THE PSYCHOLOGY WORLD PODCAST

During my learning difficulties assessment back in December 2024, the lovely woman conducting the assessment tested me for a wide range of different mental health conditions. She ultimately decided that I only met the criteria for dyspraxia as well as dyslexia, but at one point she wanted to investigate me for Dysgraphia. I mentioned something and she agreed the diagnosis didn’t match me, but I st...

Whether you’re an aspiring psychologist, psychology student or loved one of a teenager, this podcast episode will be immensely useful to you. Since my audience is mainly psychology students and aspiring and qualified psychologists, I want to mention that depending on the mental health service you work in, there is a chance you’ll encounter a survivor of sexual violence. As well as I’ve already men...

Recently, as I continue to search for a mental health-related job to do after my clinical psychology MSc, I came across a job for a Social Prescriber Line Worker. I applied for the job, I got an interview but I have little idea what a social prescriber actually does. Chances are, you don’t either because this is a very new job role in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, but it serves a v...

After subscribing to a few Continued ProfessionalDevelopment newsletters and seeing the option for Single Session Therapy on my university’s counselling form, I finally decided it was time to investigate this type of psychotherapy in more detail. Traditionally, we know that psychological therapy can take months of therapy sessions to be fully effective and to improve a client’s life for the better...

At some point in our lives, we will encounter someone who is being passive-aggressive towards us. Whether this is a friend, loved one or work colleague, people will always be passive-aggressive towards us in some fashion, and this can make work situations uncomfortable and sabotage friendships and other relationships. Therefore, in this social psychology podcast episode, you’ll learn what passive...

After last week’s podcast episode that focused on my disillusionment with clinical psychology over the unpaid work experience requirements, I wanted to focus on ways how psychology students can get paid work and build up skills for future job applications. I’ve been working as a student ambassador for my university’s Outreach and Widening Participation department for 6 years now and I’ve learnt so...

As I near the end of my Clinical Psychology MSc and look towards the future of working in mental health, I am increasingly being concerned, disillusioned and unsure about any sort of future employment. Not because I am a bad candidate, a bad student or someone who doesn’t care about psychology. I seriously love and care about clinical psychology. Yet there are massive barriers and silly experience...

After a recent experience of a friend invalidating me, it got me thinking about the importance of validation in social relationships. Then I started thinking about validation in mental health because often my mental health has gotten worse after someone invalidated me, my feelings and my experiences. Also, I’ve been running a little experiment this week when I try to be more mindfully validating o...

Unless you’ve accessed mental health support before, you might not even know there’s such thing as a psychological or counselling assessment. And even if you’re aware of it, in my experience, it isn’t really until your postgraduate qualificationthat you learn about the role of a clinical psychologist in a psychological assessment. In an effort to breach this gap and help raise awareness of assessm...

In recent years, DEI (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion) Initiatives have become a very hot political issue with certain groups suggesting DEI practices discriminate against straight white people by making it harder for them to thrive. In reality, this isn’t the truth because DEI practices help everyone regardless of your sexuality and race. This means that DEI initiatives also help straight white...

Whenever we think about professional lie detectors, we tend to think about the “experts” we see in crime dramas. The sort of people who can expertly and instantly tell if a person is telling or not, and some people claim to be able to do this in real life. Is there any truth in this claim? In this forensic psychology podcast episode, you’ll learn about the forensic psychology of deception, how lie...

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of books being banned in the United States for having LGBT+ themes and characters. Yet books are also being banned for teaching Critical Race Theory, having black characters and a whole host of other reasons. In this clinical psychology podcast episode, you’ll learn why do book bans harm mental health, why book bans harm our childre...

The majority of listeners of The Psychology World Podcast are between 40 and 50 years old and from conversations I’ve had with listeners, a lot of them have children or younger family members. As a parent, they want to protect, love and make sure their child is okay and happy whatever their age. No one wants their adult child to be suffering in silence and feel like they have no place to go, but f...

One of the biggest criticisms against transgender individuals that I hear is that “science” says there are only two genders and a lot of transphobic people rely on “science” to back up their transphobic views. However, the reality is that science clearly shows us that there are more than two genders and there are big differences between sex, gender and gender identity. These are important distinct...

The majority of people think that if they’re exhausted then the best way to fix their exhaustion is to get physical rest through sleep. Whilst this is important, it is not the only type of rest a person needs to combat fatigue and exhaustion. In fact, a lot of therapists and professionals, like Saundra Dalton-Smith, explain that rest is the most underused safe and effective alternative therapy tha...

To kick off Pride Season 2025 on The Psychology World Podcast, I wanted to look at why we celebrate Pride Month. Since thankfully in June a lot of cities, communities and companies come together to celebrate Pride Month. They put up flags and companies change their logos to represent all the different genders, sexualities and the diversity of the human experience. Also, the LGBT+ community and the...

Discovering your partner cheated on you, betrayed your trust and shattered your relationship is an awful feeling that no one should ever have to go through. It can lead the other partner feeling unsure who to trust, weakened and it can make them question everything they knew about the relationship beforehand. Yet it is possible to overcome infidelity and rebuild trust in the relationship so it can...

As aspiring and qualified psychologists, our work mainly focuses on helping people with mental health difficulties. For example, how their depression, social anxiety or trauma responses negatively impact their lives and cause them significant levels of psychological distress. Then we use our psychological knowledge to create interventions to help them. However, less often, we’re taught to think ab...

For the past six years that I’ve been running this podcast,I’ve had to sit university psychology exams. Every year, I hear from other students that they are stressed out, concerned and they are nervous about their revision, their exams and the results day itself. Recently, I gave a series of talks at a local college in Canterbury to help 17 and 18 year olds how to cope with exam stress, so I want...

At the time of writing, exam season for psychology students is just getting underway. I had my only exam three days ago and I know the second-year psychology students had their developmental psychology exam at the same time. Exam season involves a lot of revision, a little stress and students trying everything under the sun to improve their concentration and revision. Binaural beats are one such t...

Whenever a client comes into our therapy room or whenever you meet a psychologist, they have certain privileges and disadvantages that you don't have. Also, you’ll both have different life experiences, perspectives and focuses that you will share and you will differ in. This is because every one of us is wonderfully unique with our own thoughts, feelings and lived experiences. Yet as aspiring...

I don’t think anyone can go through their psychology journeywithout encountering any myths about psychology. A few years ago at a gender reveal party, I was talking to my brother’s dad (we have different ones) and he explained how he needed to see a psychologist because of an injury before he could go to work. Yet when he was younger and even now, he wouldn’t do it because everyone back then knew...

If you’re a UK listener living in Kent then you might have heard on the radio recently an advert by Kent County Council about the awful and damaging impact consistent arguing and parental conflict can have on child development. After hearing this advert a few times, I wanted to learn more and it’s really interesting how parental conflict negatively impacts a child’s development at no fault of thei...

Rape and other forms of sexual violence is beyond awful. It is one of the worse, most traumatic and devastating things that can happen to a person. During sexual violence, someonetakes everything away from you, your control, your consent, your ability to do anything at all. You just go into survival mode and the consequences of sexual violence are immense. There isn’t a single area of your life th...

After something personal happened last night, all I can think about today is trauma and considering this psychology podcast episode is already likely to be late going out, I didn’t want to argue with myself. I just wanted to do an episode on something I was already thinking about because what we experience in our childhood can have a massive impact on our relationships. For example, what we think...