Making sense of things

As a Professor of Clinical Psychology, I have argued for a long time that our mental health is essentially a psychological issue, and that biological, social, and circumstantial factors affect our mental health and wellbeing by disrupting or disturbing psychological processes. This places psychology at the heart of mental health.

In this video, I briefly introduce this idea – that, fundamentally, our thoughts, our emotions, our behaviour and therefore our mental health, are largely dependent on our understanding of the world, our thoughts about ourselves, other people and the future. This understanding, of course, has itself been and continues to be shaped by our experiences. Essentially, things happen to us, we make sense of those events and respond to them, and there are consequences. We all differ in the ways we respond to events, and there are many reasons for those differences. There are as many different reasons for these different responses as there are people on the planet. Biological factors, social factors, circumstantial factors – our learning as human beings – affect us as those external factors impact on the key psychological processes that help us build up our sense of who we are and the way the world works.

These ideas are central to my resolution of the ‘nature – nurture’ dilemma, and form the content of this week’s material.

Peter Kinderman