Who I am and why I'm writing this
Clinical psychologist · Neuropsychologist · Psychotherapist
I've been a psychologist for over a decade. In that time I've learned one thing with absolute certainty: certainty is overrated.
I'm a clinical psychologist, neuropsychologist, and psychodynamic psychotherapist. I run a psychological practice and a clinical research center in Bydgoszcz, Poland. I diagnose ADHD, autism spectrum, and neuropsychological conditions in adults and adolescents. I do psychotherapy. I supervise other clinicians. And for the past few years I've been training therapists in psychedelic-assisted therapy, working across international clinical trials with psilocybin and other compounds.
That's the CV version. Here's the real one.
Most of my days are spent sitting with people who came in with a question and expecting a clear answer. "Do I have ADHD?" "Is this autism?" "What's wrong with me?" I understand the need. A name for what you're experiencing feels like solid ground. But I've learned, sometimes the hard way, that rushing toward a label can mean missing what's actually going on. A behavior is not a symptom. A symptom is not a diagnosis. And a diagnosis is not an explanation.
This is the tension I live in professionally. Between the pressure to be quick and the responsibility to be accurate. Between what a checklist captures and what it leaves out. Between what a study shows and why it shows it. That second part, the why, is where most of the interesting questions hide. And most of the mistakes.
Why I write
I started writing publicly a few years ago, in Polish, on my blog and on Facebook. Mostly about ADHD, diagnostic methodology, psychedelic therapy, and the things that bother me about how psychology is communicated online. I noticed something. The posts that resonated most were not the ones where I had answers. They were the ones where I was honest about what we don't know yet. Where I said "this is more complicated than it looks" and then showed why.
This blog is a continuation of that thinking. A place where I can write more slowly and more deeply than social media allows.
What to expect
I'll write about clinical diagnosis and the difference between pattern recognition and actual understanding. About psychedelic-assisted therapy, what the trials are showing and what the hype is hiding. About neuropsychology and why the brain is not a simple input-output machine. About research methodology, because how a study is built matters as much as what it finds. And sometimes about what it's like to sit in a room with someone and not know the answer yet.
I won't write to impress. I won't pretend that complex things are simple. And I won't give you five easy takeaways when the honest answer is "it depends."
If that sounds like your kind of reading, welcome. If you're a clinician, I hope this gives you something to think about between sessions. If you're not, I hope it gives you a better sense of what good clinical thinking looks like and why it takes time.
Let's start.
Contact
If you'd like to get in touch, email me at kontakt@lukaszwarchol.pl.