Dr Gavin Belcher of the UoG Department of Psychology is no slave to convention and, having taken exception to a journalistic cliche commonly appended to his name, has previously argued that “anyone who is afraid of controversy is afraid also, by extension, of disinterested rational enquiry… a scientist should be afraid of nothing but of applying inadequate rigour to any given question.”
Dr Belcher describes his interest in the field thus:
I have an interest in those areas of human experience described in the nomenclature of our times as bipolar disorder or manic depression, those which fall under the umbrella of autism spectrum disorders, and those described as ADHD/ADD. I have an interest in the treatment of such disorders and in their causation. I am not and have never been inclined, as my colleagues too often have, to dismiss disorders and quirks of metabolism, environmental pollutants and dietary compounds and adulterants as causative factors; indeed, I consider that the arbitrary dismissal of such factors is a dereliction of duty, scientists being, I further believe, duty-bound to assiduously pursue the truth not to defend an ideological or otherwise conventional standpoint.
I have an interest in the construction of the taxonomy of mental disorders and the various influences upon this process.
I have an interest in the quest towards the non-reductive scientific understanding of the human mind and the understanding of this quest as one which must remain distinct from those other sciences which have not the necessity of recourse to non-scientific discourse as a corrective, as a context and as an informant to the scientific verities, as I believe Psychology does.
