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Clinical psychology
Peter Kinderman is a clinical psychologist. He spent most of his career at the University of Liverpool, was President of the British Psychological Society, and retired from the university in 2026. On Experience he takes one psychological idea a week and explains what it actually shows, which is usually not what people think it shows.
The career
Peter was Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool and Head of its Institute of Psychology, Health and Society. He trained and worked as an NHS clinical psychologist, including in acute inpatient psychiatric care, and has been an honorary consultant clinical psychologist with Mersey Care NHS Trust. He is registered with the Health and Care Professions Council.
He retired from the university in 2026. No leaving do, no exit interview, no speech. That turned out to be the Concept of the Week in episode seven, because psychology has a name for exactly what he was doing.
He is now a founding director of Kinder Media, which provides psychological consultancy to broadcasters, production teams and journalists, and works on duty of care for programme contributors. That grew out of an award-winning collaboration with the BBC and ITV to create the first training for psychologists working in television, with Julie Freeborn, formerly the BBC's mental health lead.
The British Psychological Society, and policy
Peter was President of the British Psychological Society in 2016 and 2017, and Chair of its Division of Clinical Psychology twice, in 2004 to 2005 and again in 2010 to 2011. He resigned as Vice-President in 2017.
He gave oral evidence to the Joint Committee on the Draft Mental Health Bill on 26 January 2005, appearing as Chair of the Division of Clinical Psychology. He helped initiate the statutory regulation of psychologists in the UK, working with what was then the Health Professions Council, and contributed to the Power Threat Meaning Framework, the British Psychological Society document led by Lucy Johnstone and Mary Boyle that sets out an alternative to psychiatric diagnosis.
He sits on Mental Health Europe's Beyond the Biomedical Paradigm taskforce and is a member of the Council for Evidence Based Psychiatry.
What he argues
Peter's academic position is set out in a 2005 paper in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, and it is more careful than the shorthand suggests. He argues that simple biological reductionism is not scientifically justified, and that disruption in psychological processes is the final common pathway to mental distress, with biological and social factors doing their work through those processes. He does not deny that biology matters. He argues about where it sits in the chain.
The public version, in his books, is blunter: that the disease model of mental health care rests on shaky foundations, that diagnostic labels do more harm than good, that people usually need practical help more than medication, and that distress is most often an understandable response to what has happened to someone. Plenty of his colleagues disagree, which he would say is the point of having the argument in public.
None of that is what he does on Experience. The show is not a platform for the argument. It is a psychologist explaining, in plain English, why a person in the news did the thing they did.
The books
The academic statement of the argument is a paper rather than a book: A psychological model of mental disorder, Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 2005.
Elsewhere
Kinder Media · Wikipedia · The Conversation · Google Scholar · Bluesky
On the show
The finding that a statement you have heard before feels truer than one you have not, whether or not it is true. Repetition makes a claim easier for the brain to process, and that ease gets misread as evidence.
The process of stopping being what you were, whether that is a job, a marriage, a vocation or a public office. It runs in four stages: first doubts, seeking alternatives, a turning point, and then the slow work of building the ex-role.
Rewarding a behaviour unpredictably, on average about one time in three, which produces the most persistent behaviour psychology has managed to make. It is how a fruit machine works, how you keep a fox coming to your garden, and how a social feed is designed.
A philosopher's way of saying that causes are almost always tangled. An INUS condition is an Insufficient but Necessary part of a set of conditions that is itself Unnecessary but Sufficient for the result. The spark alone did not cause the fire, and the fire could have started another way.
The study of the explanations people give for why things happen, especially why they succeeded or failed. We tend to credit ourselves for the good results and blame circumstances for the bad ones, and the explanation we settle on shapes what we do next.
The tendency to look for, notice and remember evidence that supports what you already believe, and to skip past the evidence that does not. Everyone has it. The trick is catching yourself at it.
Behaving in a way that matches who you actually are and what you actually think, so that other people can read you accurately and learn they can rely on you. Trust grows out of it because trust depends on prediction.
Brain cells, first found in macaque monkeys in the early 1990s, that fire both when you perform an action and when you watch someone else perform it. In humans the evidence points to a mirroring system rather than a single dedicated neuron.
The show
Experience is a weekly podcast in which Hilary Jeffs and Professor Peter Kinderman take one story from the news and work out the psychology underneath it. New episodes every Tuesday. Where to listen.