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Mental Health Care Pathways and Service Implementation

After qualifying in clinical psychology my research focused on psychological therapies for psychosis and, later, their implementation in criminal justice settings. This work highlighted for me the difficulty of implementing therapies as per protocol in real world, chaotic, settings. To address this implementation gap, my work has focused on the implementation of therapy with the fewest possible therapeutic ingredients and expectations on those accessing it. The experiences and priorities of people accessing care in this context has become a central focus of my work.

Social determinants of Mental Health

My work in secondary mental health care placed the impact of social and economic factors on access to care into sharp relief. I have gradually fostered an interest in understanding the social determinants of health and have worked with doctoral students in this area, finding associations between inequality and mental health across domains (see Tibber el al. 2019, 2022).

Public Mental Health and Community Based Approaches

We know that there are many obstacles to accessing help from mainstream services. We also know that people prefer to access informal help from other sources - friends, relatives, voluntary and community sector organisations. In a recent study we found that people who self harm found that support from VCSE was beneficial and more accessible than mainstream care (a blog on this is available here (hyperlink to: https://sphr.nihr.ac.uk/news-and-events/blog/guest-blog-getting-help-for-self-harm-communities-of-support/). I have also been fortunate to work with doctorate trainee clinical psychologists on projects with refugee people, services supporting homeless people and those accessing creativity groups (see Tribe et al. 2019).

Systems Thinking and Cybernetics

With colleagues I have edited the Interdisciplinary Handbook of Perceptual Control Theory (PCT). PCT provides a unifying framework for psychological science that allows researchers in different fields a common language. It also views behaviour from the “inside out” making it consistent with qualitative and quantitative methodology. Finally, it holds potential for integrating a computational modelling in research methodology (see also Mansell and Huddy, 2018).