Consultant Clinical Psychologist | Psychotherapist | Senior Lecturer | Writer
Media
The stories we tell about mental health — and the structures that shape those stories — have profound consequences for people’s lives. Much of my media work focuses on widening the lens: bringing nuance, challenging the binaries of “deserving and undeserving”, and foregrounding the social, political, and structural forces that too often slip from view.
My aim is to bring depth, accuracy, and humanity into the spaces that shape the national conversation, using research and compelling storytelling to speak to a wide range of audiences.
Alongside my clinical and academic work, I have long written and commented for major outlets, producing analysis and commentary under pressure and to tight deadlines.
My bylines include The Guardian and The Independent, and I am regularly interviewed for broadsheets, magazines, podcasts, and broadcast media on mental health, trauma, neoliberalism, and the welfare system. I also work within the theatre sector, offering dramaturgical consultation to productions engaging with psychological, political, or trauma-related themes.
Broadsheets
Selected Journalism:
Watts, J. (2022). England's mental health care lacks money, yes — but it also lacks compassion. The Guardian. A series of scandals on acute psychiatric wards demands attention not just to underfunding but to the punitive cultures that too many patients are confined within — and what genuinely safe inpatient care could look like. Read →
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Watts, J. (2021). Britain's inhumane benefits system is giving people PTSD. Novara. The welfare system deploys a four-part formula — removing safety, lowering status, attributing blame, and eliminating outside perspective — that demonstrably produces and worsens mental illness. Read →
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Watts, J. (2022). No wonder more young females are dying by suicide than since records began. The Independent. Rising female suicide reflects not individual pathology but a convergence of poverty, chronic untreated trauma, interpersonal violence, and a misogynistic diagnosis that enables the precise conditions of neglect so often behind breakdown. Read →
Broadcast
