The Anxious Physicist

Personal blog of Dr Alex Mendelsohn

Month: February 2022

Physics World article context #2 – BRAIN and the future direction of neurological measuring devices

February 28, 2022 / / 1 Comment

This is the second of a series of blog posts on the context behind my Physics World article: A physicist’s experience of the mental-health system. There is a lot of backstory. So during the editing process, I sent documents to the editor to help explain some of the views I express in the article. I have decided to add them as blog posts.

The author, Alex, discusses their frustration with the lack of advanced brain measurement machines available for use in their treatment. They searched for non-invasive and direct methods to record action potentials in the brain, but the techniques they found were either poorly funded, invasive, or indirect. The BRAIN initiative was also found to be lacking in progress. Alex quotes a 2015 paper by a working group on the analysis of circuits of interacting neurons, which highlights the need for development in this area and the potential for revolutionary advances. As someone who is mentally ill, Alex was disappointed that progress had been slow and felt that a lot of hope had been taken away.

When things were pretty bad and no treatment had had a significant effect, I could not understand why no one was looking at my head. Where were all these magnificent brain measurement machines I had seen in the news and media growing up? My condition was so severe I was certain something would show up. I even asked one of the clinicians this (they did research as well as treatment and had an MRI machine on site), they replied: “we wouldn’t be able to interpret the images”. Which infuriated me as an experimentalist. Non-interpretable data is literally the start of any experimental investigation!

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Physics World article context #1 – the benefits of therapy

February 14, 2022 /

This is the first of a series of blog posts on the context behind my Physics World article: A physicist’s experience of the mental-health system. There is a lot of backstory. So during the editing process, I sent documents to the editor to help explain some of the views I express in the article. I have decided to add them as blog posts.

This blog post discusses the benefits of therapy and the Alex’s views on it. The post is part of a series of articles on the context behind the Physics World article, “A physicist’s experience of the mental-health system.” Alex begins by noting that therapy helped them become a confident, emotionally aware individual. However, they felt that during the process, they were not receiving treatment, but rather an education to learn a skillset. They believe that listening is not a passive activity, but an active one, and that counsellors are trained to be the best listeners on the planet. The safe environment provided by therapy allows individuals to process their emotions and understand how they build and lead to the person they are. Alex believes that therapy is not a treatment but an education, and that it helps a large proportion of people with mental health problems. The post ends with the Alex’s view that an education can still work as a treatment, but it is much easier to do when used as a preventative measure.

The Physics World article is focused almost entirely on the psychiatric system. In the original draft, I sent two articles – the second was focused more on the psychotherapeutic system, but was only loosely tied to physics. This blog post summarises my views of psychotherapy.

I don’t think therapy was bad at all. Through it, I became a confident, emotionally aware individual. The problem was that during the process it was abundantly obvious that I was not receiving treatment. I was receiving an education (as someone who has been in education my entire life).

In my view, treatments require the person receiving it to do very little work (usually to lift their arm from the pill box to their mouth), whereas education requires the person receiving it to do a lot of work, in order to learn a skillset.

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