United Kingdom
An experimental physicist and psychiatric patient who writes about the psychiatric system and mental health in general.
A deeply personal essay about what it was like to live with severe mental illness in a world that doesn’t want to look too closely. Through my story, I challenge the stigma, indifference, and missed opportunities in psychiatry, and make a moving case for seeing people in extreme states as valuable—both for what they can teach us about the mind and for who they are.
An essay on therapy and neuroscience, exploring how my own recovery was misread and what split-brain studies reveal about the stories our minds tell us.
As a physicist with severe anxiety, I used my scientific training to navigate contradictory lithium therapeutic monitoring guidelines and find a dosing regimen that worked for me, revealing a broader need for clarity and critical thinking in psychiatric care
This piece explores the complex duality of psychiatric medications, the risks of biased guidance—medical or otherwise—and calls for greater accountability from the deprescribing platform Inner Compass Initiative.
Alexander Mendelsohn wonders why the mental-health system lacks the quantitative rigour that physics benefits from
Academic article proposing three "Amdisen levels" to replace the notation 12hr-stSLi. Preprint here: https://zenodo.org/records/14992713
The omission of standardized 12-hour post-dose timing (12h-stSLi) in reporting lithium serum concentrations represents a critical methodological flaw in psychiatric research, obscuring pharmacokinetic interpretation, compromising data comparability, and impeding the advancement of precision in lithium therapy.
(Page 28, Autumn 2024 edition of HoPSIG newsletter) Amdi Amdisen was a Danish clinical psychiatric researcher who devoted almost his entire career to developing a procedure to monitor lithium serum concentrations. His story is often overlooked in articles detailing the history of lithium therapy despite his contributions benefiting millions of patients all over the world. In this article, I right this wrong.
The article critiques a webinar based on “The Lithium Handbook” for inaccurately labeling the 12-hour lithium serum concentration as a trough level, when it is actually a midpoint concentration, highlighting how such misunderstandings in pharmacokinetic terminology can lead to clinical miscommunication and potential patient risk.
During my PhD, I faced a lot of academic politics and power plays that really hurt my confidence and mental health. Conflicting demands from supervisors left me overwhelmed, and one treated me more like a tool than a person. Despite support from others, the experience showed me how toxic and unaccountable academia can be.