Meet Kimberley

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:05Kimberley Wilson:The ultimate cookout starts with the ultimate ingredients. At Whole Foods Market, no antibiotics ever, burgers and kebabs are prepped and ready to throw on the grill. Fire up a juicy ribeye, grab creamy potato salad and savoury flatbreads from the prepared foods department and round it all out with 365 brand condiments, chips and dips at everyday low prices. Whole Foods Market. Make your summer sizzle. 102 miles ago, the oil light came on. 100 miles ago, you noticed. Now, it's time to head to Take 5. This oil change, fall in love with your car all over again. In just 10 minutes, your dream technician will check your tire pressure, top off fluids, change your oil, and verify with Carfax exactly what your car really needs, all while keeping you in the driver's seat.

0:56Take 5 to stay in your car 10-minute oil change. Save up to 30 % on your next dollar change to take five. $15 value. Valid at participating locations. Terms and conditions apply.

1:06Hello and welcome to this special episode about Complex, the brand new podcast from BBC Sounds about mental health. I'm Zan Van Tulleken and I'm introducing you to the host of Complex, Kimberly Wilson.

1:20Kimberley Wilson:Yes, it's a podcast all about mental health that I'm hoping will fill a gap in the market for evidence-based, expert-led information on mental health.

1:34I've got to start by saying your qualifications because, of course, you are a chartered psychologist. We made an amazing show together called Made of Stronger Stuff, and you've appeared on What's Up Docs. You're also an author, How to Build a Healthy Brain, and Unprocessed, how the food we eat is fueling our mental health crisis. You are a Bake Off finalist. And I should say in our personal life, you are a lovely friend who does really take care of the people around you in a thoughtful and intelligent way that is massively helpful.

2:07Kimberley Wilson:That's really generous. Thank you. Before we get into talking about your podcast, I've just got a few warm up questions, a quick fire round. And when you answer them, I want you to explain why I'm asking them. Okay. Are you ready? Let's go. Favourite sandwich? So this will be from my year of the sandwich where I made a different sandwich from a different part of the world every week for a year. It was my favourite challenge ever on my Instagram. And there are so many to choose from. I would say... And people may not know that there are well over 52 different sandwiches. It's almost true that every country has a national sandwich.

2:46Kimberley Wilson:Everybody has a sandwich. Everybody has a dumpling, but that might be for another year. I think maybe one of my favorite ones would be the Trinidad doubles. Oh, I don't know. It's like two thin flatbreads that are fried and topped with a chana masala, chickpea curry, and then spicy dips, and then you fold them over, and they're like luscious and rich and just delicious and so flavorsome. Like spicy and layered. Yes. Sandwiches with dips, that's, oh. And also we should say, you are not just psychologist extraordinaire, you are Bake Off finalist. I am a Bake Off finalist. Which I found very intimidating.

3:28The first time I met you, that was one of the few things I knew about you. And I was quite starstruck by that. It's just cake. I still am. It's just cake. No, I'm over it now. It's just cake. It's just cake. It's just bread. It's just a showstopper. Favourite hobby?

3:47Kimberley Wilson:so i i set myself a challenge to do a whole bunch of things 40 before 40 and they included things like learning to knit and to crochet and roller skate they were incredibly challenging ones there were like weren't you learning to swing dance or something as well did you join a choir yes so what so what of all the hobbies you did what was what was your favorite um actually i'm i'm Getting into crochet, so maybe crochet for now, but it does change. You're a psychologist. What's your favourite emotion? My favourite emotion, and I am on record with this, is anger. I love anger. Because anger is sort of cathartic.

4:25It's the one emotion where you know how you feel.

4:28Kimberley Wilson:Because it's so misunderstood. And I think anger had a very, very poor PR job and I want to be its ambassador. I think anger is the emotion of self-defense and integrity. And if you know how to channel it correctly, and if you know how different it is from violence, it actually is a great motivating and empowering emotion. Oh, that's lovely. Anger is a force to change the world. Absolutely. The Trinidadian double, crochet and anger. What a fantastic start.

5:05A lot of our listeners may never have seen a psychologist themselves. Talk about your work, because I think we get an image of psychology and psychotherapy from the television that doesn't kind of capture the full range of your experience, at least.

5:19Kimberley Wilson:Yes. And so I've worked in a few different environments and settings. So when I was training, I actually worked with a lot of children and young people. I worked in schools. I worked in children's charities. And then when I finished my qualification, I worked in prison. So I ran the therapy service at what was then Europe's largest women's prison. And now I work in private practice. But what the work looks like is essentially someone is experiencing some kind of emotional, relational or psychological distress or difficulty. They are feeling very anxious. They have very low self-esteem. They find themselves in these repeating patterns in their relationships.

6:00Kimberley Wilson:Three months into a relationship, I get cold feet and I have to leave. A year into my work, into my job, I lose interest and I quit. And so there are these ways in which they don't really understand why they behave in certain ways. And what we do together is to address those difficulties, inquire, question, teach. There's a psychoeducation, we call it, teach you about how the brain works, teach you about psychology so that you can contextualize your experience and you can say oh okay the reason I do that might be because of this okay now that's less frightening for me now I'm less anxious and concerned that there's something very wrong with me I can contextualize my experience so I've reduced my anxiety I've reduced my concern I've got tools that I can use to shift the way that I think and behave.

6:53What inspired you to become a psychologist?

6:57Kimberley Wilson:So I think there are some personality aspects of it. So I think I was, when I was younger, at least quite quiet, quite introverted, quite internalizing and introspective. But it's also true that there's a lot of psychiatric and neurological illness in my family. So I grew up with a real awareness of brains that don't work very well. There's personality disorder, schizophrenia, motor neuron disease. So I was really aware of brains that don't work very well, strange engagements with reality, and also what happens when brains break down. So I think I entered school and academia with that knowledge.

7:41Tell me about what you love about your work, because you really do enjoy psychology and being a psychologist, like it's pouring out of you. and you make me love psychology and that was not the thing I was drawn to at medical school talk to me about what you love about your work I will try to be concise um because there are lots of parts of it that I love I think keep smiling already really so I think on I'll try

8:06Kimberley Wilson:and break it into three so on a very personal level um it is intellectually stimulating you know it's the work itself is about um pattern finding it's almost like being a detective right you know a crime has happened you know and that's the symptom your symptom has occurred okay now who are the suspects you know where can we trace this back to where can we see this the initiating event how can we pull these things together you know and how do we to stretch the analogy find justice how do we help you kind of come out the other side of it so I find it really intellectually stimulating, you know, finding out about how the person sitting opposite me got to be in this place and this state at this time.

8:56I think it's a little bit of a cliche,

8:59Kimberley Wilson:but it's a true one to say that it's an extraordinary privilege to be able to be beside someone in their difficulty and help them through it. And that is just the most moving thing, to be able to do work that feels really meaningful, that you've enhanced supported someone's life in that way is just incredible.

9:24So my brother Chris and I are very excited about your new podcast. I think we do think of it as a sister podcast. We love a sibling relationship.

9:33Kimberley Wilson:Yeah. Can you tell us about it? Yeah, so Complex is where I hope to demystify, organise and clarify the whole world of mental health that we are encountering. So lots of people are having conversations about mental health, whether that is online, in their workplaces, with their friends, and it's become a very noisy space. And there are a lot of confusing ideas about what a certain experience, thought, belief, idea or symptom means. So what we're going to do every week, I'll be joined by an expert guest. So it would be a psychiatrist or a psychologist, a research psychologist. We'll take a particular issue, say narcissism, and we'll break it down.

10:15Kimberley Wilson:We'll start with a definition. What is it? You know, and what is it from a clinical or professional academic perspective? What are its signals and signs? And then how does it show up in our everyday life? And within that kind of framework, what we want to be thinking about is, yes, there are times with these sorts of signs and symptoms where we might worry as clinicians and practitioners, and we will identify who those people are and how they should seek help but for the vast vast majority of people you don't need to worry so it's really a podcast which is hopefully about reassurance clarity information and letting most people know that you don't have to worry about these things it sounds massively valuable because so many of us including me i think i sort of pathologize i think of i think of what are probably quite ordinary thought processes as diseases.

11:11I label them. I start to worry if I need a diagnosis. And having a bit of clarity through the noise would be massively important. I think there are lots of people who want to diagnose us because it's very valuable for them, but it's not necessarily helpful for me.

11:24Kimberley Wilson:Yeah. And one of the things I didn't realize when I was online and I would be seeing posts that say things like five signs that you're a high functioning narcissist or five signals that you have trauma or anxiety. And I thought, I wonder if people are just putting these posts together because they do well online. You know, these listicles are interesting and people click them and they want to identify themselves and it feeds the algorithm. And then I found out that actually, it's actually a marketing strategy. It's a deliberate marketing strategy where people people who are selling you something first have to let you know you have a problem so they say hey these five things are a sign that you have anxiety and here's my package deal coaching one-on-one course stimulating device whatever to help you with your anxiety and so it really really raised quite an important kind of ethical issue about this sort of content that goes out and the impact it has on people because it's not innocuous.

12:29Kimberley Wilson:We have an idea called the prevalence inflation hypothesis. It's the idea that the increased availability and promotion of mental health information, yes, for a group of people, it's helped to reduce stigma, allow conversations that might not have been possible before. But for other people, it's led them to misdiagnose, mislabel, misidentify everyday, normal common experiences but what happens is when you label your everyday normal distress as a sign of something more sinister or worrying you actually then do increase your distress so that this promotion of mental health information in this way might actually be increasing people's distress so it's a real ethical issue and what I really hope to do is let's clarify let's organize Let's come at this from a professional standpoint and let you know where I, if you were sitting across from me, I would say that is absolutely nothing to worry about.

13:26Kimberley Wilson:Please go off and live your life versus actually, yes, maybe there's something we need to think about here. But that you've got two experts in every episode, two experts in your corner helping you to make those distinctions. In your corner is a perfect way of describing you. I think through all my interactions with you, professionally and personally, the thing that I would say to any listener is, Kimberly, is on your side, that fundamentally, you are not selling people things, you want to help them navigate the world, and you do not want to increase the amount of mental distress or mental illness in the world.

14:02So we're here now in this podcast, who are you going to have on?

14:05Kimberley Wilson:So we have a selection of expert guests. And so I'll be talking to Dr. Sarah Vora, who's a psychiatrist, about people-pleasing. I'll be talking to Dr. Sula Wingasson about perfectionism, you know, a range of people about their expertise on particular issues. Both people-pleasing and perfectionism are things that will touch everyone's life in some way. But you will be going into specific psychological problems or phenomena that might seem a bit more specialised or might seem to affect only a particular group of people. Tell me about how you're trying to reach everyone with every episode. Yeah, so in the mainstream online conversation, we focus an awful lot on the everyday common mental health conditions, anxiety, depression, and common mental health complaints, perfectionism, and that sort of thing.

15:02Kimberley Wilson:But what I'm trying to do more broadly across all of the episodes is really skill people up into understanding how to appraise this information. So if you see a post that says five signs of this or that condition, you're able, having listened to Complex, to think, actually, I might not know for sure, but I don't think it's that simple. You know, the way that we as practitioners think about it is if this thing isn't impairing your ability to function in your day-to-day life, if it's not stopping you from going to work, going to school, college, university, if it's not stopping you from engaging with your friends, if it's not keeping you indoors, it's probably not something that you need to label and worry about.

15:44Kimberley Wilson:So we really think about diagnoses of conditions around how much they impair someone's functioning. And that isn't something that I think is going across on social media or more broadly. It's so interesting that you talk about this because I encounter this stuff all the time on social media and the ones that particularly grab me are the ADHD diagnoses. And there will often be a series of quotes from individuals who seem to have been diagnosed with ADHD describing aspects of life that I absolutely relate to. The last one I saw was about leaving a party and kind of beating yourself up for just being sort of saying the wrong thing and not being sociable enough and being a bit awkward.

16:22So these things, and I think even though I should know better, not least because I've spoken to you a lot, I'm still seduced by this idea that somehow this bit of expertise on this particular account is directing me towards a problem that I have.

16:38Kimberley Wilson:Yeah, and it's very common. It's very normal. We're all a bit concerned that there's something a bit unusual about us in some way. And maybe that's the point is that we all think there's something a little bit unusual about us. Because our minds are our own, because we can't see into somebody else's brain, And because nobody's really talking about the weird stuff that they do, nobody's talking about the fact that they talk to themselves when they're on their own. Nobody's talking about the intrusive thoughts that pop into their head every now and again out of nowhere. No one's talking about perhaps that they have to put one shoe on first and then the other shoe on and it has to be right and then left.

17:13Kimberley Wilson:No one talks about all of these little things. and so when you're alone with those thoughts and those observations of yourself it's easy to think that those are anomalies and signs of something very wrong rather than little quirks of having a human brain oh i love that so um i am obviously the only person i observe alone and so i necessarily assume that i'm absolutely unique and totally different and also probably there's something wrong with me or at least it's very easy to manipulate me into there's something wrong with me um it does feel like you have a position in complex that is um potentially controversial which is you don't need to pathologize all this stuff and i think there are lots of people out there who are really increasingly insisting that huge numbers of us have some kind of um psychiatric or psychological pathology that needs a label and that we will benefit from this and it feels like you're slightly pushing against the tide with that do you feel like you're resisting that that flow?

18:14Kimberley Wilson:I think possibly. I hadn't thought about it like that, but I think possibly that's true. I certainly find myself when I'm sitting across from clients doing a lot of reassuring and saying, you know, someone will come in and say, I'm pretty sure I've got borderline personality disorder and I'm trained in DBT. I'm trained to identify borderline personality disorder and not for a moment had it occurred to me that this person might fit that criteria. And so I spend a lot lot of times saying, I wonder where you've gotten that idea from. That's really curious. And so I do find myself doing a lot of reassuring and challenging of what can be quite fixed beliefs about conditions and problems and issues that someone has, you know, read the diagnostic criteria or read a list of signs and symptoms and like horoscopes often thought, oh, actually this occasion when I've done that might fit that.

19:06Kimberley Wilson:And this occasion where I behave like that might fit that and then pull that together and give it a label and that's just simply not how we do it in clinical practice you are a chartered psychologist um can you talk to me about your credentials and your qualifications yes um so the reason i specify chartered is because and a lot of people won't know this the term psychologist isn't a protected title so can i say i'm a psychologist you're a psychologist and you won't be breaking the law wow you know what i'm not gonna do it i'm gonna resist the temptation please don't do that people don't want that for me and so it really doesn't mean anything uh academically professionally for someone to say that they're a psychologist what matters are chartership and the protected titles and that means that you have to have done an accredited training reached a certain level in that training and be on the hcpc registered health in Care Professions Council register in order to be able to use that label.

20:12Kimberley Wilson:And I'm a counselling psychologist. And so people can go onto that register, they can find my name, and they can know that I have met those training and practice standards, and that I have signed up to an ethical code of conduct. And therefore, I have to do my very best to provide thoughtful, clear, evidence-based nuanced information. The title complex is a great psychology pun. It's also referring to the fact that life feels terribly complex. I think now more than ever, the amount of uncertainty around our health and our mental health particularly is enormous. Yeah. What I hope to be able to do is give context to that complexity.

20:55Kimberley Wilson:So yes, it's complicated for everybody. Yes, this stuff is confusing for everybody. You are absolutely not alone in this. I and my guests and the rest of the audience are alongside you trying to understand this stuff, trying to make sense of it and giving you a little bit more clarity and a little bit more reassurance. This is me, Zand van Tulleken, talking to Kimberly Wilson, the new host of the new podcast about mental health. Yes, the podcast is called Complex. It's on BBC Sounds. everybody subscribe now and make sure that you don't miss a single episode I will definitely be listening thank you so much for joining me and thank you all for listening in the meantime take care of yourselves yeah take care and go gently

21:50Kimberley Wilson:he's widely recognised as one of the greatest footballers in history he's won the prestigious Ballon d 'Or award five times He's the all-time leading goal scorer in professional football. And according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he's the first active footballer in history to achieve billionaire status. Guess who we're talking about yet? That's right. Good Bad Billionaire is exploring the life and fortune of football icon Cristiano Ronaldo. That's Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.