Vincent Deary is a Professor of Applied Health Psychology at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He also works as a Practitioner Health Psychologist in one of the UK's first NHS trans-diagnostic fatigue clinics. In his research he has focused on the development of interventions for a number of conditions, including fear of falling in older adults, the management of chronic physical conditions and the ways in which disease and life circumstances can affect our relationship with food. This latter strand of his work - the altered eating research - provided one of the first insights into how Covid-related smell and taste loss could have a much wider impact on our lives, moods, and relationships with ourselves and others.
As well as being a clinical academic, he is also a writer, with unique ability to draw on experience from his life, work, and research together with anecdotes from art, philosophy and popular culture. His first book, How We Are, which was published in 2015 to wide acclaim, takes the reader "under the hood" of daily life. He showed how it is so largely lived by habit that few of us notice the complexity that sustains us until we are forced - or choose - to change. In his soon-to-be-published second book - How We Break - he turns the same insightful eye to human distress and suffering. He is currently working on How We Mend, which will bring this trilogy on human life to its conclusion.
Agent: Patrick Walsh