Hey there! Welcome to the Marketer Of The Month blog!

We recently interviewed Dame Til Wykes for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Dame and here’s what we discussed about –

1. Access to digital technology solutions for underserved communities
2. Ensuring the efficacy and dependability of digital technology options for mental health care
3. Integrating virtual reality and immersive technologies with traditional forms of therapy and treatment
4. Ethics, transparency, and evidence-based practice in developing digital mental health interventions
5. Potential harms of promoting untested or ineffective treatments to vulnerable individuals
6. The future of digital technology solutions for mental health

About our host:

Dr. Saksham Sharda is the Chief Information Officer at Outgrow.co He specializes in data collection, analysis, filtering, and transfer by the means of widgets and applets. Interactive, cultural, and trending widgets designed by him have been featured on TrendHunter, Alibaba, ProductHunt, New York Marketing Association, FactoryBerlin, Digimarcon Silicon Valley, and at The European Affiliate Summit.

About our guest:

Prof. Wykes is the Head of the School of Mental Health & Psychological Sciences at the National Institute for Health Research. She founded the Service User Research Network at King’s College, London and focuses on innovative treatments for schizophrenia and eHealth/mHealth projects such as myhealthlocker. As a leading voice in mental health research, we invited her to discuss how digitizing mental health care is changing the world.

EPISODE 102: Dame Til Wykes, King’s College London – Digital Mental Healthcare – Balancing Innovation with Responsibility

The Intro!

Saksham Sharda: Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Saksham Sharda. I’m the creative director at Outgrow.co and for this month we are going to interview Professor Til Wykes, who is the professor of Clinical Psychology and Vice Dean of Mental Health and Psychological Sciences. Thanks for joining us, professor.

Dame Til Wykes: Great to be here.

Don’t have time to read? No problem, just watch the Podcast!

Or you can just listen to it on Spotify!

The Rapid Fire Round!

Saksham Sharda: So Professor, we’re going to start with a rapid-fire round just to break the ice. You get three passes. In case you don’t want to answer the question, you can just say pass. But try to keep your answers to one word or one sentence only. Okay.

Dame Til Wykes: Alright.

Saksham Sharda: The first one is, how long does it take you to get ready in the mornings?

Dame Til Wykes: About seven minutes.

Saksham Sharda: What time of the day are you most inspired?

Dame Til Wykes: Early evening.

Saksham Sharda: Your favorite color?

Dame Til Wykes: Blue.

Saksham Sharda: The most embarrassing moment of your life?

Dame Til Wykes: Getting the Guinness World Record for the largest mental health lesson.

Saksham Sharda: Oh, wow. And what was it?

Dame Til Wykes: It was the Guinness World Record for the largest mental health.

Saksham Sharda: Okay. As in like, how long was it?

Dame Til Wykes: Not how long, but how large.

Saksham Sharda: Okay.

Dame Til Wykes: So it was, you know, 400 people.

Saksham Sharda: Okay.

Dame Til Wykes: Or 400 children. That’s your difficult gig if you’re doing 400 children.

Saksham Sharda: Alright, so the next question is, how many hours of sleep can you survive on?

Dame Til Wykes: Five.

Saksham Sharda: Favorite book?

Dame Til Wykes: The Ragged Trouser Philanthropist.

Saksham Sharda: The city in which the best kiss of your life happened?

Dame Til Wykes: That’s tough. There’s been so many

Saksham Sharda: So that’s a pass then.

Dame Til Wykes: That’s a pass.

Saksham Sharda: The biggest mistake of your career?

Dame Til Wykes: Pass.

Saksham Sharda: How do you relax?

Dame Til Wykes: Netflix, Prime Books and occasionally walking.

Saksham Sharda: Your favorite movie about mental health?

Dame Til Wykes: Outrageous.

Saksham Sharda: How many cups of coffee do you drink per day?

Dame Til Wykes: Two.

Saksham Sharda: A habit of yours that you hate?

Dame Til Wykes: Pass.

Saksham Sharda: The most valuable skill you’ve learned in life?

Dame Til Wykes: Not to worry about failure.

Saksham Sharda: And the last question is your favorite online Netflix or Amazon show?

Dame Til Wykes: Ted Lasso.

Saksham Sharda: Okay. Alright, so that was a rapid-fire round. You did quite well. Just two passes.

The Big Questions!

Saksham Sharda: So now we’re gonna move on to the bigger questions. And these you can answer with as much ease as you like. And the first one is, can you discuss a specific project or initiative you have been involved in that uses digital technology to improve mental health outcomes?

Dame Til Wykes: Okay. Well, I’ve been involved in quite a few, so it’s tough choosing one. But I suppose from the beginning I helped develop an online treatment-computerized treatment blended. So it involves a therapist helping people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia with their cognitive skills. That’s because we know that people’s cognitive skills can predict their poorer recovery as they go through life in general. So the idea is to improve their cognitive skills and then get some functional recovery, particularly to concentrate on their personal goals. So it’s called circuits. And we have evidence now for its effectiveness as well as its efficacy. And we also know now how to implement it because we’ve just finished a study on different ways of implementing circuits and what is the most cost-effective way.

Saksham Sharda: So what are some of how these cognitive skills are being improved?

Dame Til Wykes: Okay. Well, the software program includes both sorts of exercises and tasks. So tasks are a bit like the kind of games that you might play. Very neutral. And it’s very important to provide neutral tasks because otherwise, people get a bit anxious if it’s a real-life task straight away. And they learn skills like problem-solving, breaking down planning chunking information, and learning how to memorize something. Most, most times people do have some of those skills but they’ve forgotten to use them. Other times they don’t actually because the problem for people with schizophrenia is it starts very early and so they may never have developed those sorts of skills. And then we provide very similar real-life tasks that are kind of built on the same infrastructure as the neutral tasks. Like, and we introduce them to things, to the same things. Use the strategies that you’ve learned and use your ability to break down a problem. We teach them how to go to work in a factory. We teach them how to do, make your CV, how to produce a text message from a letter how you might go about traveling, and what you might have to think about in advance going shopping, making a recipe, and some social tasks as well. And the idea is that we teach them something called metacognition. You know, it’s not, this is not a game. You don’t have to get it correct. You just have to learn the process of being able to carry out a task. That’s the point of the program. And we use metacognition in a completely different way by getting people to think about what they’re going to do and make choices at the beginning. So guesses, you know, is this gonna be a difficult task? How long will it take me? What strategies am I likely to use? And then at the end of these exercises and tasks, they make those same decisions and they can then reflect on how the, you know, they may have said it took them 15 minutes in the beginning, but they were overestimating cuz it only took them three. So the idea is to help people reflect on their behavior and not just learn the strategies, but to learn when to use those strategies. But as I said at the beginning, it’s a blended therapy, so you can do some of that work on the computer on your own, but a lot of the time what’s helpful is to have a therapist who helps you, point you in the right direction, provides that social support and provides something that the computer just could not provide, which is noticing when somebody, particularly in the UK just wants to stop and have a cup of tea rather than pushing on and making them feel like they’re failing because their concentration isn’t as quite as good.

Saksham Sharda: So what generated your interest in the field of schizophrenia and metacognition in the first place?

Dame Til Wykes: I suppose it was a very long time ago, I was developing some measures of social functioning. And I went to a long stay hospital out in the countryside. And I interviewed a lot of people and I took a lot of measurements. One of those measurements was some cognition measures, and then the hospital closed down. It was a long-stay hospital. But then because it was an expert place for rehabilitation, they tried hard to move people into the most independent living conditions that were possible. And I then went back and found where the people were. I did it at one year, at three years, and at six years, and found that the cognition measures actually predicted where they were going. And that was something you couldn’t measure. I never told the staff what the cognitive measures were and who was poorer than somebody else. But somehow even with the best rehabilitation possible, these cognitive problems just were a barrier to taking on the opportunities that we are being offered them. So I decided then that, you know, we should be looking at improving cognition. Although that was totally against the tide of thought at that time. Everybody thought that cognitive problems were static and you just couldn’t make any changes. But of course, nobody had tried to change them. So it was impossible really to say that they were static, just that if you did nothing, the cognitive problems were there at age 20, at age 40, and at age 60. But nobody tried to make changes for and help people to formulate how they might approach cognitive difficulties. So that’s sort of why I was inspired by people and by them telling me they had these cognitive problems, you know, I can’t quite concentrate on a conversation. I sometimes, you know, forget what the other person’s saying. I can’t watch soap operas on the television because I forget what somebody said earlier in the programme. So, or in a newspaper article, I just can’t follow it because I forget what’s going on at the beginning. So part of all of that was people talking to me about it, but also this research, which showed me that I was you know, that I’d discovered that people with cognitive difficulties have real problems in the future.

Saksham Sharda: And were digital solutions the first thing you thought of, or did you also think of other solutions first?

Dame Til Wykes: I was led kicking and screaming to the digital world. So first of all, we used some sort of paper and pencil tasks still with a therapist. And then we did a study with very young people and they started to tell us that, you know, what we were doing was boring and why couldn’t we do it on a computer? So we then developed the first computerized cognitive remediation program, and it’s sort of gone on from there. And it was mainly, again, because, you know, people value the skills of being able to use a computer. So when we started, you know, even the young people hadn’t got that many skills because many of them, as I said, a diagnosis of schizophrenia happens early and it develops over some time. And often people fell out of school and didn’t have the kind of background education or even access, to computers and the digital space. So part of providing the computer was also a motivator for people to get involved. But I should say that these are not games. They don’t have to be super duper avatars, you know, coming out of the screen at you. We are trying to teach people very specific skills, and we do not need them to be diverted by having effective Disney animation on the screen. That is not what they need. They need to be considering, you know, how to approach a task and how they might think about using strategies they’ve learned out in the community in the real world.

Saksham Sharda: And in all this, how do you address concerns about access to digital technology solutions, particularly for individuals in underserved communities?

Dame Til Wykes: I think it’s a real problem. It’s not just for underserved communities, even in the more, the less developed world or the less economically you know, the low and middle-income countries, it’s not even there. It’s even in South London where I’m based. Some communities may have a mobile phone, but it’s a pay-as-you-go phone, or even if they have a smartphone, they’ve got a very limited data contract. So, and probably do not have any internet at home. You know, we learned over the pandemic how hard it was for many families who had a couple of children who needed to get online to get some education that they only had one piece of equipment to hand around. So I do think if this is a health service intervention, then the health service ought to be thinking about having effectively a lending library of both their data and the ability to use computers. And we have been developing that. We’ve developed it because if people needed to have online therapy because you couldn’t come in to see a therapist, then some services kind of built pods for people so that they could go there and easily log on you know, with only a couple of keystrokes and that then they could use a computer wherever they were. And I’m very keen that we teach people not only in a therapist-patient dyad but actually part of this therapy is to teach people to be more independent. So they need to do homework. And on a computer, you can just tell that they’ve done their homework because you can see they’ve logged in. And so they need to feel that they own their learning. So part of the whole therapy is to provide them with opportunities to be able to practice on their own. So having access to some of these potential lending libraries or computer pods is another way of giving them some more independence. So it is a problem access to equipment and data is a problem, but so are the technical skills needed because we assume everybody can use a mouse. And, you know, even my 91-year-old dad can email even if sometimes it’s all in capitals. So, we do have to teach some people how to use the computer and I think that’s fine for us to do. And in fact, our therapy has taken that into account and has separate initial phases that you can go through to teach people more about the computer, you know, how to use a mouse, how to access specific things within the program so that they can turn it on and off. And, how to enter so you know where to put your password and what your past is, where you might find your password.

Saksham Sharda: Yeah. So, access to technology is one thing, basic access to technology. But on the other hand, how do you see far-reaching technology like virtual reality and other immersive technologies being utilized in mental health treatment in the future or now?

Dame Til Wykes: Well, there are two ways that it can be used. It can be used to, well, there’s a very good way to bring the community into the clinic because you can provide more situations in VR where people can begin to practice their skills or do the sort of metacognition self-reflection, which I think is vital. You, I know as a clinician, you ask a patient to do some homework in the community, why don’t you just, you know, go to the shops and buy these four things? They come back to the next session, but they haven’t done it. And what you need is to have a sort of middle step. You know, you can have things on the computer where you’re teaching them problem-solving and planning. But then I think having them in the clinic, actually practicing some of those skills in a more real-life situation with a VR is a really good way forward as a sort of stepping stone to going out into the community. I think the other thing we can do is to have the clinic in the community. So with VR, you could get people to practice things in their living room as opposed to being in the clinic and have a more remote system for providing help with particular problems. I mean, you talked about it as mental health treatment rather than about the treatment of cognition. And that can be for depression and thinking automatic thoughts, negative thoughts all the time when you go into situations. Or it could be somebody who feels, you know, paranoia or anxiety when they enter social situations. So you can create social situations and get them to talk about it and talk their way through it in a graded way, which you cannot do in real-life opportunities, are not necessarily provided in a clear graded way where you could go in and come out again. Whereas in virtual reality, you can do that. And so that is a sort of safe way of enabling people to practice skills, which I think is very important.

Saksham Sharda: And is this happening at scale or its of experiments? Is VR being used?

Dame Til Wykes: Well in all of these things, as I discover, you know, you need CE marks and CA marks and registration with various people. So I’m part of the, you know, a process of providing the understanding of what works. You know, this isn’t an app produced on a Monday that’s green and then you produce another one on a Wednesday, which is yellow, and they do the same thing, but they’re a different color with no evidence whatsoever. But you can market them somehow as helping with your well-being. This is not that kind of space. I think for ethical mental health, digital treatment, you need to show evidence of effects and also to show if the proportion of people who do not improve says even if you have a very large effect size is called, which is how much improvement people show. There will be some people who will not improve and people in, you know, individuals with mental health problems who then use an app that purports to improve your depression or your well-being and if you don’t improve, you will feel even worse about yourself. Whereas we need to situate that information for people and say, well, for about two-thirds of the people there was some improvement, but for a third of them, there was no improvement at all. And they know, you see is, well I’m just one of those people who didn’t improve on this specific treatment. And I think that’s a vital way of making all of these digital treatments transparent so that you can see even before you press the button to download. I’m very keen on this that you will see exactly what information this provides. Not only things like is hazard tests being done on it but also on who was the test. Because a lot of people do these well-being or depression studies on what we might call the worried well people who are a little low in mood, but they are not depressed. They’re just a little low in mood. And what works for people who are a little low in mood may not work at all for people with depression. So I think you need to know what you’re getting. I mean, when you go to a supermarket and you look for conflicts, you can look at the back of the packet before you buy it and compare two boxes of conflicts. You can’t do that with an app. You have to already have effectively bought it or even if it was free, given away a lot of your data via the non-privacy statement that you are signing. And I think that is a real setback for digital health interventions. There’s been a kind of wild west. Yeah, I think with this and that, you know, from a clinician’s point of view, I think we’re doing a disservice to people if we don’t provide them with evidence that this is likely to work or not work for them and allow them to know what data is out there, how it’s been processed, and not in a 32-page document that you are never going to read. You know, if this informs, you that your personal information is going to a third-party marketer, then people probably need to know that before they click on the button.

Saksham Sharda: And do you think there’s going to be a backlash against this wild west kind of treatment of a very crucial thing like healthcare?

Dame Til Wykes: I think health services will become more what’s the word? Well, the problem is it’s such a wild west. There are 75,000 apps produced almost every year that get added to the app stores and we’ve no idea what they are, or who produced them. They may say things like this have been produced on cognitive behavioral therapy principles. Most often they’re not. They haven’t been tested properly. And I suspect some health services will begin to say we are not paying for something that we don’t know whether it works. And certainly, in the National Health Service in the UK, you have to go through lots of hoops to be able to show that something works so that it can be prescribed in the NHS similarly in, for the FDA in the States. But most of these people, the cowboys in the wild West who are producing a lot of these apps may do it for, you know, good reason, not because they wanna make money because they thought it was a good idea and they got the coding skills. They really, those people are probably gonna have a harder time in the future making a living out of producing these sorts of so-called help for mental health problems.

Saksham Sharda: And so what do you think are, well in a different topic, what do you think are the steps being taken to integrate these digital technology solutions with traditional forms of therapy and treatment? What’s the future of that?

Dame Til Wykes: I think there’s a big future in that future on either site. Most patients, people with mental health problems, when you ask them, will you have just an e-health intervention, they will say, no, we don’t want it instead of seeing a person, but we will still use it if it’s as well as seeing a person. So I think there are services in the UK that stage the intervention. So you get a kind of online help first and then you get more support and then you get face-to-face treatment. I don’t know that that’s quite right. But I do think it’s important that we do a, that they’re complimentary. They’re not either. And the reason I stress the sort of service mental health service user point of view is that I’m very keen that we should take their views into account rather than just clinicians or even those sort of service providers who think, oh, well have that, you know, eHealth system because it will be cheaper. It’s not necessarily cheaper. And for clinicians, one of the things that they don’t want is to feel they’re losing their skills and they certainly will lose valuable clinical skills for a health service if they don’t see enough patients of a similar kind. So I see these as I’ve sort of described circuits at the beginning as a blended therapy, it’s a therapy where we help to introduce the person to the program, and we stick with them to point out the things that they need to know because those things are not necessarily obvious in the computer program. And you don’t necessarily want to, you know, hit them over their head with big words on the screen saying, now you have metacognition. It’s more subtle than that. You know, they’re acting as a teacher and a therapist and a supporter. And we know that social reinforcement is the best way of helping people to absorb information. So they’re there to do all those three things and to step away and allow the person to become more independent as you go through therapy. And I think that the best way to go with these therapies is that it will be blended, no definitely not, and either or.

Saksham Sharda: And could you talk a bit more about the supporter aspect of this? Because of the teacher and therapist, I guess we’ve discussed a lot, but the supporter aspect?

Dame Til Wykes: I think well the difficulty is the therapist and supporter kind of overlap quite, they all overlap quite a lot. Yeah. So part of the support is that you know, if a person is faced with a new problem that looks too complicated, they kind of shut down and think, we’re not, I don’t want to do that. So part of the supporter’s role is to help them through that process so that they should have a go. Cuz we know that people who do well in exams are the people who spend time thinking about the problem, not moving on fast, and finishing quickly. It’s when they spend time thinking about the problem that they become much more successful. So part of the supporter’s role is to do that work and it’s very hard for a computer to do that work. I think, you know, computers could step in as teachers and I don’t doubt that they could step in as a therapist, although, you know, as a lot of chatbots around that would think they could. I think that you need that kind of support. I dunno whether you’ve come across it before, what you’ve faced with a complicated statistical analysis and you think I’m never gonna be able to do this. And what you need is somebody to open the gate and let you think about it a bit more and do it in sort of small doses of introductions to this. And you suddenly become much more familiar and you are not going to immediately that sort of gate comes down in front of you and say, I definitely can’t do this.

Saksham Sharda: Yeah. So I was going to say how do you think, like, as far as ethics goes, you’ve already spoken about the wild west of like there is no ethics in the app marketplace, but even for apps that aim to be ethical, what is the future of that? How or what are the ethical considerations or challenges associated with the use of such digital technology?

Dame Til Wykes: Well, mainly I think, you know, where the data goes and I think that’s a big issue even for organizations that have you know, evidence of efficacy. I think the problem is how you are going to turn a profit to keep it going. And I’ve heard people at you know, conferences like web summits say, well, you know, we are gonna have to sell off the data because there’s no way that we can manage to keep going without that. So I do think that the business plan has to be rethought and you know, people keep telling me we can’t go back on providing things for free. There is no such thing as a free service. Something has to be paid for. So I do think that health providers need to think about how this digital health system will help improve their patients so that the patients don’t come back again into the service and cost money and which can help them to kind of move forward and recover. The problem is the costs as I’ve managed to do recently by looking at cost-effectiveness that you shift the costs. So a health service could be buying the app, but the savings are maybe made within the health system, but they’re moved onto community costs for support within the community. And so it’s quite difficult to trace how effective it can be and therefore how much it’s worth paying for that as a society. And I think the financial model is a big driver of the ethical issues that we need to sort out. I mean, one of the obvious ethical issues though is the sort of UX design. It’s, you know, what you need is to have service users at the beginning, not at the end looking at feasibility, but saying, this is the sort of problem you need to solve. Not the problem, you know, that you thought you were solving when you woke up this morning. Just because you knew how to code it to produce that app or health measure. And, so I do think we, the ethics a lot to do with transparency and trust in what you are doing. I had four Ts, but I can’t remember the other two. I call them TFAT principles. So it’s sort of trust for transparency kinds of issues that we need to have in this field because it has kind of run away with us.

Saksham Sharda: Alright. So as a person at the forefront of the field we are talking about in general what is your prediction for the next 10 years, the next decade, but then the next 50 years and then the next hundred years? Where is this headed in general, Schizophrenia and all of this here?

Dame Til Wykes: Okay. I think let’s talk about the infrastructure first. Cuz that is a big barrier. I think the infrastructure is just going to be built, you know, and I also think that we learn, I said that where these issues about equipment in lower-middle-income countries, actually we should be learning from lower-middle-income countries, you know, what’s the lifetime of a phone in those countries as opposed to in the UK and Europe. So I do think there will be more access to the internet or other than the internet that some people may begin to pay for services, which they would have gotten for free today because of the issues about security and privacy of data. But also about the Wild West as well, which is like the master Dawn and Twitter issues at the moment. Who knows what will happen to master Dawn, but it’s clear that Twitter is losing followers because, and its market share because of the way that it’s managing data. And if companies begin to build up that trust that is, there’s finance or incentives to do that. I then think that, because the infrastructure will change, I think it will become much easier. It would be thought of as a community resource just like water is and we may be paying somewhere in our taxes for that service. But that will allow much more of these, I think blended therapies are where health services are going to go. I think there’ll be a more remote provision of therapies. I think we learned that during covid, you know, the sort of telehealth type approaches, which of course they’ve been doing in Australia for a very long time because people are so remote. And I think, there will be more services that are developed, but I suspect fewer companies will be making them. I think, we’ll there will be, but there is no sustainability, I don’t think of the market as it is. So, you know, no matter how enthusiastic you are, you probably need to start with more money than you think it, you know, it’s unlikely it’s going to be in a garage somewhere in Palo Alto. So, you know, well I think that’s for the next 10 to 50 years, I think between 10 and 50 years will have better sort of visual virtual reality. So I think we’ll get better avatars. We already have something called avatar therapy actually at the institute where I work where you build an avatar that looks like the voice you hear in your head and then the therapist again blended therapy, the therapist speaks through the avatar and, you know, it’s a very uncomfortable feeling cuz the avatar sometimes says terrible things but you then react to the person’s voice when become, because often the voices will go away if the person takes control. And it may be we do that now, but it may be that we can begin to automate some of the processes of speaking to a person that would take the load, certainly off the therapist, even if the therapist has to guide some of this. And I think we’ll have more blended therapies. This is up to 50 years. I don’t know, I think 15 years ago if I had had to imagine the future now 15 years ago, I would’ve had terrible trouble. You know, trying to think. Even though I know people who were writing the internet, you know, writing the code, I don’t think I would’ve realized how big an issue it would become. And even, and if you go back even longer than 25 years ago. Lots of things changed. And, you know, maybe we will have, you know, for health, little implants for people measuring people’s blood pressure continually, as they do with people with diabetes where it measures your, your blood sugar. Maybe we’ll have other, you know, bits and bobs rather than tattoos. We’ll just have these things stuck to the outside or on the inside of us measuring something important. And that’s quite likely to be the case in the future. And there will be other breakthroughs. There will be other breakthroughs in learning more about why we get some of these problems like, you know, developing schizophrenia and we might be able to prevent some of them, but I don’t know that and that may be helped by having a kind of observational individual data which is collected via a Fitbit or by your smartphone in terms of speaking on the phone and recording your speech and learning something about you from that, from your speech tones or where you are walking. I mean I do that now actually. So, those are the sorts of things that I think might happen and you know, we are looking at ways to predict relapse in the future from active and passive means. So by speech, by GPS signals, by just passive accelerometers either in your phone or in your watch to try and predict relapse in depression and schizophrenia. I think we might have cracked that by year 50 and that might help us then in the next 50 years to prevent some of these difficulties from arising. We will never be able to prevent life events, life goes on, stuff happens and the stuff that happens will affect us. So traumatic events will always affect us. So we won’t be able to prevent everything, but maybe we’ll be able to predict a few things.

Saksham Sharda: So leaving all that behind or in front cuz it’s the future. The last question is a bit of a personal kind it is for you. The question is, what would you be doing in your life, if not this?

Dame Til Wykes: I think when I was little, I did an awful lot of reading in our village library. I ran out of the children’s section so they allowed me to go to the non-fiction section of the library and you know, if I’d been taller I could have been an architect or an accountant or a ballet dancer cuz they were on the top, top shelf. In the end, I became a psychologist because I could reach the shelf with the books on, psychology at age 11. So I think I would’ve, I was always interested in people, but I’m also interested in maths and you know, design and I used to do ballet, so who knows what I would’ve done. I don’t think I ever decided to be a psychologist. I just ended up here where I am now. So without very much of a decision-making process, I must admit, which is not the way that I mentor other people to have a more strategic view of their careers.

Saksham Sharda: That’s interesting. So in another universe, I’m interviewing you as a ballerina but in this one this is great. Yeah.

Let’s Conclude!

Saksham Sharda: Alright, so that was the last question. Thanks, everyone for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrows podcast. That was Dame Til Wykes, thanks for joining us, professor.

Dame Til Wykes: Thanks a lot for having me.

Saksham Sharda: Check out her website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another episode.