1/4 Today, I earned my Master of Science in Clinical Research Methods from Fordham University! 🎓 This milestone feels especially meaningful because my path through higher education has been non-linear.

Yesterday, I attended my final class at Fordham University, and next weekend, I will graduate with my Master of Science in Clinical Research Methods! 🎓🎉

Me: *clicks an OSF link* OSF: gotta be safe, can you login real quick? Me: sure, login completed OSF: cool, I have completely forgotten what link you clicked, here's your Dashboard

An important reminder for the field: We must integrate diverse stakeholder perspectives (community clinicians, clients, loved ones, etc) to keep PD research person-centered, compassionate, and clinically useful. x.com/embpd/status...

What is it like to experience long-term psychodynamic #psychotherapy? A study in Psychotherapy found that treatment supported self-compassion and relationships, but was emotionally and financially challenging. Read the @growkudos.bsky.social summary: https://bit.ly/42nb281 @apadivision29.bsky.social

PSA for academics: if you get a conference invite from "scientexevents" (Gmail address, vague "international neuroscience & mental health meeting," generic flattery about your recent paper) — it's a predatory conference scam. Delete, don't reply.

I'm at NASSPD 2026 in Toronto this Friday (April 24) with two talks. Session O1 at 10:45am is on distress tolerance change during partial hospital treatment. Session O3 at 3:25pm is on AMPD coverage of borderline personality disorder. Come say hello if you're there 👋

My paper "Powering the Circumplex" was just accepted at Assessment! 🎉 It's a practical guide to sample size planning for the Structural Summary Method with an R package (github.com/kimberlyjg/s...) & web calculator (kjgilbert01.shinyapps.io/shiny/). Data & code: osf.io/63wyf

When should you validate and when should you interpret with a borderline patient? CIIT offers a framework for timing evidence-based psychodynamic interventions in real time. Includes a full session walkthrough. kimberlyjgilbert.substack.com/p/where-inte...

You don’t have to be psychodynamic to care about better diagnosis. My new post asks why DSM-6 is chasing solutions the PDM-3 has already worked out: capacities over symptoms, severity over labels, and formulations that actually help treatment. kimberlyjgilbert.substack.com/p/designing-...

They argue that PF can't both capture what PDs share and distinguish PD from other disorders, but that only holds if PF is a statistical summary. If it's a developmental capacity, being specific in origin and broad in consequence isn't a contradiction. That's how development works.

This was a great read. One disanalogy: classifying an animal doesn't change the animal, but diagnosing a person reshapes their property profile — self-concept, behavior, social role, treatment all shift. The atlas is reactive: superimposing structure changes the landscape you're mapping.

Antagonism is a coherent factor between persons. Within persons it splits: hostile aggression on one side, entitlement fused with insecurity on the other. Why? I think the divergence tells us something specific about timescale and process. New post: kimberlyjgilbert.substack.com/p/the-conver...

For everyone navigating BPD who has ever felt both rescued and trapped by a diagnosis. The science of classification is changing. The voices of lived experience should be shaping how. On what we gain and lose as psychiatry moves toward dimensions. 🔗 kimberlyjgilbert.substack.com/p/the-name-t...

New paper accepted in Personality and Mental Health on rethinking stigmatizing trait language and centering patient perspectives 📣 Gilbert, K. J. (in press). Nothing about us without us: Centering lived experience as the AMPD moves forward. Personality and Mental Health. osf.io/459z2/

The Future DSM committee wants more dimensions, more biology, more cultural sensitivity. All good. But none of it addresses how mental health problems actually unfold, person by person, day by day. 🔗 kimberlyjgilbert.substack.com/p/a-better-m...

‼️ Just out in Psychological Assessment! Check out our new paper exploring the hierarchical structure of the HiTOP-SR scales and their associations with daily life experiences. dx.doi.org/10.1037/pas0...

A lot of arguments about “personality functioning” are actually arguments about three different things: • a developmental construct • the DSM-5 LPF • the questionnaires used to measure it The field keeps using the same phrase for all three. New post: kimberlyjgilbert.substack.com/p/the-constr...

These captchas just keep getting harder #rstats

Energy was the most predictable affective state here and negative affect was the hardest. If passive sensing is better at tracking energy and activation than valence, maybe the path to clinical utility runs through fatigue monitoring rather than mood tracking 🤔

Great new paper led by @bringmannlaura.bsky.social, highlight the need to collect qualitative data in ESM / EMA research. #PsychSciSky 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Thank you for the kind birthday messages 🎂 I'm finally starting to understand the uncontrollable urge to complain about back problems.

This is great. The hardest version of this problem isn't choosing between process and product. It's that you often can't tell which one you're looking at until after you've skipped it. Sitting with messy data feels like a bottleneck, but it might be where your understanding quietly takes shape.

Clinical psychology depends on scientific evidence, but research from @chopwood.bsky.social et al. suggests that the kinds of data most commonly produced may not always align with what clinicians find most useful in practice. Read the article in American Psychologist: doi.org/10.1037/amp0...

The trope “I’m an introverted extravert” is a great illustration of a) the inherently contextual nature of personality and b) limits of even our best trait models.

Fascinating work. The next step here might be AMPD Criterion A. Identity and self-direction are narrative-structural constructs that self-report struggles to capture. This is the method that could finally scale personological assessment of personality functioning from unconstrained text.

The interpersonal situation framework describes a dynamic, unfolding context where perception, construal, affect, motivation, and behavior cycle between self and other. It also describes every open mic I ever did. Here, I map CIIT onto my experience. 🔗 kimberlyjgilbert.substack.com/p/what-three...

It’s official! I’m excited and honored to be accepting a spot in the Clinical Science PhD program at the University of Michigan for Fall 2026 🎉. I’ll be joining @aidangcw.bsky.social's lab and I am incredibly grateful for the mentors and support that helped me reach this milestone.

1/ Our new paper is now in press at Personality and Mental Health! 🎉 We looked at how well the DSM-5 AMPD captures the diverse features of borderline personality features across three samples. 🧵 osf.io/mc5h6/

This is excellent. The most interesting result isn’t that AP outperforms PP, but that the treatments seem to operate on different time horizons. When change unfolds over years, follow-up length stops being a methodological detail and becomes the result.

The validity, reliability and clinical utility of the Alternative DSM-5 Model for Personality Disorders (AMPD) according to DSM-5 revision criteria onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

The HiTOP Society will have its first free-standing conference this year on June 4-6. The Call for Abstracts is now open, and we hope you'll consider submitting your HiTOP-related work! www.hitop-system.org/hitop-2026-c...

This piece argues that psychodynamic constructs become scientific when treated as hypotheses about interpersonal dynamics over time—an idea Leary had decades ago. 🧵👇 https://kimberlyjgilbert.substack.com/p/psychodynamic-theory-isnt-the-problem

Here, I write about personality and identity as a clinical psychology grad student—but also about what it means to be a person doing this work. Research, creativity, comedy, and staying human alongside science. open.substack.com/pub/kimberly...

Hello, all! I will be moving over to this platform from X so bear with me through some repeat posts.

1/📌 New Post: https://t.co/ceHhlV6Fpj https://t.co/LLyQxn8Hqs

1/ Psychoanalysis and interpersonal psychology were never enemies. They just spoke different languages. Timothy Leary tried to translate between them—and almost succeeded. 🧵👇 https://t.co/zJVHftvRwF https://t.co/uLpLDxRYiz