About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about some key issues and debates in clinical methodology, focusing in particular on: (i) some key requirements when diagnosing someone with a mental disorder, including observing their behaviour and assessing their medical records; (ii) three updates in the DSM-5 being to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms, dementias and cross-cultural recognition of distress; (iii) Daly and colleagues’ 2020 longitudinal study of changes in mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic; (iv) the results and conclusions of Daly and colleagues’ study; (v) defining holism as viewing the interconnections between the parts of a whole as more important than the sum of its individual parts; (vi) defining reductionism as the practice of seeking understanding of a concept by breaking it down into its constituent parts; (vii) an evaluation of holistic and reductionist techniques in the context of clinical psychology, including how easy or difficult it is to build treatment plans from their theories.

About the lecturer

Dr Cody Porter is a senior lecturer in social psychology in the department of Health and Social Sciences at the University of the West of England. Dr Porter’s research interests are in information elicitation, lie detection and offending behaviour. Some of Dr Porter’s recent publications include ‘Implementing converged security risk management: Drivers, barriers, and facilitators’ (in press) and ‘Applying the asymmetric information management technique to insurance claims’ (2022).