I'm sooooo excited to share my new writing venture with you! As someone who has often found it difficult to find the time to write (you'll notice that my blog posts are pretty infrequent!), the irony is that I LOVE writing!!! This Covid-19 experience... although it's been a challenging time for many and for me at times too, it's also given me the time and space to really rethink my working life and how to incorporate more writing time.
For many years, I worked as an academic alongside my clinical practice, therefore constantly learning through my own research and practice, as well as transferring this knowledge to a range of audiences. From psychology students to postgraduate doctoral trainees and professional colleagues, to the general public. What I've really missed in recent years is this distribution of knowledge!! Whilst I've authored and edited journal articles and books, they've been mainly for a specialist student/professional audience, and I'm sooooo keen to make this sort of psychological knowledge accessible to the general public. Although more of a practitioner these days, I am also mindfully aware that I'm very much a scientist-practitioner and in my clinical work I always consider the evidence-base for the therapeutic work undertaken.
So... in my thinking I've come up with the concept of 'the science behind...' which will enable the sharing of knowledge around psychological concepts, mental health, psychological therapy and the psychology in our every day lives, hopefully in such a way that will bring these concepts and the science behind them to life. Given that psychology is EVERYWHERE, there's a lot of material to work with, right?!!
I'll tag in other psychologists' blogs or social media platforms, particularly those who may have specialist knowledge in the area being covered for you to expand your knowledge further on those particular topics if they are of interest to you; and I also intend to host specialist guests in these blog posts too.
There have been several thought showers over here to consider the types of content that may be of interest and we've come up with a range of different areas, including 'the science behind... stress, laughter, love, lies, relationships, kindness, negative thinking, happiness, fear, personality, sleep, mental health conditions....' I really hope that this will help in the campaign towards the destigmatisation of mental health too.
If there are any particular topics you'd like to see covered, please do let me know in the comments section below. In the meantime, look out for the first blog post coming soon and the #thesciencebehind hashtag ♡