Clara Humpston, Lecturer in Mental Health at the Department of Psychology
Clara is working towards an interdisciplinary understanding of schizophrenia.
Her research experiences span from psychopharmacology to cognitive neuropsychiatry to phenomenology, and she's closely involved with the International Consortium for Hallucination Research.
She joined the University of York in 2022.
email: clara.humpston@york.ac.uk
Our 60-second interview with Clara:
What do you do in the field of mental health?
My focus of research is on schizophrenia and psychosis spectrum conditions, especially understanding first person experiences and narratives. My work also spans psychopharmacology, cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology.
What do you find most rewarding and inspiring in this work?
When I have done or written something that resonates with a person’s experiences; for example the paradoxical or mystical feelings of schizophrenia and the meaning that each person attaches to these experiences, beyond diagnostic symptoms.
What is the most challenging or complicated aspect of this work?
It’s all good fun so it’s not challenging in a bad way but it’s complex in that I have to keep a tab on all the different teams and individuals I’m liaising with; services, academics, governance. It’s a whole ecosystem that needs to work together to be able to do research.
What impact do you hope your work in mental health is having - or can potentially have?
I hope my work will give service users a voice so that their feelings are represented and their experiences are understood and listened to, and it’s not just a tick-box exercise of symptoms to give a diagnosis.
Could you share with us one piece of advice that you follow for your own mental health?
For the hassles in life that grind you down, I say to myself “tomorrow is always another day – nothing lasts for ever – why worry about things that are not in your control?”