While I’ve always thought that we may be overprescribing SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a type of antidepressant) to people who are feeling blue, I thought the science was chrystal clear that low serotonin levels caused depression. I was therefore highly surprised when I learnt…

Every time I experience psychosis, I stop eating meat. Fish is the exeption, perhaps because I grew up to Kurt Cobain singing “It’s okay to eat fish, ‘cause they don’t have any feelings.” Or more likely, because I used to go fishing every summer with…

I’m reading Ethan Watters exposé Crazy Like Us where he postulates that the most devastating consequence of the global spread of American culture is not the obesity epidemic or bomb craters but the destruction of the human psyche itself. We are on track to homogenize the…

The date was December 3rd 2024 when my fourth psychosis hit. There were no warning signs. I was sitting by my desk, listening to the opera Vide cor meum from Hannibal, and starring into the gaze of Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Lecter. Ben was playing Remnant…

Sensory gating is the process by which the brain filters out irrelevant stimuli from the meaningful one. It prevents an overload of information in the higher cortical centres in the brain. The process is central to explaining the delusions and hallucinations in schizophrenia. Sensory gating…

For the past few weeks, I've been drinking a lot and it's left me with the blues. Shots of Jameson on the night shift, followed by more shots after the night shift in a bartender's bar. It's often daylight out by the time I make…

I wrote my second-year thesis in the history of ideas about education and child-rearing - specifically, the pedagogic ideas about freedom represented by the Scottish educator A.S. Neill. He started publishing books in the 1920s and took a radical approach to child-rearing. Children should be…

I was really happy the other day when someone told me that an old colleague that used to work with us was coming back to the pub. I'll call him Quito. He's young at just 21 and a refugee from Venezuela so he hasn't had…

I spent the past week writing about Neil Postman's perspective on technology. Postman was a media theorist who asked the question of whether we're controlling technology or whether technology is controlling us. In his most famous book Amusing ourselves to death from 1985 Postman described how we're…

There's something called the Mandela Effect which is the phenomenon where masses of people believe that an event occurred when it didn't. The term was first coined in 2009 after researcher Fiona Broome got talking to people at a conference about how she remembered Nelson…