portrait

Lars Klintwall

Anknuten till Forskning

Clinical psychologist and post-doc, interested in causal symptom network methodology as an alternative to traditional psychiatric diagnosis.

Om mig

Aside from clinical work and research, I do a swedish-language podcast together with my psychologist colleague Liv Svirsky, called "Barnpsykologerna". I´ve also written two books for preschool-aged children about exposure therapy for specific phobia and social anxiety.

Forskningsbeskrivning

My background is in applied behavior analysis and social skills training for preschool aged children with intellectual disabilities and autism. However, the past few years my long-running interest in alternatives to psychiatric classifications (e.g. "autism", "depression", "social anxiety") has materialized into a research project about "causal symptom networks". This paradigm sees psychiatric symptoms not as caused by underlying and discrete diseases, but as caused by each other. Such networks of symptom causation can be created by intensive longitudinal data, which has shown them to be highly idiosyncratic, which makes them similar to classical case-conceptualizations in CBT. My own contribution to this field is, hopefully, developing briefer assessment methods, such as self-rated / perceived causal symptom networks (a swedish-language online questionnaire that creates such a network can be found HERE.)

Currently, I have collaborations across Europe and Sweden investigating questions such as:

- What is the clinical utility of self-rated symptom networks?

- Can recurring types of networks be found within populations such as patients with depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue, psychosis?

- Are repeated assessments of perceived causal networks (e.g. across a month) more stable than one-session assessments?

- Is focusing on healthy behaviors more useful than symptoms, i.e. resilience networks?

- Can a patient-created perceived symptom network be useful as part of supervision of therapist?

- Can symptom networks realistically be created for family systems (i.e. child-parent dyads?)

Pedagogiska meriter

Single-case research methods, Psychology dept., Stockholm University (2018-2022)

Psychiatric evaluation and interventions for children, Psychology dept., Stockholm University (2018-2021)

Utbildning

PhD in behavior analysis som Oslo Metropolitan University

Clinical psychologist, Stockholm University