Many Interesting Conversations

By Prof. Niamh Stack (August 2023)

You know you are getting old when you regularly receive invitations to talk to prospective and current psychology students about your career journey in psychology, which can sometimes feel like an invitation to write your own eulogy. Within these talks I am often asked why I love psychology and my answer is always the same - it is because it is a conversation that never ends. There is always something new to hear, to learn, to be surprised or frustrated by, to be angry or amazed about, to be challenged and motivated by, to open up a space to try and help make a change for the better.

My interest in psychology began in childhood during family dinner table conversations with my father, a teacher, moaning about 'bloody psychologists' coming into the school and telling you the name for a problem you already knew a child had and failing to do anything to practically help. These heated conversations inspired me be curious about who these psychologists were and what they did. These conversations also inspired a career long interest in improving conversations between educators and psychologists both of whom are hugely committed to improving young people's lives but between whom there is a long history of things getting lost in translation on both sides (Craig, Wilcox, Makarenko & MacMaster, 2020; Wilcox, Morett, Hawes, Dommett, 2021). These conversations sparked a long collaboration with my co-researcher Prof. Margaret Sutherland where she brought the education perspective and I brought the psychological (e.g. Sutherland & Stack, 2014). Working in this cross disciplinary space allowed me to see psychology and its applications with a clearer, critical, reflective lens. The different perspectives led to some lively 'that won't work in a classroom Niamh/there is no evidence to support that Margaret' conversations but these conversations ultimately led to 'well how do we make it work/let's get some evidence' solutions'.

Conversations are not always comfortable but can often be necessary and in recent years psychology as a discipline has being having a lot of important but challenging conversations about problematic aspects of the discipline, historical and current, about necessary changes and future directions. Solutions are not always easy and there can be disagreement about future directions but the best way we can keep moving forward and improving as a discipline is by keeping talking and listening.

Download: An introduction to the field of LGBTQ Psychology and the BPS Psychology of Sexualities Section - Jowett & Semlyen, 2016.

The above quote is from an article by Adam Jowett and Joanna Semlyen that details an example of psychology's problematic past, in this case in contributing towards stigmatising the LGBTQ+ community, and the discipline's journey towards hopefully a more constructive, positive future in actively working to challenge homophobia and hetrosexism and supporting the positive well-being of non-hetrosexuals.

Possibly two of the most powerful seminars that I have attended in my career were delivered by Shout Out and the Black and Minority Ethnics in Psychiatry & Psychology Network in both I was confronted by own privilege as white straight person and psychologist and my own ignorance and inactivity in not having taken the time read, learn, understand and do better for others. One thing that struck me from both seminars was the comment that so often we are afraid that the challenge is insurmountable or we are afraid of causing offence or getting it wrong in these difficult conversations that we are paralysed into inactivity. But there is always something that can be done and what we need to be doing is educating ourselves, trying to do better and apologising when we get it wrong. Each of us as individual psychologists are part of the discipline of psychology, for it to change and grow, we must be willing to change and grow. This is a journey I know I, and a lot of fellow psychologists are still on, and talking about it as a discipline, having those difficult and often hard to hear conversations, sharing resources and evidence based research and good practice helps to start the process.

While it is both necessary and important to see our failings it is also important to remember the power of psychology as a positive force and there is much to be proud of, inspired by, and hopeful about, as a psychologist or aspiring psychologist. For me this was very much brought into focus during the pandemic, where we saw the importance of psychology, across the sub disciplines, in providing research to best understand and inform Public Health Behaviour Programmes, in helping patients transition to digital interventions, in helping co-workers know how best to support each other following the death of a colleague, in providing advice for parents on talking to children about Coronavirus and helping them to manage the uncertainty that came with it, in developing freely available resources to support the transition Back to School. So many psychologists across the world, from across all the fields of psychology supported their clients, did their research, wrote the free resources, taught their students while juggling all of the above in their own homes during the pandemic and of all these colleagues I am in awe.

To me psychology has such an important role in advocating for social justice and political change, so much so that we have introduced a new core course in our BSc and BA psychology programmes at MIC that will highlight the role psychology has to play in society and changing it for the better. Within this course we will talk about the work of psychologists like the Psychologists for Social Change who are a network of applied psychologists, academics, therapists and psychology graduates who are interested in applying psychology to policy and political action. Their mission is 'to encourage more psychologists to become involved in political and social action, to disseminate psychological knowledge and research in ways that are relevant to current policy concerns and to move psychologically informed discussion into the public sphere'. We will also talk about the role of psychology in addressing climate change.

Globally, many rivers and waterfronts today are polluted, adversely affecting habitats, wildlife, and biodiversity (Isaza et al., 2020; Sumpter, 1998)... emerging research highlights the reciprocal relationship that exists between human and planetary health, offering the promise that as humans spend more time

enjoying nature, they may want to care for nature more in return. Such findings require further research and exploration as a possible resource for mental health services, however the beginnings of this research offer a clear message to us – if we wish to care for our own health we must also protect the health of our wild and precious blue spaces, entering into a relationship of reciprocity with nature which allows both humans and the planet to live well.

Overbury, Conroy, & Marks (2023) Swimming in nature: A scoping review of the mental health and wellbeing benefits of open water swimming

The above quote is from one of many emerging psychology articles evidencing just how important nature and the outdoors is to us as humans and how psychology can play a role in helping to protect it. A key message within their article is the need for more research and action in this area by psychologists. The authors argue not just for more research but for better research. This call to improve the quality of psychological research, and to make it more open and inclusive in parallel, has been very present across all sub disciplines of psychology in recent years (see Nosek et al., 2022, Replicability, Robustness, and Reproducibility in Psychological Science) and has permeated discussions around how we best teach psychology and its methods to our next generation of psychologists, a call to action that has been taken up by many such as the excellent Forrt Initiative and the Psyteachr team at Glasgow and which is impacting on our pedagogy and curriculum development here in Psychology@MIC which we will share more about in later blogs in this series. We must ensure that our psychology graduates are both well equipped consumers and producers of research and knowledge so that they are well informed clinicians, academics and practitioners wherever their career takes them and that they can identify 'fake news' when they see it...

In keeping with the ethos of open scholarship, science and communication, we decided to launch this psychology blog as a Department as part of our 20th Anniversary celebrations. Our anniversary gave us the chance to reflect on the founding vision of the College to be 'champions for the most marginalised in society with the conviction that education was essential to the quality of life to which all individuals should be entitled.' and what this meant for us as a Department of Psychology in practice in today's society.

It gave us the opportunity to appreciate our programme developments over the years from the first psychology programme accredited by the PSI in Limerick City in 2006, to the introduction of our unique dual qualification in education and psychology, the BEd Education and Psychology, and our brand new single honours BSc Psychology single honours programme. It gave us pause to be grateful to all the staff who have shaped the department across those years and to all the graduates who have gone on to make positive changes in society and on individual's lives.

In reflecting on all that had been achieved and all of our ambitions for the future we wanted a public space to share the conversations that led to those developments and to the conversations we are having about our future shape. We wanted a space to talk about things that we care about as a department, challenges we are facing, the amazing collaborators that we are working with out in the community, research we are doing, writing we are working on and pedagogical approaches we are taking and why we think they are important. We hope that these blogs will give prospective students insight into what psychology is about and what studying psychology here at MIC is like. We hope others will find these conversations interesting and that you will get in touch if you would like to collaborate on research we are doing, or to become one of our community partners or share pedagogical practice from other departments and schools.

We hope this is the start of many interesting conversations and that you will grab a cuppa on occasion, have a read and join us on the journey.