Clinical psychology

Most of the last 40 years, whenever we've spoken about new parents and mental health, we've spoken about postnatal depression.

Now, new research published by, uh, the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology has found something that most people, including most clinicians, don't yet know, that anxiety and related disorders are the most common mental health conditions in the perinatal period.

They affect one in five pregnant and postpartum people, and they are more common than depression.

One of the lead voices in that research, and the UK's foremost expert on anxiety and OCD in pregnancy and new parenthood, is my guest today.

Fiona is an associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oxford, and an honorary consultant at the clinic- and clinical psychologist at Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust.

Her research sits at one of the most important and least understood intersections in early childhood, the relationship between a parent's mental health and the development of their baby.

She spent the last two decades building the evidence, and the conditions that she studies are far more common, far more serious, and far more treatable than most people realize.

So even when I was going into graduate school, I knew I wanted to be in the field of autism.

It's just that most of the researchers and clinicians working within that space were in clinical psychology programs.

And I ended up going to the University of Connecticut to train with Debbie Fine.

who is now retired.

Is this something you've tried to change about yourself? I'd love to know what worked for you if you've managed to change your messy habits.

Trevor Mazzichelli is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at Curtin University.

He has been exploring the idea of innate messiness recently.

Trevor, welcome.

Fair.

Trevor, thank you so much for chatting with me.

Trevor Mazzichelli is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at Curtin University.

One text here says, my hackles are up.

And this is where today's podcast episode comes in.

Because as part of the celebrations, um, of releasing my own, well, my brand new book, Beyond the Lecture: Thrum United Thoughts on Mental Health, Clinical Psychology, and Psychotherapy, I had to reflect on some research that I took a part in, and the research in involved our thoughts and perceptions on clinical psychology training and the use of AI avatars.

It was a really interesting experiment.

I learned a lot, and in today's podcast episode, uh, you're going to hear about this.

Because as time moves forward, this is gonna become more and more important.

So if you're interested in learning about the future of clinical psychology, artificial intelligence, and real-world psychological research, then this is gonna be a great episode for you.

And you've got that to look forward to in the content part of today's episode.

So moving on to the psychology news section.

Yes, for many years.

You see, I was in Psychologie Clinique.

I'm not much of a language doctor.

Would you...

Hey, hey, that needs to change.

We need to have more people in clinical psychology programs who are teaching on food and nutrition.

I mean, it happens at Canterbury because I'm there.

And so I do a fourth year, an entire honors course on mental health and food.

I

mean, I think we do need to be revisiting these things again, probably because the need is so great.

And at some point in, you know, historically, when I went through clinical psychology, I don't remember feeling like there was a crisis.

I don't remember that word being used in the 1990s that there was a mental health crisis.

But I do understand it.

that sometimes resilience and all of these mental health concepts they aren't meant with sincerity and if you live and breathe a clinical psychology like i do then it's very easy to remember the truth but sometimes we've actually got to be reflective and that we've got to realize that not everyone lives and breathes psychology like you and me therefore They do believe in the myth.

So they do go to pop psychology sources and they do go to these more damaging ideas about what a resilience is meant to be.

Like a lot of people would believe that resilience is meant to be cope with more and ask for less.

And it means I can basically do whatever I want when I want to.

And I've been trying to do some stuff that I don't normally do, like I go on the Switch.

But in terms of useful stuff for this week, I have been working on my Clinical Psychology and Doctor of Educational Psychology personal statement.

So I've done a first draft of both of them.