Journalism

In 1994 I won a Science Media Fellowship, which enabled me to spend 3 months working as a science journalist at the Financial Times.

After I finished I had the opportunity to write for the paper. First, I shared a weekly column, The Nature of Things, with Clive Cookson, the Science Editor. He had been writing the column fortnightly in the WeekEnd FT. With my participation the column became a weekly column and we took turns.

After I had been writing columns for The Nature of Things for about 5 years a new editor decided to revamp the WeekEnd FT. She wasn’t very keen on science and killed the column. However, she was interested in health, which I felt was boring and in Psychotherapy, which  I was curious about. She wanted someone who could write authoritatively about the major schools of psychotherapy. I volunteered: how hard could it be?

My new column Psych Yourself Up appeared fortnightly for about a year, until I ran out of therapies to write about. The articles were very popular with therapists and several of them appeared on therapists’ web sites. I contemplated turning them into a book, but instead I have made them available here.

  • The Science pages here contain a selection of my columns from The Nature of Things.
  • The Psychotherapy pages contain most of the columns from Psych Yourself Up.