Honored to be part of this reflective piece led by @laurenshallion.bsky.social. Thinking through these issues was cathartic, then lit a fire, then instilled hope for how to keep moving psych wellness & behavioral health forward. May others feel that hope & drive to keep psych science rolling. 🙏🏼

Just accepted at Nature Mental Health: Crises and Opportunities for Psychological Science under Fascism https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/nz42x_v3 1/9

Psychological science is in crisis. We are losing funding, fighting uphill against censorship, and watching as our students, colleagues, neighbors, and friends are attacked because of their nationality, gender expression, or skin color. Such is life under fascism. 2/9

So we wrote a paper about it. With a brilliant group of colleagues, I name several challenges facing our field — some of which already feature prominently in discourse (such as attacks on funding and diversity) — and some that have so far flown under the radar (such as systemic gaslighting). 3/9

Times of crisis, however, are also times of opportunity. It’s just like the old saying: when fascism closes the door and sets the house on fire, ingenuity opens the windows and rolls out a ladder. 4/9

Clinical science needs this wake-up call. Our treatment effect sizes have been stalled for generations. Slight variations on the same ideas and methods, formerly the most reliable way to gain funding, have not made a difference in people’s lives. Something has to change. 5/9

We have both the opportunity and the need to rethink major aspects of the way we conceptualize, conduct, and evaluate our work. Non-incremental progress requires us to consider, tolerate, and attempt non-incremental change. 6/9

We name several more opportunities: to pursue the lines of work we believe in, without deference to funding priorities. To learn to do more and better with less. To exercise our academic freedom and refuse to comply. For many of us, to discover the actual reasons that tenure exists. 7/9

Progress in the face of fascism, inertia, and universities governed in practice by teams of lawyers will not be easy. These are objectively difficult problems. Fortunately, those are exactly the kinds of problems that many of us are paid to figure out how to solve. 8/9

I was fortunate to write this paper with some of the smartest and most courageous folks in any room: @lluaces.bsky.social @sheilacrowell.bsky.social @junegruber.bsky.social @tinaboisseau.bsky.social @anthonyperillo.bsky.social @jenperillo.bsky.social @cdelawalla.bsky.social 9/9

Deepest thanks to all those who made University of Regina @uregina.bsky.social Taste of Research Night possible. You visited this skeptical, jaded academic with the true spirit of academia, alive and well. Each day I feel more blessed by the privilege to be part of it.

✨🥹 new library card day 🥹✨

The best course I took @bardcollege.bsky.social was Literature, Language, and Lies, taught by Francine Prose. Each week’s homework was to read the same story covered by multiple news sources and identify the linguistic choices that helped create different angles. We need that, but for everything.

So special to attend "JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times" at Bard College. My students saw great talks that touched on lightness, beauty, gratitude, & joy by Teju Cole & others. Thanks for thoughtful moments of reflection! ✨#JoyInDarkTimes #resilience @vassar.bsky.social @bardcollege.bsky.social

This is profoundly insightful.

this is good stuff. the term 'inclusion' brings stupid performative posturing out of a certain anxious cohort, but it's a vastly important concept-cluster, so judicious usage should be celebrated. so here: i'm passing along someone's powerpoint slide, like god (hypothetically would have) intended

I’m pretty proud of this slide. I hope that by the end of the semester, I’m also proud of my follow-through.

“What do you mean, why's it got to be built? It's a bypass. You've got to build bypasses.” -a different author of a different book Very much enjoyed the launch of Ken Wilson’s “Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road” @therealkenwilson.bsky.social @uregina.bsky.social

Are you an alum from one of the 9 schools Trump just attacked? Sign this alumni petition now to support your school, defend democracy, and build a grassroots movement for campus freedom across America. alumni.controlshift.app/petitions/tr...

United States academic landscape got you down? Apply to join my lab at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada! I’m planning to accept a graduate student in Clinical Psychology. Additional information: https://www.uregina.ca/academics/programs/arts/master-phd-clinical-psychology.html

Papers I Can’t Assign: https://meehl.umn.edu/sites/meehl.umn.edu/files/files/099caseconferences.pdf (One of these days, perhaps, I will stop reading the field of academic psychology for filth. Today is not that day.)

First day of classes 🥹

Why I Don’t Teach the Hidden Curriculum:

Live feed of my heart when I pulled up to my new gig and discovered that it not only looks, but also feels, exactly like this:

🚨 Follow alert! Ceci Westbrook, MD, PhD is a postdoc in the lab specializing in fMRI of repetitive thought and related processes. Check out her latest paper on reward responsiveness (with @cdladouceur.bsky.social)!

Meeting the neighbors

It’s officially official: I’M MOVING TO SASKATCHEWAN! If you’ve never had the experience of a country welcoming you with open arms, it’s difficult to explain. I’m deeply moved and profoundly grateful and will continue to do everything in my power to be deserving of it.

Support your public library. Defend your public library. Slay the enemies of your public library.

Hey linguistics folks, you know what I would love? A semantic distance thesaurus. I want to type in two words and have it tell me the word(s) that are semantically between them. Anybody feel like partnering with industry to get on that?

There’s no conspiracy to ‘turn’ anyone anything, but I did notice that when I started engaging with content in a first-person/diaristic way, algorithms start personalizing what they sent me. Part of that personalization included stable demographic characteristics, and wow was that eye-opening.

And now for something completely different! In this new lab preprint led by Ceci Westbrook, we find a link between successful control of repetitive thought and increased activity in attention-related brain networks. By contrast, default mode activity was not associated with regulatory success.

::very Meryl Streep voice:: Michelle Newman. For a paper on worry? Groundbreaking. (Just kidding I am eternally grateful)

Associate Editors reviewing the list of "recommended alternative reviewers" from folks who declined the request.

I find it frustrating because clinical psychologists are among the only people actually qualified to speak on the health science relevance of the structure, but there is an aggressively-enforced prohibition on acknowledging it out loud — which precludes actual, legitimate science.

I sort of understand Taylor Swift and Beyoncé keeping things hush-hush. I don’t respect it, but I understand their motivation. Academics are simply not paid anywhere near enough to justify this level of selling out.

I understand that “it’s a secret.” What I do not understand is how our field justifies the preservation of that secrecy while championing the concepts of (open!) science and education. If we have knowledge, we’re supposed to share it openly and transparently. That’s supposed to be our whole thing.

I still can’t wrap my brain around the reluctance to engage in this discourse. You can all honestly do a close read of albums like folklore and RENAISSANCE and think, “this structure seems coincidental. It certainly doesn’t mirror my own digital experience or the sociopolitical landscape.” Really?

It seems an apt time to re-up our preprint describing crises that (especially academic) clinical psychology faces under fascism, as well as opportunities we see for moving forward with purpose. I neglected to say this in my first post, but feedback is very welcome.

Scenes from my local #NoKings protest. Chant: NO KINGS! NO ICE! NO FASCIST USA!

"Gosh, why am I so anxious?"she wondered as she finalized paperwork for her international move taking occasional breaks to watch footage of paramilitarized masked agents of her home country's fascist regime tackling migrants, citizens, and senators in the streets. "Must be too much caffeine."

Happy this is out & honored to be a part of it. As the subtitle says, I hope many of us are transitioning in the face of threats to science from crisis mode to reclaiming purpose.

Very intriguing first paragraph; going straight on the top of the TOREAD pile. Very impressed with @laurenshallion.bsky.social et al.'s direct naming of rising fascism as a major problem to science. Tackling it head-on seems more productive than dancing around it and/or ostrich-ing.

I can’t explain how relieved I am to see this stipulation rescinded. Assuming they let me move the grant to Canada (fingers crossed), it means my lab, collaborators @christianwebb.bsky.social, Hani Zainal, and I are about to have the chance to do some really freaking cool mental health science.

An HONOR to be on a paper with this killer crew. Thank you for @laurenshallion.bsky.social for your leadership on this project!

Mental Health Science Under Threat: Confronting Crises and Reclaiming Purpose with @lluaces.bsky.social @sheilacrowell.bsky.social @junegruber.bsky.social @tinaboisseau.bsky.social @anthonyperillo.bsky.social @anthonyperillo.bsky.social @cdelawalla.bsky.social https://osf.io/nz42x

Crises for the field include funding cuts, censorship, DEI dismantling, gaslighting, reactionary centrism, and extreme mindsets. Opportunities we identify include paradigm shifts, dismantling traditional hierarchies, values re-alignment, public outreach, and resourcefulness.

I’m thrilled to share this preprint with a brilliant co-author team. We describe several crises mental health science faces in the current sociopolitical context, as well as new and previously-overlooked opportunities to make non-incremental progress. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/nz42x_v1

Anyway, I'm working with some (truly brilliant) folks on a Perspective paper about ::gestures widely:: and wow is it some of the most therapeutic and rewarding work I've done in a long time. Buckle up and stay tuned, folks. We have THINGS TO SAY.