Clinical Personality Psychology | Simone Cheli | Evolving Psychiatry #56

How do clinical psychologists think differently once taking an evolutionary view? How can the evolutionary sciences help in understanding the problems people seek help from therapists for?Simone Cheli, PsyD, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist based in Florence, Italy. He is the founding president of Tages Onlus, a Florence-based clinical, research, and training centre he established in 2014, and an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at St. John's University, Rome. He previously spent fifteen years at the University of Florence working in psycho-oncology and severe mental illness.He is best known for developing Evolutionary Systems Therapy (ESTS), an integrative clinical model that brings together Paul Gilbert's Compassion-Focused Therapy, the metacognitive tradition of Paul Lysaker and Giancarlo Dimaggio, attachment theory, and evolutionary psychopathology. His research focuses on schizotypy, personality disorders, perfectionism, and the dimensional understanding of psychopathology, and he is a member of the HiTOP Consortium.He is the co-editor, with Paul Lysaker, of A Dimensional Approach to Schizotypy: Conceptualization and Treatment (Springer, 2023), and the author of the popular Italian book L'animale che si credeva altro: Guida facile alla psicologia evoluzionistica in sette storie (Fioriti, 2026). He has published over one hundred peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, and serves as co-editor of Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session and associate editor of New Ideas in Psychology and Mental Health Science.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.