Our Latest Articles

The first time I heard about circadian rhythms was in my high school biology class. I remember breezing past the term, memorising that “circadian rhythms = sleep-wake cycles,” and not thinking much more about it. That is, until I started to study them in graduate school.

I am a mental health researcher working on the HappyMums project, a European consortium that focuses on understanding depression in pregnancy. At King’s College London, we are leading a clinical study involving the use of a smartphone application, called the HappyMums App.  Since the start of our project, much of our discussions have been about privacy and data sharing. The idea of having a large-scale dataset encompassing a thousand participants, across seven different sites

When we think about individuals who are likely to consume alcohol in large quantities, we often think about college-aged students or middle-aged adults. However, one important age group is often overlooked: older adults. Alcohol consumption in this group, specifically among individuals aged 60 years and over, is increasing at a faster rate than previous generations, raising concerns about the health consequences of alcohol use in ageing populations.

Some things in life you never expect to lose. Your orgasm is one of them.

More than a century ago, psychiatrists spoke of ‘climacteric insanity’: the strange and sudden madness said to strike women at the end of their reproductive years. Physicians in the late 19th century described vivid delusions, sleeplessness, and emotional turmoil appearing ‘at the change of life’, when the female body ‘lost its balance’.

I am a psychiatrist with a long interest in researching topics like mental capacity, that lie in the borderlands between psychological medicine, ethics, and law. In this context, I do something unusual for a psychiatry professor: I teach psychiatry in a law school.

On a Sunday evening in August this year, I was on my first on-call shift as a trainee psychiatrist in a leafy psychiatric hospital. After a day of walking between old buildings which had been converted into wards, tending to patients’ mental and physical health needs, I decided to have dinner on the grounds.

In mental health services, clinicians write thousands of notes every day. These records capture the details of people’s lives: how they feel, what they struggle with and how they respond to treatment. Hidden within these words is an enormous amount of knowledge about mental health but most of it has never been analysed in a systematic way.

Depression is a complex condition. We know its symptoms well, but we still do not fully understand what happens in the body when someone is depressed. Also, not all individuals with depression are the same, and this diversity may arise from differences in biology – the many bodily processes that constantly shape the way we are and behave.