Peter was involved in a series of research studies on burnout that over the past few years. Some clients of the practice participated in the study. Two papers were published in late 2023 attempting to refine the psychological construct of burnout. Burnout is a syndrome characterised by emotional exhaustion, empathy loss and reduced professional accomplishment. It is usually associated with work stress, however can also arise in other situations such as being a student or caring for a loved one.

The defensive cascade, commonly referred to as the “fight or flight response”, is a coordinated set of behaviours, supported by physiological changes, that promotes survival in the face of some form of threat. As threat escalates, the nature of the defense response changes in a predictable way and this is supported by our physiology.

Have you ever felt butterflies in your stomach before giving a speech or going to an interview? Or, have you ever found yourself looking for an excuse to get out of meeting new people or confronting others about something they are doing that you do not like? Or, are you uncomfortable when you have to make a phone call or when you have to talk to friends in a group setting? If you have answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, you may have social anxiety.

Striving for excellence, beating our personal best, getting to our ideal weight, giving it our all, never giving up! These widely used statements conjure images of elite athletes, heads of industry, professional musicians, prestigious scientists. These figures are held up as a model to follow in order to thrive, achieve fulfilment and reach our potential. And what in the world could be wrong with that? For some people, nothing at all. But for a substantial number of us, striving for perfection contains the kernel of chronic dissatisfaction, worthlessness, depression and anxiety.

Evolution has endowed all humans with a continuum of innate, hard-wired, automatically activated defense behaviors, termed the defense cascade. Arousal is the first step in activating the defense cascade; flight or fight is an active defense response for dealing with threat; freezing is a flight-or-fight response put on hold; tonic immobility and collapsed immobility are responses of last resort to inescapable threat, when active defense responses have failed; and quiescent immobility is a state of quiescence that promotes rest and healing.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or CBT is a tradition of psychotherapies that became most prominent and influential from the 1980’s to the early 2000’s. It is an active treatment in which the client develops skills to better manage distress and thoughts and behaviours associated with this distress.

Schizophrenia is a troubling and often debilitating disorder. People who have this disorder can experience a wide range of distressing symptoms. These include: hearing voices say offensive personal messages, disruption of normal thought and language, perceptual changes (colours and sounds seem more intense than normal, or seeing illusory sights or feeling illusory sensations), losing the ability to visually express emotion, losing the ability to initiate action, and holding very strong convictions that are not supported in fact (e.g. that I am Jesus, or that I am being stalked by my neighbour).

Panic attacks consist of an escalating feeling of terror and dread that is associated with a range of physical sensations. They are usually brief, in most case lasting for between 10 and 20 minutes. In some cases individuals report much longer panic attacks.

An article written for Cleo magazine by Peter Walker, Clinical Psychologist, on the difficulties that can be experienced when people withdraw from anti-depressants rapidly.

Difficulty initiating and maintaining sleep often prompts people to seek the assistance of a psychologist. It is common for clients to attend my practice lamenting the loss of precious hours of sleep. They relate long hours spent staring at the ceiling, tossing and turning, physically and mentally exhausted, yet wide awake.

Psychosis, the experience of hallucinations (hearing voices, seeing things others don't) and delusions (holding beliefs that those in your community consider false) can be a terrifying and isolating experience. For many years psychological interventions were thought to be at best ineffective and at worst reinforcing of psychotic symptoms, so it was unusual for individual's distressed by these experiences to seek psychological support.