Hope is found in a corridor of darkness, feet and hands chained to the ground, only the faintest speck of light far off in the distance. It is not found at the start of a race or in the bleachers of a stadium. It is not found in political offices, on posters or a ballot paper. It is not found in forward-thinking companies, in school halls or lecture theatres. It is not the search to find a friend or lover. It is not in a lottery ticket or job position. It is not following a pop star, motivational speaker or politician. It is not a yearning or an ambition or a heroic figure. Hope, is keeping your head turned towards the light, even after it seems to fade from view.
Author: Alex Mendelsohn (Page 4 of 5)
I had a severe reaction to an antidepressant which, overnight, turned me from someone who had no anxiety symptoms whatsoever, to someone who had all of them. I then spent 8 months learning psychological methods (a lot of which I came up with myself) to 'reanimate my Frankenstein brain'. I then returned to my physics PhD where I finished the last 3 years of my PhD in 20 minute intervals, meditating in between to keep myself functional. After I finished, I collapsed from exhaustion, due to the slow progression of my physiological illness. I spent a harrowing couple of years in an indescribable hell, before we eventually got to medications that finally started to work. I am still recovering, but the closest to remission since that awful night in November 2015.
During the editing and proofing process of the Physics World article I wrote, a few misconceptions slipped in. Which is understandable. Before I became mentally ill, I believed many of the misconceptions I have listed below. As I slowly got sicker and sicker, I realised just how wrong most of the common perceptions of mental health conditions are.
A poor understanding of the brain in society leads to films, T.V. shows, articles and other forms of media misrepresenting what mental illness actually is like. Ironically, this misrepresentation can come from the mentally ill themselves. It can be immensely difficult to describe what it is like to have a mental illness because the very nature of the illness affects the organ that we use to describe what it’s like.
Our society is therefore filled with misconceptions galore. Which makes having a mental health condition or illness all that much harder to deal with. Something I hope to rectify very slightly here.
I want to emphasise that the article is based on my experience. The following will likely differ from person to person. Which brings me on to my first misconception.
Continue readingThis is the fourth 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.
I didn’t want the fact that I took Venlafaxine between 2016-2019 to be in the PhysicsWorld article.
I left it out for reasons I hope will be made clear in this blog post. It was difficult, perhaps impossible, to include without a lot of background information and the drug did not give me much, if any benefit. I actually think it made my condition worse.
It is true that I believed that I could achieve remission solely through psychotherapeutic methods during the PhD and also true that I actually require medication to treat my illness.
I feel including even a short mention of Venlafaxine would have confused the reader and distract from the points I was trying to make later on. I hope this is made clear in the following story:
Continue readingThis is the third 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.
It was during my rTMS treatment that I first encountered the rating scales. And, had I been completely honest, I would have said that I could not answer the questions. That I could not give a rating at all. Especially as every scale asked for an average over the last 2 weeks. I have thought of an analogy that I hope might get across the reason why I felt it was pretty much impossible to give a rating.
Say you have lived in Southern California USA for your entire life. You are used to warm, dry and sunny weather year-round. In the previous two weeks however, the weather has been very unCalifornian. On the first day it was foggy and a bit chilly out, the next few days were pretty warm for this time of year (winter) temps going up to 24 Celsius, with a lot of Sun. On the weekend though it rained persistently. Last week however started extraordinarily with snow, possibly the first time you had seen it in your life. The rest of the week then stayed pretty chilly, five or six degrees Celsius, before returning to warm and cloudy.
Continue readingThis is the original draft of the Physics World article: A physicist’s experience of the mental health system (which then lead to the 24th February podcast)
I sent this draft to the editor around August 2021, when I was quite a lot sicker than I am now. I am proud of what I wrote given I could barely make breakfast at the time. So bear this in mind if some of it doesn’t make sense!
I entered my experimental physics PhD way out of my depth. I, like many others, was taken aback by just how much rigour goes into the experiments. “Did you check this?” my supervisor would say “Or that?” he would continue, as I stood there with a feeling of dread knowing that my answer was going to be an inevitable, “No”. “Well, we will have to redo the experiment then” he would say, knowing full well that by “we” he meant “me”.
Continue readingSpring is coming, flowers are blooming and the days are getting longer. What better way to celebrate than a critical analysis of the mental health system! My original draft of the Physics World article (I will shut up about it eventually, I swear!) joins a list of weird and wonderful blog posts I have planned for the next few months. Here are their previews.
Why has no one taken any measurements of my brain?
The original draft of the Physics World article that I sent to the editor. In it, I compare my experience as a PhD physicist and my treatment from psychiatrists. I shine a light on the unscientific nature of the psychiatric system and how it affected me personally. I posit a way in which it could be made more scientific.
Physics World article context #3 – the problem with rating scales
I am quite critical of rating scales in the article. To back up these criticisms I tell the story of when I had to fill them in, and why they are completely inadequate as a measurement tool
Continue readingThis 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.
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!
Continue readingI talked to Matin, the editor of Physics World, about the feature article that I wrote for the February 2022 issue.
You can find the podcast here.
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.
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.
Continue readingHello to everyone who happened upon this blog. My name is Alex Mendelsohn*. There isn’t much here in the form of sunshine and flowers (unfortunately, I couldn’t find those emoji’s – all I could find were these red flags: 🚩🚩🚩). Instead, you are free to feast on a collection of thoughts from a physicist going through severe mental illness. Yippee!**
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