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Disability due to chronic pain is a massive issue in the UK, with millions of people across the country unable to work, see their friends, or perform everyday tasks because of their condition. As an individual with experience in researching chronic pain and educating others about it, I am passionate about understanding the holistic impact pain has on individuals and how this can be managed. 

On ‘The Traitors UK’, an award-winning reality TV competition, strangers trust and betray one another for the chance to win up to £120,000 (and one more day in the presence of Claudia Winkleman’s fringe). There may be no official strategy for winning, but the players who last longest all seem to understand one thing: psychology.

Dementia is a progressive neurodegenerative condition that affects the brain and causes issues with memory, behaviour, emotions, and communication. The most common form is Alzheimer’s disease, which is characterised by a slow decline in cognitive and motor functioning, with symptoms including trouble concentrating, finding the right words to communicate, issues with remembering events, people and places, and controlling movements. Many individuals also experience secondary me

I will shift. Two teenagers scribbled this same line repeatedly in their journals. Both later died by suicide after extensive interactions with Character.AI chatbots

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.

I am a current PhD student at UCL and Research Fellow with the UK Trauma Council. I was previously a Research Assistant working on the Adolescence Mental Health and the Developing Mind (AMHDM) ReThink Programme. My work explores how experiences of early adversity (especially care experience) shape mental health, and how research can meaningfully involve those it aims to serve. I wrote this blog to reflect on the "Adolescence, mental health and the developing mind" (AMHD) “Spe

Why is the use of antidepressants so controversial, and how could we prescribe them more effectively? This question is a priority in my research at King’s College London, where I work as professor of statistical genetics. My academic background is in statistics, and I am passionate about using genetics to improve the diagnosis and treatment of mental health conditions.  Together with people with lived experience of depression, my research team integrates clinical and biologic

Writer’s note: This article has been co-written by Courtney Worrell and Tony Woods It has long been said that art is good for our health, but we didn’t know much about how or why. So, this summer, we set up shop in front of the likes of Van Gogh and Manet at the Courtauld Gallery in London to look at the science behind this relationship and explore how the body really responds to viewing art. Spoiler alert – what we found was very, very interesting.   Vincent Van Gogh’s Sel

My name is Pierrette, and I am a Master's student studying Neuroscience at King's College London. A few months ago, I was introduced to the concept of the brain's "dark energy" during a lecture on neuroimaging. Deeply interested in this topic, I began to wonder about the origin and nature of consciousness and questioned whether the awareness of oneself resides in the body, or if our mind and body are two separate entities that converge to make us human. Photo by Shawn Day on

First Episode Psychosis (FEP) refers to the first experience of psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations or delusions. I am a final-year psychiatry trainee with a long-standing interest in both FEP and gender-specific medicine, now working in a specialized early intervention service in Northern Italy.

Why are some young people still missing from mental health research and what can we do to change that? Hi, I’m Rachel Perowne, a PhD researcher and I’m passionate about making youth mental health research more inclusive. I believe that the best way to achieve this is to involve young people in a meaningful way in the research process. Together with my supervisors and colleagues, including three young co-researchers, I recently published a systematic review exploring the barr

Every human being begins life as a single cell.  That cell divides, multiplies, and transforms into many different types of cells — muscle, nerve, skin, blood, bone, and so on — until, somehow, a complete body emerges. But this transformation raises one of biology’s oldest and most fascinating questions: how do cells know what to become?

I am Dr Rebecca Bind, a Postdoctoral Research Associate working in the Perinatal section of the Stress, Psychiatry and Immunology Lab at The Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. Most recently I managed a clinical trial for mothers with postnatal depression called SHAPER-PND, the results from which have just been published and I will discuss below.

My research in mental health and neuroscience is fuelled by a deep curiosity about how the world around us, everything from our...

A researcher’s perspective In recent years, cannabis has become a hot topic, from recreational legalisation debates to discussions about medical applications. But beyond its social and legislative implications, there's a growing body of evidence suggesting that cannabis use might be linked to severe mental health disorders, including psychosis, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. Understanding these associations is crucial as cannabis consumption rises worldwi

I’m a 39-year-old neuroscience and psychology graduate, freshly finished with my MSc at King’s College London. My story begins in 2020,...