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Staff Profiles

Dr Lucy Robinson

Reader in Clinical Psychology

Background

I am a Reader in Clinical Psychology on the Newcastle Doctorate in Clinical Psychology programme. I joined the team in April 2017 from a clinical academic fellowship in Academic Psychiatry and the Regional Affective Disorders Service (RADS).


I have an interest in Student mental health and led the Office for Students-funded project BRIGHTER (BRinging Innovation to Graduate mental Health TogethER) between 2019-22. We developed a University-led Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) service for students and co-produced CBT-based 'mind mangement' workshops for postgraduates, undergraduates and staff to help with common issues in academic life (e.g. imposter syndrome, work/life balance, procrastination, social comparison, and sleep). I was Deputy Clinic Director of this Psychological Therapies Training and Resesarch Clinic from 2020 until 2026.


I also have a research and clinical interest in idiographic (person-specific) methods in mental health, including finding innovative ways to map out individual experience, such as dynamic network modelling. 


Before my clinical training, my PhD studies investigated neuropsychological function in Bipolar Disorder.

Open Science Framework profile: https://osf.io/bdfpg/


Funding:

1.   Office for Students funding competition to improve access and participation for black, Asian and minority ethnic groups in postgraduate research study’

Project title: Postgraduate Research Opportunities: North East (PRO:NE) £800,000 for 48 months from February 2022. Dr Robinson is co-investigator.


2.   Medical Research Council Adolescent Mental Health call MR/W002442/1:

Project Title: Developing and Evaluating a Stepped Change Whole University approach to Student Mental Health. £3.78M for 48 months from September 2021. Dr Robinson is CoI and co-lead for work package 5. 


3.   Office for Students ‘Achieving a step change in mental health outcomes for students’ challenge competition: Project title: BRringing Innovation to Graduate mental Health TogethER (BRIGHTER) £826,000 for 27 months from September 2018. Dr Robinson is lead PI.


4.   Newcastle upon Tyne NHS Foundation Trust Research Capability Funding

Project title: Exploring Dysautonomia’s Relationship with Catastrophisation in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. £15,192 in 2014 for 1 year. Dr Robinson was Co-PI.



Esteem indicators:

2015-2024 External Examiner appointments at UCL, Lancaster, Staffordshire, Essex, and Oxford DClinPsy programmes


Awards & Prizes:

2012 Associate Fellowship of the British Psychological Society (AFBPsS)

Feb 2006 Robert Fischl Postgraduate Travel Award

July 2005 Mary Mckinnon Prize (highest overall mark)

July 2005 British Psychological Society Award for Undergraduate Psychology (best performance in clinically relevant modules)


Qualifications:

2010-2013 Doctorate in Clinical Psychology, Newcastle University, School of Psychology

2005-2010 PhD – Neuropsychological Performance, Emotion Processing and Psychosocial Function in Bipolar Disorder, Newcastle University, Institute of Neuroscience (Academic Psychiatry)

2002-2005 BSc (Hons) Psychology – 1st Class, Newcastle University

1999-2002 BA (Hons) Economics – 1st Class, University of Durham

Research

My research centres on two main areas - student mental health and person-specific methods for studying mental health.

Student Mental Health

Within the student mental health field, we ran our own in-house clinical service between 2018 and 2026 and collected research data focusing on predictors of treatment engagement and complexity. Between 2021 and 2026, I was Co-I on the Nurture-U project, a large programme of research involving 6 UK universities and including a survey of mental health needs in students, developing 'compassionate campuses', introducing mental health literacy training into the curriculum, randomised controlled trials of self-help interventions for low mood and for rumination/worry, and incorporating a wellbeing signposting toolkit into the wellbeing offer. I led the Mental Health Strand lead of the PRO:NE (Postgraduate Research Opportunities North East) project between 2022 and 2026. In partnership with the 5 universities in the North East of England, UK, the PRO:NE project sought to improve access to postgraduate research opportunities to students from minoritised groups.

I have a number of students at various levels who have investigated different aspects of student health and wellbeing, including views about digital interventions, perceptions of the impact of university on mental health in alumni, exploring psychiatric language use and how this might have changed over time, and looking at when and how people of different ages determine distress to have reached the threshold of a clinical problem.

You can read about some of the students' work in the News & Events section of the BRIGHTER website.

Person-specific methods

Whilst our understanding of various mental health difficulties has increased greatly over time, there are still a large number of people living with psychological distress that current treatments do not help. I am interested in understanding more about person-specific ways in which distress is caused and maintained in the hope we can find better ways of tailoring interventions to a specific individual. The aim of this personalised medicine approach for mental health is to bring the right treatment to the right person more quickly and achieve better outcomes than the current practice of working through a sequential series of treatment steps.

I am interested in any methods that further this endeavour. At the moment, network analysis and especially dynamic network modelling, hold great promise for bringing a different perspective to how we study mental health. The network approach conceptualises mental health difficulties as arising from mutually causal elements rather than the observed features (such as change in mood, fatigue, withdrawal, negative thoughts, changes in appetite) resulting from an unseen 'common cause'. For example, from a network perspective. depression would result from a series of causal interactions between experiences, thoughts, beliefs, behaviours, physiology and biology. This in contrast to established ways of thinking about disorders as a simple consequence of some central cause that triggers all of the symptoms.

This opens the door to exploring the relationship between elements to identify causal and maintenance patterns and frees us up from specific syndromes as the units of interest.

A number of different student projects have used ecological momentary assessment to investigate a diverse range of phenomena, including loneliness, OCD, social phobia, health anxiety, and depression. 

For more detail see my Open Science Framework profile.

Before my clinical training, my PhD studies investigated neuropsychological function in Bipolar Disorder.

Teaching

I teach evidence based practice, experimental design and research methods on the DClinPsy course.

I am also lead for the Service-Based Project.

Publications