I’ve run the clinpsy forum for 18 years, and before that I spent a couple of years as a moderator on a precursor forum. I’ve compiled and/or written about 200 wiki posts that have been viewed millions of times between them. Some individual posts have had over 100,000 page views – the most popular being ..read more

The way people talk about increasing the resilience of children who have experienced trauma makes me deeply uncomfortable. Likewise the way we talk about people who have lived through traumatic experiences in their work, bullying or coercively controlling relationships needing to “toughen up” or learn skills to “shake it off”. Worse still, the idea of ..read more

How we talk about things influences how we think about things. Whether you believe the people arriving in small boats after perilous journeys are “illegal immigrants” (who have come here to exploit the system and harm us) or “asylum seekers” (desperate people who are seeking better/safer lives for themselves and their families) frames how you ..read more

I wanted to write something about recent events. They’ve had a powerful emotional effect on me, and lots of people that I know. People who are muslim, asian or black have been particularly affected, but I think many people will have been a bit more wary of unrest or concerned about what was going on ..read more

When I watched The Usual Suspects, the twist at the end made me immediately re-watch the whole film. The extra bit of knowledge meant the same information from the earlier plot had entirely different meaning. The same things happens when you realise someone has lied to you, or manipulated you for some secondary gain – you suddenly need to reappraise all the prior interactions you have had in light of this new insight. It is inevitable as we go through life that we learn additional information that helps us understand things in more sophisticated ways. Just as we learn that our parents are flaw ..read more

Both Liz Truss and the disgraced PM have been pictured in the media cosplaying over recent weeks and months. Johnson dressing up as a fighter pilot, a soldier, a fishmonger, and in numerous hard hats and reflective jackets, and Liz Truss mimicking famous photographs and outfits of Margaret Thatcher have received the most coverage. But they aren’t the only ones. Priti Patel had her police jacket for her publicity shoots about immigration enforcement, and Sunak has been photographed in army camouflage, reflective jacket and hardhat, or white coat and mask during various visits, Sajid Javid likew ..read more

I have posted in the past about the feeling of running a small entrepreneurial venture, and how it can feel like pushing a giant boulder up a hill without much help, and how every time I think I’ve reached the summit a new peak appears. Well, for the first time, it feels like that feeling has changed. Suddenly it feels like I’m at the top of the hill, and I have a team of people to help me think about how to make the boulder roll. It is still a daunting task to get the thing to roll in the right direction, and there is still no guarantee it will start to gain momentum and size, let alone reach ..read more

This post is about periods. It is personal and somewhat more visceral than the things I usually write, so if you don’t like descriptions of blood and gynaecological issues, you might want to skip it. It does feel a bit uncomfortable to share something that feels quite private, so I have waited a while to click post. But I want the information to be out there for other people to find, and to encourage research about the impacts of hormonal contraceptives on women’s wellbeing, so I wanted to share my personal experience. And I figured that I wanted to support other people who have spoken out, li ..read more

Today an article from WHO about reducing the harm caused by alcohol around the world has got people all fired up on social media. The article has slightly clumsy wording about prevention of harm to unborn babies from alcohol, that some people have interpreted as a recommendation to prevent women of child bearing age from being allowed to drink. In response people have jumped in as much to defend/normalise drinking as to stick up for women’s rights (and to rightly criticise the way certain other types of risks from alcohol are only mentioned by reference to other documents, such as the risk of ..read more

I read an article recently entitled “There are no black people in Africa“. The idea seems like one of those obvious-once-you-think-about-it things that needs to be said more: People don’t inherently identify by skin colour, we identify by our culture, language, geography, function within a community etc and it is only when colonialism and migration put people in a context where they are seen as “foreign” or “different” that the labels of others (often those with power) group them with everyone else in the world with their skin colour as if this is a simple homogenous group. So in America or Eu ..read more