My training and the first part of my career as a clinical researcher was at Université Laval (Québec) until 1997 and then at Université de Montréal in Canada. In 2000 I moved to Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK) and I have been research director for the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology since 2001. From 2000 until 2018 I also held a research, training and development role at the Newcastle Cognitive and Behavioural Therapies Centre, a regional specialist mental health service within the NHS.

My main research interests have been in the field of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder and other disorders dominated by intrusive thoughts, worry and rumination. The focus is to extend psychological models of these and other disorders through increasing the degree of specification. Through this strategy I believe we will ultimately develop a knowledge base that will enable treatments to become more effective for those who currently benefit little with existing psychological treatments.

I have been investigating the role of Intolerance of Uncertainty along with colleagues and students at Newcastle for over a decade. We first became interested in Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) in 1993 at Université Laval (Quebec) when we realized that for people with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, uncertainty was part of the threat or threatening in and of itself. From a hunch came a questionnaire published in 1994, the Laval model of GAD with IU at its heart, then a treatment with several RCTs, and much more work on the model. It appears to have face validity, resonates as a concept with clinicians and patients alike and it is being used with different populations and in different areas of psychological research. Along with a range of collaborators, our current lines of research in this area include the nature of IU and its manifestations in everyday life; its possible origins and developmental course, its potential contribution to anxiety (including performance anxiety), depression, psychosis, and autism spectrum disorders; its possible role in physical health conditions, its presentation in non-western cultures, IU and healthy ageing, developing IU-specific treatment strategies, how people use internal body signals in response to uncertainty, etc.

In the last three years we have been looking at IU as a trans-situational factor and how people react to real life events that occur and have both uncertainty and threat as their defining features. Since the pandemic we have been developing and testing the model, developing interventions, and providing training for uncertainty distress. Ongoing tests of the model include the various uncertainties of the pandemic that also go beyond the virus (finances, occupation, social change, etc.), Long Covid, vaccines, climate change and extreme weather, and long-term health conditions, carers of people with dementia, and clinical training.

Making And Keeping Friends With Uncertainty