provides me with. Yet ultimately, I love this psychology podcast because of all of you wonderful listeners, especially when you share and review the podcast and buy me books. I am really grateful for every single one of you so in this psychology podcast episode, I wanted to reflect on the lessons I’ve learnt in the course of doing this podcast. If you enjoy learning about clinical psychology, a psychology student’s life and why psychology is flat out amazing then this is going to be a great episode for you. Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Psychology Worlds Magazine . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. 5 Lessons Learnt In 300 Episodes Key To Knowledge is Always Be Learning Something that has popped up a lot more for me recently is just how much I learn through this podcast and this includes all the blog posts I have stacked up that I need to turn into episodes in the future. This realisation might be because I was talking with a lot of clinical psychology students that had had the exact same degree as me but I was able to have a lot more insight, perspectives and knowledge about different aspects of clinical psychology as well as our other subdisciplines. Yet these students could only talk in-depth about the topics covered in our lectures. They had no idea how clinical psychology worked behind the scenes, different aspects of mental health conditions amongst other things. This was highlighted even more last night at a university social I attended with my old supervisor and all his current students that he’s supervising. A lot of the students were making some comments about psychology, and especially psychology careers, that were slightly wrong but because I learnt about those areas through the podcast and my interactions with the staff, I was able to carefully help them. I didn’t want to be a know-it-all but still. Ultimately, I know I say this a lot but the main reason why I keep coming back to my audio booth every week thankfully without fail at the moment is for the learning. I want to be a knowledgeable aspiring psychologist so in the future I can become a qualified psychologist and the key to knowledge is learning. If I wasn’t learning about the things that I was interested in and if I didn’t flat out love learning new things about psychology then I wouldn’t be doing this podcast. There would simply be no point whatsoever. Some of my favourite episodes that highlight this extra learning that the majority of other students don’t know includes: ·       What Makes A Trauma-Informed Psychologist? ·       What Are The Advantages and Disadvantages of Clinical Cut-offs? ·       What’s Enhanced Cognitive Behavioural Therapy? Therefore, like me, by listening to this psychology podcast every week, you are learning so much more than you realise. As well as this knowledge could be really useful to you in the future. Be it with conversations with friends or family, in a future job interview or even in your current psychology or non-psychology job. Knowledge is power and the key to knowledge is never stop learning. The Mental Health System Is Broken One useful podcast episode that ties into this section is Why Is The Police Refusing Mental Health Calls A Bad Idea? I admit this might be a slightly odd change of tone but this is a personal thing I have learnt a lot over the course of my psychology journey, past 100 episodes and in 2024. Oddly enough, I’m not actually disheartened, rageful or scared about this issue in the sense that I’ve lost hope. In fact, I am very excited about the future because I have met, listened to and read so many amazing people and future and qualified psychologists who are fighting like hell to transform mental health services for the better. My favourite has to be Lucy Johnstone with her work on formulation and how that is revolutionising the way we work with clients and create interventions and treatments with them. Yet there are other smaller names too that are just as important, when I did my work experience in the learning disability team and the Gender Identity Clinic, I met so many amazing people that were working their socks off to serve their clients. They weren’t all psychology people but every single one of them was amazing. Therefore, as much as I have written in my books and spoken on the podcast about the immense issues in mental health services, I am hopeful for the future. There are a lot of great mental health professionals and students rising through the psychology ranks that have a burning passion to help make the world a better place and to make mental health as important as physical health. Yes, I know in the UK in the past year or two, legally mental health is just as important as physical health treatment but come on, just go into any NHS service and you can see the lingering impact of the biomedical model. Actually, try to access a psychological service within the NHS I dare you. You will be met with a lot of medical doctors, offering you medical solutions and psychological referrals made by experts in physical conditions that put you on waiting lists for at least 5 years or more. Whereas as my housemates proved if you go to see medical doctors about a psychological condition, like depression, they will give you a medical solution within 5 minutes without a diagnosis or any psychological support. That is exactly what has happened to a dear friend of mine. Psychological treatment needs to be a major part of psychological conditions. Sorry, I do get carried away on that soapbox at times. In addition, there are major issues with managerialism, understaffing, top-heavy organisation and underfunding within the NHS that greatly restricts mental health services from doing what they need to be able to do to improve lives, decrease psychological distress and give clients more adaptive coping mechanisms for their mental health difficulties. The system is broken because of these issues that plague it, and so many people who desperately need mental health support are being denied it because they aren’t going to kill themselves. Yes, most of the time your mental health has to be that severe for you to access psychological support. I know from personal experience, I’ve been denied anorexia support because I am not severe enough so I need to go private so I don’t get hospitalised. Yet there aren’t that many eating disorder specialists in my area, let alone ones that I can afford, so I’ve found one woman who I need to contact. Yet in this country and all over the world, everyone should be entitled to mental health support if they need it for free. Nonetheless, let me repeat myself here because I have said this before and I will always say this, I never ever want the NHS or other mental health services to be disbanded or gotten rid of. There are immense issues with the NHS and other mental health services all over the world but things can change, things are  changing for the better. This just means as aspiring and qualified psychologists, we must always be fighting for change. It won’t be easy and it will feel impossible 99% of the time because we need such dramatic structural changes to our mental health services, but as long as there are amazing people like you who speak up and fight the good fight then there is hope. There is always hope that we can and we will fix the broken mental health system. Learning Empowers You This is another very personal lesson that I am extremely glad that I’ve learnt in the past 100 episodes. Since the knowledge I have learnt through this podcast has been immensely useful to me as a student, an aspiring psychologist as well as a survivor with my own mental health challenges. Knowledge and my constant learning on this podcast has empowered me with an understanding and a way to explore topics I need to explore for my own future and healing. For example, as a psychology student and aspiring clinical psychologist, I have flat out loved exploring various mental health conditions, types of therapies and techniques. All of this learning has empowered me to have a drive towards wanting to become a qualified psychologist. I have a good idea about what a clinical psychologist does, how they can change lives for the better and I have a foundational understanding of all the things I want to develop during or after my doctorate through Continued Professional Development. I am not an expert but because of the learning I’ve done through this podcast I have a good idea about what and why I want a career in clinical psychology. Without this podcast, I wouldn’t know a fraction of the information I do about clinical psychology and the wider areas of psychology that we cover from time to time. Actually, come to think of it, this reminds me of how I describe The Psychology World Podcast whenever I meet someone new and they ask me what do I cover. I always tell them that the podcast is mainly about clinical psychology and it allows me to explore beyond my lectures and textbooks. And that is completely true because the podcast empowers me to go out and find this information that I wouldn’t be looking at and researching otherwise. All of you wonderful listeners are another reason why I’m empowered to keep learning. Each kind comment, each thank you and each time you reach out makes me want to do this even more. So thank you dear listener. Finally, in the past 100 episodes (to be honest all 300 episodes have proved this to me time and time again), I’ve learnt how this podcast is critical to my own mental health. Not only in terms of the great interactions that I have with you listeners, which can really make me smile on a bad day, but for my own mental health struggles. When I was dealing with my childhood trauma after my breakdown in August 2023, this podcast was a great way for me to research what I was learning in counselling about myself, how my past had impacted me and how it was impacting my relationships right now. I’m grateful that I had this podcast to help me learn and really understand what on earth I was experiencing. In addition, this year after my rape, this podcast has been a lifeline. Sure, me putting out that podcast episode on male rape on 6th May 2024 killed this podcast for months. The audience numbers have only recently started to recover, but I am grateful that I had this psychology podcast. I’ve written a lot of future blog posts that explore different aspects of sexual trauma, how the body responds to trauma and Window of Tolerance is a big concept. I wouldn’t have researched a single one of these topics in any great depth without this podcast and that would have been very damaging to my mental health. I wouldn’t have been able to explore and understand why I was experiencing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, flashbacks, anxiety and all the other negative mental health outcomes associated with sexual violence. There were a lot of healing moments in amongst all the darkness of my mental health because I was able to write podcast episodes. It made me feel a little less insane during the most intense and darkest moments this year. This psychology podcast truly has been a lifeline to me over the past few months, so thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening. Some past podcast episodes that highlight this empowerment through learning includes: ·       Why An Erection Isn’t Consent? ·       What is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? ·       What Are Some Psychological Treatments For Eating Disorders?   The Body Is Critical In Psychological Trauma Work Previously, I’ve mentioned that I wasn’t a massive fan or I didn’t think that much about how our physical body fed into our mental health. Of course, I know that psychoeducation is flat out critical in clinical work with clients. For instance, when working with someone with an anxiety disorder, it’s important to explain to them how the physical sensations of a panic attack and the physical feelings of being anxious is a physical manifestation of psychological states as well as you can help clients to look out for these signs so they know when to use therapeutic techniques amongst other uses of psychoeducation. In addition, I understood that our physical and social environment are critical factors in our mental health. It’s why I really like the systemic approach to mental health because it proposes that if something happens in our social system then it creates a ricochet effect that impacts the rest of the system. This was proved even more important to me last night because of a social factor in my shared university house, it is that factor that is impacting my mental health and my eating disorder. It’s starting to get to the point where I am nervous to use the kitchen or make a mistake because someone has Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in the house so they can have a lot of breakdowns. This makes eating and cooking even more stressful for me. Anyway, I suppose I did understand that our physical body and environment has a lot of impacts on our mental health. It’s why I really like the biopsychosocial model that works holistically to address all these different types of factors. However, it was only after my sexual trauma with my Post-Traumatic Stress, panic attacks and more that I realised just how flat out critical our bodies are to our mental health. It was the physical sense of safety that I had lost, the constant physical tension and the constant tension in my body that really damaged my mental health as well as the psychological processes. Therefore, one of the most important lessons I have learnt in the past 100 episodes is that if I get involved with trauma work in the future, I will focus a lot more on the physical body and how it impacts clients. In fact, I will do this with all my clinical work in the future because the mind-body link has several impacts on our mental health. Some episodes that highlight this mind-body link includes: ·       How Does Trauma Affect The Heart? ·       How To Promote a Healthy Brain-Gut Connection? ·       What Is Psychophysics? On the whole, to make this lesson useful and applicable to you, as much as I hate the biomedical model with all my heart, I want to highlight that we must always remember the biopsychosocial model. We must always strive to work holistically with clients so we address the biological, psychological and social factors that made their mental health condition to develop and be maintained. Just because we mainly focus on the world of psychology and social factors, there will be times when biological factors and our physiological responses play an important role too. That is what this podcast allowed me to learn and understand at a much deeper level than my textbooks, lectures and degree. Psychology Is Amazing The final lesson brings together all of the lessons so it will be shorter than some of the other sections. This podcast teaches me how psychology is amazing because it truly has the power to improve lives and save lives and transform lives for the better. Let’s take depression for example, I went through so many depressive episodes earlier in the year and it is awful. You don’t have any energy, motivation and one day it took me 5 hours just to have a 15-minute shower. Also, it makes you feel like everything is bad about the world, it biases your views about the world and it impacts the majority of your social relationships. However, it is psychology that shows us how to effectively treat depression through cognitive behavioural therapy, different techniques and positive psychology can be immensely useful too. The reason why my depression stopped or I haven’t experienced a depressive episode in months is because of my specialist rape counselling helped me to heal, and I’ve learnt a lot of self-soothing, positive psychology and other techniques that help me to maintain my mental health. Medicine hasn’t helped me. No medical doctor would have given me anything and the root of my depression and trauma responses was a physical event not a medical condition. It is psychology that has allowed me to heal and move on. In addition, as an autistic person, certain parts of the medical community tend to see autism and other neurodivergent conditions as something that needs to be cured or fixed. Yet this thinking that there is something deeply and profoundly wrong with me isn’t useful or helpful and it only makes me feel awful. Yet modern clinical psychology has helped to foster a sense of acceptance, support and they want to help neurodivergent people to thrive. It is this positivity that does stretch through a lot of mental health settings, society and different professions, including certain parts of the medical community, that makes me feel great. It is these techniques that have helped me to decrease my psychological distress, improve my life and given me more adaptive coping mechanisms so I can thrive and deal with stressors that come along. Ultimately, without psychology and without this psychology podcast giving me a way and platform to learn about mental health, how to improve my life and others and us having the knowledge I need to debunk a lot of the myths about everything I’m experiencing. I do not believe I would be here. I think I would probably be dead a long time ago but knowing everything I do about mental health, clinical psychology and more helps me to know that it’s okay to reach out for support. It’s okay to have therapy and therapy is far from the scary mystical process that mainstream society treats it as such. Psychology has taught me a lot about what actually happens in therapy and why therapy is effective, so I know this isn’t a random shot in the dark like a lot of my non-psychology friends imply way, way too often. Some podcast episodes that highlight this lesson includes: ·       What Are 3 Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Techniques? ·       How To Survive A Major Depressive Episode? ·       What Should Therapists Tell Clients In A First Therapy Session? Conclusion I think it’s clear at the end of this episode that I have learnt a hell of a lot of things over the past 300 episodes, let alone the past 100. This podcast and all of you great listeners help me learn, support my mental health and you all make me happy. It is our interactions, our conversations about episodes and your thoughts and feelings that really delight me because it shows to me that this podcast is something people enjoy and it is making a positive impact on the world. That is something that really makes me happy. All I want is to have a positive, meaningful impact on the world, and I don’t know where I heard it from, maybe it was a film or something, but someone said something along the lines of when we leave this world, we need to leave it slightly better than we found it. I want to make sure that happens so my books, my podcast and me aspiring to be a clinical psychologist are a part of that goal. In terms of the future, I can already assure you that I have no intention of stopping this podcast. I already about around another 30 blog posts written up that need to be made into podcast episodes at some point and I have even more ideas for more episodes in the future. Each of these episodes allows me to explore something in more depth or something brand-new entirely and that excites me. I look forward to sharing new content with you, I look forward to continuing my YouTube shorts experiments where I release a daily one for the foreseeable future, and I am excited about the future of psychology. That really is something I am passionate about exploring and I hope that you want to come along with me for the journey.     I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Psychology Worlds Magazine . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. Patreon for exclusive access and rewards Have a great day. I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon  page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click  https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley  for a one-time bit of support.

In biological psychology, there is one of my favourite topics in psychology. It might not be related to clinical psychology, mental health or even forensic psychology, but I love it anyway. Psychophysics is a fascinating area of psychology that has always grabbed my attention and made me want to understand more about how a physical stimulus leads to a psychological experience. For example, how does physical stimuli of chocolate create a chocolate taste in our minds, and how does chocolate create the psychological experience of pleasure. These are some of the questions that psychophysics aims to answer. In this biological psychology podcast episode, you'll learn what is psychophysics, what does psychophysics cover and what might the future of psychophysics be. If you enjoy learning about physiological psychology, biopsychology and how our physical environment impacts our psychological processes then this will be a brilliant episode for you. Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Biological Psychology . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. What Is Psychophysics? Personally, I flat out loved learning for a single lecture about human perception because of a single area of psychology that focuses on the interception between our physical environment and our psychological experiences. That is what the area of psychophysics aims to study and expand our understanding of human perception. For example, right now at the time of writing, I’m listening to some “coffee shop jazz” livestream on YouTube (this is the physical environment) and it is helping me to concentrate, feel relaxed and feel content. Why do I feel like this because I have physical music playing in the background? Equally, why did I feel happy (a psychological experience) when I listen to I Will Survive  or Carol Of The Bells? Or when I watch Heartstopper  on Netflix? Why do these physical experiences cause me to have a psychological sensation or feeling? This is why psychophysics is so important to understand why the physical world impacts us. Overall, psychophysics is the empirical study of how the physical world and our psychological experiences intertwine. This allows us to expand our knowledge about human perception. What Do Psychophysicists Research?  Like most areas of psychology, there is an infinite number of topics to study even within a subfield of psychology. For example, I conduct mental health research, but within mental health, you can study treatment modules, treatment effectiveness, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, sexual disorders, biased cognitive processes and on and on and on. Psychophysics has a lot of different avenues for researchers to explore as well. For instance, one researcher might want to study how a “just noticeable” (probably the only concept in this topic I remember from second-year undergrad) change in light levels impacts someone’s perception of a stranger. Then again, another researcher might want to investigate how a change in the sugar content of a cake changes the level of happiness we experience if we eat it before an exam. Lastly, a researcher could investigate how temperature impacts and warps our perception of time and how much fun we’re having. There are so many different areas that you can research within psychophysics. Ultimately, psychophysics is all about the fascinating relationship between our sensory experiences and our physical stimuli. In other words, psychophysics aims to decode how our brain makes sense of the world and create psychological experiences for us. Just like why listening to “coffee shop jazz” helps me feel relaxed and focused. What Is Threshold Theory and Signal Detection Theory? When you learn about psychophysics at undergrad level, you get introduced to Threshold Theory as this is a major theory that aims to explain how physical stimuli impact our perceptions. The theory investigates how the minimum amount of a stimulus is needed for a person to detect a psychological sensation. For example, how much sugar is needed in a chocolate bar for it to taste sweet to a person. As you can imagine this changes for everyone so let’s say that 5g of sugar is needed for Isabella to say a chocolate bar is sweet whereas Barbara might only need 1 gram of sugar. This leads us to another theory. Signal Detection Theory builds upon Threshold Theory by adding a decision-making element in perception, because this theory proposes that perception isn’t only about the strength of a stimulus. Instead, it is about the strength as well as our ability to detect the stimulus. I’m actually a good example of this because my spicy tastebuds are nowhere near as sensitive as the rest of my family’s so they can be dying after eating a spicy dish but I will be fine and act like it’s nothing. Therefore, not only is my Threshold of spicy higher, it could be argued that my ability to even detect spicy is lower than theirs. Moreover, Signal Detection Theory has a lot of interesting real-world applications that go beyond the scope of this podcast episode. Such as, this theory can explain how radiologists can spot tumours in X-rays and why people sometimes think they’ve heard their phone buzz when it actually hasn’t. What Are Weber’s Law, Fechner’s Law and Steven’s Power Law? Considering I live with two physics students who are constantly talking about different laws of physics, I feel this is definitive proof that psychology has mixed perfectly with physics to produce this intersecting discipline. Therefore, Weber’s Law proposes that the just-noticeable difference between two stimuli is proportional to the magnitude of the stimuli. In other words, if you have 2 chocolate bars, one with 1 gram and another with 2 grams of sugar. Then another 2 chocolate bars altogether, one with 10 grams and another with 11 grams. It is easier to tell the first two apart because of the first two have greater magnitude.  Building upon this, Fechner’s Law proposes that the perceived intensity of the stimulus is proportional to the logarithm of its physical intensity. For instance, the hotter the physical stimulus of a chilli, the greater the psychological sensation of spiciness. Finally, Steven’s Power Law proposes that in reality, the relationship between the physical magnitude of a stimulus and the perceived intensity of the psychological experience can be described as a power function. This Law has been applied to sensory modalities, like the perceived loudness of sounds as well as brightness perception. On the whole, when it comes to these theories and Laws, these are the key concepts that help to form the foundation of psychophysics and our expanded understanding of how physical stimuli create psychological experiences. Why Does Psychophysics Matter? Using Psychophysics In The Real World Sometimes I think a major problem that all sciences have, including psychology, is that after looking at the theory behind a concept, we end up getting confused about why this is useful to know. As well as I often question how is this psychological concept useful in the real world as I am a firm believer that the entire point of science is to help improve lives and make the world a better place. When it comes to psychophysics, this has real world implications because it helps us to understand our senses like hearing, taste, smell, sight and our feelings. Also, it helps us to understand how our senses adapt in response to the environment. For instance, habituation is the process of us not noticing a physical stimulus after a while once we know it doesn’t pose a danger to us. Like we notice when a fan starts up but after a while we stop noticing the fan’s noise. Moreover, psychophysics really helps decision-making and cognitive psychology research as psychophysics deepens our understanding of how we perceive and process information. As well as it shows us how our complex cognitive processes work. For instance, psychophysics research on how our brains process temporal information is useful for understanding multitasking and eyewitness testimony. Lastly, if we look at clinical psychology, psychophysics allows us to better understand, assess and treat sensory disorders. Such as, we can now create more accurate hearing tests and create therapies for conditions like synaesthesia, where all our senses blend together. This is only possible because of psychophysics. There are more applications but you get the gist. Psychophysics   is very useful to our understanding of human behaviour. What is The Future of Psychophysics Research? In case you’re interested in psychophysics research and you might want to conduct your own in the future, you want to be aware of the trends. For instance, psychophysics research is starting to use a lot more neuroscience and brain imaging technology so researchers want to combine the traditional psychophysics methods with the cutting-edge techniques that neuroscience provides us. These include using fMRIs and EEG techniques to study the intersection of our physical environment and psychological experiences. Especially, these cutting-edge techniques allow us to see what’s happening in the brain as we feel these experiences. I still maintain I would flat out love to be a part of a fMRI study, because it sounds fascinating. Additionally, with the rise of virtual and augmented reality, psychophysics researchers are wanting to incorporate this new technology into their studies. You could create a virtual environment and stimulate or manipulate it to induce certain phenomena and make predictions about human behaviour. For example, if you wanted to understand the psychological sensation of overwhelm then you might want to create a virtual environment of a mosh pit at a concert and put someone in there. I hate the idea of mosh pits because of my autism and they sound like hell on earth. Anyway, that is a potential idea for future research. Ultimately, virtual reality allows you to control every single aspect of someone’s sensory input. Finally, computational modelling could be a future trend in psychophysics research because if you create a large computational model of people’s perceptual processes then you can refine and test theories in ways that weren’t previously possible for researchers. Cognitive Psychology Conclusion Even though I always tell people I flat out love psychophysics as a topic, it has been years since I’ve looked into and I am very glad I’ve returned to the topic. Sure, I had forgotten how many theories and laws are involved, but it is fascinating to understand how physical sensations create psychological sensations in the brain. That is amazing to me. Therefore, as we spoke about Threshold Theory, Signal Detection Theory, Webbs, Stevens and Fechner’s Laws, I want you to know that this might be a complex area. Yet in psychology and when it comes to your interest in this great profession, never let complexity stop you. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode then keep exploring, keep learning and keep developing your interest in psychophysics or any other area of psychology. All you truly need to be successful in science is passion for a topic. It is that passion that will drive your learning, your improvement and you wanting to do the best you possibly can. I am not interested enough in psychophysics to want to study it for my career, but keeps me interested in psychology along with hundreds of other tiny topics. And that is why I love psychology, I love this podcast and I love my life. Passion really is the key to success.   I really hope you enjoyed today’s forensic psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Biological Psychology . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. Patreon for exclusive access and rewards Have a great day. Biological Psychology References and Further Reading Bass, C. DeCusatis, J. Enoch, V. Lakshminarayanan, G. Li, C. MacDonald, V. Mahajan, & E. Van Stryland (Eds.), Handbook of Optics, Volume III: Vision and Vision Optics (3rd ed., pp. 3.1-3.12). New York: McGraw-Hill. Ehrenstein, W. H., & Ehrenstein, A. (1999). Psychophysical methods. In U. Windhorst & H. Johansson (Eds.), Modern Techniques in Neuroscience Research (pp. 1211-1241). Berlin: Springer. Fechner, G. T. (1860). Elemente der Psychophysik. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel. Gescheider, G. A. (2013). Psychophysics: the fundamentals. Psychology Press. Green, D. M., & Swets, J. A. (1966). Signal detection theory and psychophysics. New York: Wiley. Kingdom, F. A. A., & Prins, N. (2016). Psychophysics: A practical introduction (2nd ed.). London: Academic Press. Knoblauch, K., & Maloney, L. T. (2012). Modeling Psychophysical Data in R. New York: Springer. Leonov, Y. P. (1975). Decision theory and the concept of threshold in psychophysics. Soviet Psychology, 13(3), 78-90. Lu, Z. L., & Dosher, B. (2013). Visual psychophysics: From laboratory to theory. MIT Press. Pelli, D. G., & Farell, B. (2010). Psychophysical methods. In M. Prins, N. (2016). Psychophysics: a practical introduction. Academic Press. Stevens, S. S. (1957). On the psychophysical law. Psychological Review, 64(3), 153-181. Stevens, S. S. (1960). The psychophysics of sensory function. American scientist, 48(2), 226-253. Wichmann, F. A., & Jäkel, F. (2018). Methods in psychophysics. In J. T. Wixted (Ed.), Stevens’ Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience (pp. 1-42). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon  page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click  https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley  for a one-time bit of support.

As an aspiring clinical psychologist that is hardcore into the idea that it is critical to our clinical work that we learn different techniques from different therapies, I want to focus on different therapeutic techniques. I think this is critical because in order to help our clients to the best of our abilities, we need to give ourselves as many tools as possible so we can share them with our clients. All to help them decrease their psychological distress, improve their lives and give back control of their lives to them. Therefore, in this clinical psychology podcast episode, you’ll learn what is guided imagery, Socratic questioning, and cognitive reframing. As well as what these techniques do, their advantages, disadvantages and more. If you enjoy learning about what mental health, therapy and practical techniques then this will be a great episode for you. Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by CBT For Depression: A Clinical Psychology Introduction To Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Depression.  Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. Note: as always nothing on this podcast is ever any sort of official advice. What Is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy? In case there is anyone new to psychology or cognitive behavioural therapy reading or listening to this podcast episode, I wanted to take a moment to tell you about what CBT actually is. I laughed to myself in the creation of this episode because considering how much CBT-based content I’ve created over the years, including three books, I have never created a small definition of the therapy. I seriously need to change that. Thankfully, I have a nice paragraph in an assignment that explains this therapy from a few years ago. “Nevertheless, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a highly effective psychotherapy for MDD (Lepping et al., 2017; Lopez-Lopez et al., 2019; NICE, 2018; Whiston et al., 2019) this essay will critically review in the rest of this paper. CBT is recommended as a gold standard treatment for MDD by the NICE guidelines (2022) involving a directive, time-limited, structured approach emphasising a collaborative therapeutic relationship between the psychotherapist and client (Fenn and Byrne, 2013) assuming maladaptive behaviours are learnt so they can be unlearned (Apolinário-Hagen et al., 2020). Therefore, therapist and client work to understand the client’s experiences and how to overcome overwhelming problems by breaking them down into smaller components (Davey et al., 2015). Clients learn how to identify unhelpful and unrealistic thinking processes and patterns maintaining their MDD (Davey et al., 2015) as well, so they can use the techniques they are taught in therapy to challenge these negative thoughts and change their habits in everyday life (Davey et al., 2015). Ultimately, CBT works by helping a client become more aware of the interrelationships between their thoughts, feelings and behaviours (Davey et al., 2015), including their negative cognitive styles, a cause of MDD identified by Alloy et al. (1999), and the Cognitive Triad as identified by Beck et al. (1985).” What Are Three Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Techniques? What Is Guided Imagery? This therapy technique was introduced by the Father of CBT himself, Aaron Beck, in the 1970s, and it gets clients to use mental imagery to relax and help clients to deal with their anxiety and stress. For instance, a therapist could guide a client to imagine a peaceful, lustrous forest and help the client to focus on the forest’s sounds, smells, sights and sensations. As well as Guided Imagery can be useful for clients with stress, anxiety or trauma with it taking between 10-30 minutes. Moreover, the advantage of Guided Imagery is that it helps to promote relaxation and reframes negative thoughts within clients. Yet some clients might struggle with the visualization part of this technique, so it isn’t right for everyone. What Is Socratic Questioning? This is a therapy technique that I’ve heard a lot about but no one has ever actually taken the time to explain what it is to me, and I have never looked it up. Until now. As a result, Socratic Questioning was typically introduced in the 1920s based on the Greek Philosopher Socrates then Aaron Beck adapted this type of questioning for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Socratic Questioning was designed to take 10-20 minutes for clients with distorted thinking patterns and it involves asking guided questions to help clients challenge their irrational beliefs. For instance, you might ask a client “What evidence do you have that you’ll fail this subject at school?” then as a client can’t find any evidence to support their thoughts, this helps to challenge this negative belief. One advantage of Socratic Questioning is that it encourages a client to critically think about their negative beliefs but it can be confrontational. This next comment I say extremely unofficially because nothing on this podcast is ever any sort of official advice. Yet this can be effective when talking with friends who are struggling with their mental health and have several irrational beliefs. What is Cognitive Reframing? Out of all the different therapy techniques used within Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, this might be the most famous or at least it’s one of the ones I’ve heard most about. Since cognitive reframing was introduced in the 1960s by Albert Ellis. As well as cognitive reframing is designed to take about 5-15 minutes and it helps a client to view situations from a different, typically more positive perspective.  One example of this reframing could be helping a client to reframe “I failed my driving test” into “Now, I know what I need to practise for next time”. Furthermore, one advantage of cognitive reframing is that encourages clients to look at situations from a new, more positive perspective so this reduces distress. Although, this reframing might not work for deeply held beliefs. Clinical Psychology Conclusion At the end of this first podcast episode in our little mini-series focusing on different therapeutic techniques, I want to conclude by saying that I’m really excited for the upcoming episodes. Since whether you love or hate Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or any of the other psychotherapies we’re going to be looking at in the upcoming episodes, each therapy has something fascinating to offer us as aspiring or qualified psychologists. And when you listen to the podcast, read one of my books or just learn about psychology, I want you to focus on that sense of curiosity. Since there are a good few areas of psychology that I have no interest in whatsoever, yet I still learn about those areas. Due to one day with one client with one particular mental health difficulty, it might be useful. That simple piece of knowledge might be the difference between helping or not helping a client to improve their life. That is why learning, developing and expanding our psychological knowledge base is always flat out critical. Thankfully, it’s a lot of fun too. Especially, when it comes to therapy techniques.     I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET CBT For Depression: A Clinical Psychology Introduction To Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Depression.  Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca. Patreon for exclusive access and rewards Have a great day. Clinical Psychology References and Further Reading ​Nakao, M., Shirotsuki, K., & Sugaya, N. (2021). Cognitive–behavioral therapy for management of mental health and stress-related disorders: Recent advances in techniques and technologies. BioPsychoSocial medicine, 15(1), 16. Bieling, P. J., McCabe, R. E., & Antony, M. M. (2022). Cognitive-behavioral therapy in groups. Guilford publications. Fitzsimmons-Craft, E. E., Taylor, C. B., Graham, A. K., Sadeh-Sharvit, S., Balantekin, K. N., Eichen, D. M., ... & Wilfley, D. E. (2020). Effectiveness of a digital cognitive behavior therapy–guided self-help intervention for eating disorders in college women: A cluster randomized clinical trial. JAMA network Open, 3(8), e2015633-e2015633. Gautam, M., Tripathi, A., Deshmukh, D., & Gaur, M. (2020). Cognitive behavioral therapy for depression. Indian journal of psychiatry, 62(Suppl 2), S223-S229. Marciniak, M. A., Shanahan, L., Rohde, J., Schulz, A., Wackerhagen, C., Kobylińska, D., ... & Kleim, B. (2020). Standalone smartphone cognitive behavioral therapy–based ecological momentary interventions to increase mental health: Narrative review. JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 8(11), e19836. Sigurvinsdóttir, A. L., Jensínudóttir, K. B., Baldvinsdóttir, K. D., Smárason, O., & Skarphedinsson, G. (2020). Effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for child and adolescent anxiety disorders across different CBT modalities and comparisons: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Nordic Journal of Psychiatry, 74(3), 168-180. Urits, I., Callan, J., Moore, W. C., Fuller, M. C., Renschler, J. S., Fisher, P., ... & Viswanath, O. (2020). Cognitive behavioral therapy for the treatment of chronic pelvic pain. Best Practice & Research Clinical Anaesthesiology, 34(3), 409-426. I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon  page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click  https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley  for a one-time bit of support.

As we saw in How Can Therapists and Parents Support Transgender Teenagers?   There are high rates of suicide, self-harm and depression in transgender youth. One of the ways to decrease these awful mental health outcomes is medical transitioning, where transgender youth transition from the gender they were assigned at birth to their affirmed gender by developing the characterised physical features of their affirmed gender. An effective way of medical transitioning is by Hormone Replacement Therapy because masculine hormones can make fat move away from the hips and thighs and deepen the voice. Whereas feminine hormones can make body fat move towards the hips and thighs and lead to the development of breasts. However, Hormone Replacement Therapy focuses on physical benefits for transgender youth, and yet this is a psychology podcast and I am a firm believer in the biopsychosocial model. Therefore, in this biological psychology podcast episode, we’re going to be investigating the psychological benefits of Hormone Replacement Therapy on transgender youth. This is going to be a lot of fun. If you enjoy learning about how hormones affect our behaviour, mental health and self-image, then you’ll love today’s episode. Today’s podcast episode has been sponsored by Biological Psychology . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also, you can buy the eBook directly from me at https://www.payhip.com/connorwhiteley   How Hormone Replacement Therapy Improves Physical and Social Wellbeing? The main piece of research we’ll be using for this podcast episode comes from Doyle et al. (2023) because they did a large meta-analysis that got data from 46 journal articles. These articles were based on interviews with people who had taken hormones and people that hadn’t, as well as analyses of people taking hormones over longer periods of time. The research clearly shows that gender-affirming hormone therapy reduces depressive symptoms as well as psychological distress in transgender people. Also, what I find really interesting is that the research shows that hormone therapy helps transgender people improve in key areas of psychosocial functioning. Mainly in trust and self-control. Furthermore, the researchers noted that hormone therapy mostly leads to a decrease in distress in transgender people and doesn’t necessarily lead to an increase in positive emotion states. In other words, hormone replacement therapy leads to a decrease in depression, isolation and sadness and doesn’t really promote feelings of positivity. Which I think is an idea finding because I don’t think hormone replacement therapy needs to promote positive feelings as that will be a byproduct anyway of the process. For example, if you have depression, sadness and you’re isolated and hormone replacement therapy reduces those symptoms then you’re going to feel better anyway. And I’ve talked to my trans friend a lot and they always tell me how much better they feel after starting hormone therapy. In addition, Doyle et al. (2023) doesn’t provide a clear explanation of why these benefits happen. We aren’t sure if this has something to do with chemical changes in the brain or from improved body image or a mixture of the two. Personally, from everyone I’ve heard from trans people, it mainly comes from their improved body image and they feel a lot more comfortable in their own skin. But of course, there are going to be other factors as well at play. When it comes to improvements in quality of life, there is some evidence of this but these results are complicated by the emotional changes that occur during hormone therapy. For instance, in a lot of studies where participants are taking masculinising hormones, these hormones tend to decrease emotions whereas feminising hormones tend to increase emotions in participants. Since participants on feminising hormones report emotional imbalances, increased emotional expressions and mood swings. Moreover, there is no clear way to tell how existing gender stereotypes affect people taking gender-affirming hormone therapy. Yet researchers do know that these factors do impact the participant’s report on their overall quality of life. Finally, whilst Doyle et al. (2023) has some strong conclusions about the benefits of gender-affirming hormone therapy, there are gaps in the literature too. Since it is difficult to get control groups of a good size for randomised, controlled studies as well as study sizes tend to be small. Yet I personally think that is mainly because the transgender community is so, so tiny compared to the rest of the population. Also, the data could be skewed by the studies using a volunteer sample of transgender people, instead of other more representative or stratified samples. Biological Psychology Conclusion At the end of this biological psychology podcast episode, the takeaway message is very clear. Hormone therapy for transgender people decreases psychological distress, depression and it improves lives. As well as this is even more important when we consider depression plays a major role in self-harm and suicide behaviour that is scarily common in the transgender community. And thanks to Doyle et al. (2023), we now understand that hormone therapy helps transgender people a lot and it might very well save their lives. Therefore, whilst there are gaps in the literature, and let me just say there are gaps in all academic literature, it is research that proves and supports the importance of this life-saving and life-affirming therapy for transgender people. I know in the USA in particular there are a lot of laws going through at the moment in the year of writing this episode in 2023, that aim to restrict gender-affirming medical practice. I’ve seen some funny reasons given including how banning gender-affirming medical practices will help people and improve lives. That is a lie and Doyle et al. (2023) proves that. Banning transgender medical care will not help anyone, but it will lead to increased rates of depression, isolation and sadness. And then that will have a knock-on effect on increased rates of self-harm and suicide so let’s not allow life-saving medical care to be banned because this episode shows us, physical healthcare can have massive benefits for our physical and mental health.   I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Biological Psychology . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also, you can buy the eBook directly from me at https://www.payhip.com/connorwhiteley   Patreon for exclusive access and rewards Have a great day. Clinical Psychology References Doyle, D. M., Lewis, T. O., & Barreto, M. (2023). A systematic review of psychosocial functioning changes after gender-affirming hormone therapy among transgender people. Nature Human Behaviour, 1-12. Eisenberg, M. E., Gower, A. L., McMorris, B. J., Rider, G. N., Shea, G., & Coleman, E. (2017). Risk and protective factors in the lives of transgender/gender nonconforming adolescents. Journal of Adolescent Health, 61(4), 521-526. Eisenberg, M. E., Gower, A. L., McMorris, B. J., Rider, G. N., Shea, G., & Coleman, E. (2017). Risk and protective factors in the lives of transgender/gender nonconforming adolescents. Journal of adolescent health, 61(4), 521-526. http://transpulseproject.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Impacts-of-Strong-Parental-Support-for-Trans-Youth-vFINAL.pdf Iverson, Jo. (2020). Once A Girl, Always A Boy. Berkeley, CA: She Writes Press Perez-Brumer, A., Day, J. K., Russell, S. T., & Hatzenbuehler, M. L. (2017). Prevalence and correlates of suicidal ideation among transgender youth in California: findings from a representative, population-based sample of high school students. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 56(9), 739-746. SANSFAÇON, A. P., GELLY, M. A., FADDOUL, M., & LEE, E. O. J. (2020). Parental support and non-support of trans youth: towards a nuanced understanding of forms of support and trans youth's expectations. Enfances, Familles, Generations, (36). Seibel, B. L., de Brito Silva, B., Fontanari, A. M., Catelan, R. F., Bercht, A. M., Stucky, J. L., ... & Costa, A. B. (2018). The impact of the parental support on risk factors in the process of gender affirmation of transgender and gender diverse people. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 399. Veale, J. F., Watson, R. J., Peter, T., & Saewyc, E. M. (2017). Mental Health Disparities Among Canadian Transgender Youth. The Journal of adolescent health : official publication of the Society for Adolescent Medicine, 60(1), 44–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2016.09.014 I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon  page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click  https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley  for a one-time bit of support.

During October 2023, I spent three days working in a Gender Identity Clinic up in Newcastle, England and I got to experience a little bit of what it’s like to work in the service. I learnt a lot about how Gender services run, what is involved and how brilliant the people there that work there. Yet most importantly, I learn how great transgender people are as well. which I already knew because I have a lot of transgender friends and I’m trans non-binary myself, but this work experience cemented my positive regard for these critical, life-saving services even more. Therefore, in this podcast episode, we’ll be looking at what happens at a Gender Identity Clinic, what I learnt from them and why I fully support these services. If you enjoy learning about transgender healthcare, mental health and clinical psychology then you’ll love today’s episode. This podcast episode has been sponsored by Clinical Psychology and Transgender Clients: A Guide To Clinical Psychology, Mental Health and Psychotherapy . Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also, you can buy the eBook directly from me at https://www.payhip.com/connorwhiteley   What Is A Gender Identity Clinic? And A First Lesson Simply put and I actually think Bing defines a Gender Identity Clinic rather well, “A gender identity clinic is a medical facility that provides support and treatment to individuals who experience gender dysphoria. It accepts referrals from all over the UK for adults with issues related to gender. The clinic is a multi-disciplinary administrative and clinical team, including psychologists, psychiatrists, endocrinologists, speech and language therapists, and nurses. They work together in order to provide holistic gender care, focusing on the biological/medical, psychological and social aspects of gender.” Source: https://gic.nhs.uk/about-us/ In addition, this is actually one of my first reasons why I really like Gender Identity Clinics as a psychology person, because they’re very holistic. Which, as I’ve mentioned on the podcast before, is flat out critical to delivering the best possible care for our clients. This is even more for Gender Dysphoria because there is a psychological dimension too it, but then there are social and biological aspects which interact. It is only by interacting and looking at these three types of factors we can possibly hope to help our clients to the best of our abilities. Be it through Hormone Replacement Therapy so trans people can have the physical body they want, or the psychological dimension so they can increase their confidence and feel okay in their own body, or the social aspects by wearing gender-affirming clothing. Addressing all these dimensions of a client’s experience is flat out critical and I’m really glad that this approach is baked into Gender Identity Clinics. An Overview Of What I Did In Those Three Days Before I start talking about some of the specific lessons I learnt during these three days, I wanted to give you an overview of what I did. Also, I should mention that in my experience, Gender Identity Clinics are made up of psychology, speech and language therapists, General Practitioners (for our international audience this what the UK calls its doctors) and nurses. I think that’s all of them but as you can see, it is very much a multi-disciplinary approach which is brilliant. Therefore, like most work experience situations, you’re given to one of the disciplines and you spend the day with them. On the Monday, I spent it with a brilliant nurse that I got on well with and I learnt a lot from her. When I first met her she was looking over some blood test results for a woman that had just started her Hormone Replacement Therapy so I got to learn all about that, the different levels they look for and the importance of liver function testing. Afterwards, the nurse had a video appointment with a woman to see how she was getting on. Since it tends to be about every six months, a client gets a “check-in” appointment so the Clinic can make sure everything is okay, the client is happy and to see if anything has changed. This is when I learnt that after a few years of being on Hormone Replacement Therapy, the effects and changes start to level off. Meaning for the first year or two, the client might notice a lot of changes because of the hormones and this makes them really help. Yet then the effects start to level off. In addition, I learnt during this call what the term “Pathway” means in Gender Identity Clinics. This is basically their route through the Clinic starting off with their assessment and diagnosis, all the way to whatever their desired end is. For example, if a client only wanted to be diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria then the pathway would be short(ish) for them because they would get the diagnosis and be discharged from the clinic. Yet if someone wanted a diagnosis and then a gender-affirming surgery that had a long waiting time on the NHS then their pathway would be longer. This was a great video call that taught me a lot about transgender people, how kind and helpful they are and there was one thing in particular that the client said that still sticks in my mind. For historical context, my work experience was around the time the UK’s governing political party had their party conference and broadcasted tons of evil, foul lies about transgender people to the nation. This was a depressing time to be transgender. However, the client on the video call mentioned how whilst the political atmosphere was upsetting, the vast majority of people in their experience couldn’t care less that they’re trans. And that was very affirming for me because that is largely true I think, because this topic is so politicised, sometimes it’s hard to remember that the vast majority of people are okay and support transgender people. I’ll always be grateful for that reminder because I think that helped me a lot as well. Then in the afternoon, I was mainly sitting with a former placement student and going through a lot of their research. Something I’ll talk about more later on because that is critical to understand. What Happened On Tuesday? As a future clinical psychologist, I really did enjoy Tuesday because I’ve been checking out NHS Assistant Psychologist job descriptions lately and every single one of them requires you to have what’s known as MDT experience. This means jobs want you to have experience in Multi-Disciplinary Meetings, so on Tuesday I went to one. It was brilliant in a very nerdy sort of way. Since we all went into this big conference room and sat around a table and everyone was there more or less. You can the Clinical Leads, the head of the service who was a brilliant clinical psychologist, you had speech and language, psychiatrists, nurses and so on. And my personal favourite bit about all of this was there were free homemade biscuits being passed round because it was close to Halloween. Therefore, for the next 90 minutes, everyone spoke about their cases, they wanted to bounce ideas off each other and there were some good discussions. Granted a lot of the cases, which I would just double-check, like the professional would tell everyone their thoughts and because everyone is really good at their jobs, there was nothing to point out or problems with their thinking. Towards the end of the meeting, a nurse joined us online and she was going through her caseload and there were some more complex cases and it was really interesting to listen to. Personally, I was surprised how long this MDT meeting went on for because that was only because I had never been to an MDT meeting before. Yet I was talking to a nurse later on and some of MDTs go on for three hours, I think that was the record at that particular service. As a result, I really enjoyed this experience because it did give me critical experience that will hopefully benefit my future career as a clinical psychologist. Then the rest of Tuesday was sitting in on appointments like Monday and checking sure that clients were okay, which was great. As well as I was sitting with a placement student and we were talking for hours about different aspects of the service and client experiences. Including some interesting research the service was doing. What Happened On Wednesday At The Gender Identity Clinic? Before this work experience, I had no idea that there were small versions of MDT meetings because at this service, there are things called Huddles. These particularly happen on a Wednesday and these are meant for less complex cases that people take along so they can still talk about them and get ideas, but they need the level of insight that a large-scale MDT meeting provides. Also, these Huddles require the presence of at least three different professions. In our Huddle, we had psychology, nursing and psychiatry, and I think speech and language might have made an appearance too. Again, this is another good piece of experience for me because it shows how the NHS works, how dedicated everyone is to multi-disciplinary and holistic approaches to transgenderism. And it also shows me that you can adapt and come up with new ideas to solve problems within problems. For example, if every single case had to go through MDT then I imagine (and this isn’t fact) that those meetings would be rather time-consuming, so coming up with the Huddle idea means everyone can use their idea more effectively. Finally, besides from sitting in on some more appointments, I had maybe one of the most important conversations I have ever had as a future clinical psychologist. I was talking to this wonderful female GP and she used to be a Commissioning Officer for NHS England and we were talking about Gender Identity Services, how they’re set up and whatnot. I’ll talk more about that in the research section, but she was talking about how on paper the Services might “cost” a lot of money but in reality, these Gender Identity Clinics are very affordable and cheap for the NHS. Since we know from the research and I’ve mentioned this on previous podcast episodes, gender-affirming practices save lives, decrease suicide rates and improve the mental health of transgender people. Therefore, these Gender Identity Clinics perform these affirming practices and treatments, and if we talk in cold calculations that all policymakers seem to love, these services mean transgender clients are far, far, far less likely to commit suicide. Meaning they can work, pay tax and contribute to the economy. Something policymakers are always interested in. Therefore, if you compare the money spent on Gender Identity Clinics and the money transgender people pay in tax and other economic activities through working. Then Gender Identity Clinics become very cost-effective for the NHS. Furthermore, possibly one of the most sobering reminders of why this area is so important is because transgender children are committing suicide a lot more now. Since the GP was telling me that ever since the UK government decided to shut down the Gender Development Service, which is the UK’s under-18 Gender Dysphoria service, the children on the waiting list for treatment have reached double-digit suicide rates for the first time. When the service was open the suicide rates for children were in the single figures. As a result, I will never let this go but the fact is clear. When transgender healthcare is restricted, this kills people and in this case, transgender healthcare being restricted to children increases the chance of them dying. Personally, even as I was trying that section, I was getting a little upset because I never wanted to have that conversation. It isn’t natural to have to talk about child suicide but because of the foul and awful decisions of policymakers and politicians and other people that know less, we have to talk about child suicide rates. And as much as it upsets me, it also gives me more determination to do sometimes, to help people and help improve lives. Lessons Learnt From Working In A Gender Identity Clinic In addition to the lessons I’ve already mentioned above, I want to talk about some specific lessons that I’ve learnt during these three days and why they’re important to current or future clinical psychologists. The People Who Work In Mental Health I think one of the most important things to recognise is just how amazing and brilliant people are who work in mental health settings. I’ve worked in NHS settings before and everyone in the NHS is extremely kind, compassionate and they truly want to do what’s best for their service users. This was exactly what I had expected and I didn’t really think too much of it, because this is exactly how people who work in mental health settings should be. However, this could be my upbringing, where I live in the world and the mainstream media, but I was really pleased with how supportive, passionate and dedicated the workers at the Gender Identity Clinic were. I know this shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, but professional who work at Gender Identity Clinics are some of the nicest, most passionate and hardworking people I have had had the pleasure of working with. Therefore, I think this is important to realise as current or future clinical psychologists, because I think sometimes we sometimes don’t understand there are other people who are just as passionate about psychology as ourselves in the world. For example, I’m currently doing my clinical psychology Masters and I am very passionate about the topic (hence the podcast and books) but my passion comes through in different ways compared to other students. So sometimes I do feel a minor disconnect between myself and other psychology students, so it was nice going into the Clinic and meeting other professionals that are just as passionate about this area as me. Understanding Comorbidity If you study clinical psychology then you might have come across the disconnect in clinical psychology between the academic research and the real-world implications.  For example, academic research empirically focuses on a single mental health condition and excludes participants from research that have two or more mental health conditions. This is great for research purposes because it allows us to focus on the effects and treatment outcomes for one single condition. Yet in reality, humans are rarely that clean cut because of comorbidities, where someone has two or more conditions. And this was something I found really interesting about the MDT meeting on the Tuesday because I got to hear about this in an applied setting. As well as I am having to be a little vague because this is a sensitive topic for a lot of clients so I will not be sharing too much publicly. Yet once you start working in mental health settings, you’ll start to see, appreciate and understand that sometimes it is “rare” to see someone with a single mental health condition because humans are not that simple. Therefore, as much as I want to elaborate on this section, I really need to refrain from doing so because I was told this podcast episode will probably attract a lot of haters that might try to misquote me in an effort to hurt the amazing clients that myself and the service are trying to help. Need For Research Something I found really interesting about Gender Identity Clinics is because they are so politicised, they are so judged by the government and all the transphobes are looking for any excuse to shut down all these life-saving services. There is a massive focus on research within Gender Identity Clinics. Now I’ve seen NHS services focus on research before because research is a critical part of healthcare, but Gender Identity Clinics thankfully take this focus to the next level. Additionally, when I asked about there was such a focus on research, I was told the following, but I need to reword it for our international listeners. A few years ago in the UK, there was a legal case brought forward by a transgender client who basically accused the Tavistock Clinic of trying to push the client through transitioning and a bunch of other stuff. The Tavistock Trust lost the case unfortunately because the Trust couldn’t provide evidence for the effectiveness and life-saving nature of gender-affirming practices. As well as because this was a court case against a Gender Identity Clinic, the mainstream media focused a lot of attention on it and they did a very thorough job reporting on it. Further, adding to the false public narratives that turns public opinion against these critically important services. Overall, this was a landmark court case in the UK because this was the legal case that was instrumental in bringing down the Gender Identity Development service for under 18s. Remember earlier when I mentioned those increasing rates of child suicide, this court case was a major factor behind it. As a result, in an effort to prevent another court case being so easily lost, there is a massive focus on research being done by these services. Because without this research that supports the gender-affirming work these clinics do and the lives they save, then there will be more court cases, more losses and more clinics will be shut down. Resulting in more trans people being denied the medical, social and psychological services they desperately need to prevent the worse mental health outcomes. Like suicide. And I do find this particular section upsetting because I know as a trans non-binary person as much trans healthcare in the UK is on a knife’s edge and I know the consequences of what happens if these clinics go away. People die. It is as simple as that and that I find distressing, but it also hardens my resolve about why I want to support trans people and trans healthcare as much as I possibly can. Overall, there is always a massive need for research in clinical settings, but even more so in Gender Identity Clinics. And one thing I have learnt from this work experience is the importance of research and how research has the power to save services and all the good they do in the world, so I will never ever take conducting research for granted again. Know And Learn More Than You Think Finally, I’ve written about this before in a few different places, but there will be times when you realise you know a lot more than you think. For example, there’s a tiny extract from Clinical Psychology Reflections Volume 4 (coming out in March 2024) that introduces this topic well. “The idea for this reflection actually came from a Prospectus Evening that I attended with some friends after a long day of testing on participants, and as much as the university wanted us to believe otherwise, this entire event was the university just marketing itself and wanting to keep us on. They had a forensic psychologist, social psychologists, cognitive people and a bunch of clinical psychologists there, and after helping myself to the free pizza and catching up with my Final Year Project supervisor socially, I went back over to my friends to see they were talking to a lecturer of mine, a clinical psychologist. And what really struck me were the questions they were asking. They weren’t dumb questions, they weren’t ignorant questions (well that ignorant) and they weren’t questions that made me question why the hell they wanted to go into clinical psychology (well slightly). They were simply basic questions that they would have known the answers to if they had taken clinical psychology modules.” My point here is that if we’re listening, trying to learn and we actively engage in learning or any sort of work experience, then you naturally pick up stuff that you didn’t realise you had learnt. The example above contains a lot of stuff about what I had learnt in clinical psychology that I considered basics but in reality, it was specialised knowledge I was surprised other people with an apparent interest in clinical psychology didn’t know. I was reminded about this again during this work experience, because on the Wednesday after I returned to Kent I went the trans social group I go to, and there were a few conversations. I was surprised I was able to follow the conversations perfectly and I could actually add the conversations in quite a lot of depth. And it just struck me how much I had actually learnt in those three days. As a result, my point is that whenever you do psychology work experience, you may think you didn’t learn anything but in reality, you probably learnt a lot more than you ever thought possible.   I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode. 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