The Anxious Physicist

Personal blog of Dr Alex Mendelsohn

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.

Misconceptions about mental illness

May 9, 2022 /

Alex discusses some misconceptions about mental illness that exist in society. He notes that mental illnesses are complex and individual experiences of mental illness vary greatly. Environmental and genetic factors can play varying roles in the development of mental illnesses in different people. Alex also emphasizes that mental illnesses cause both emotional and physical pain, and depression is not just a loss of emotion, but rather the twisting of emotions. He also points out that anxiety is not just worry, but it can be a debilitating condition that takes away an individual’s control.

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.

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Physics World article context #4 – why I didn’t put Venlafaxine in the article

April 30, 2022 /

This 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.

This blog post discusses why Alex decided not to include information about their use of Venlafaxine between 2016-2019 in their Physics World article about their experiences with the mental-health system. Alex explains that the drug did not give them much benefit and may have even made their condition worse. He also felt that including even a brief mention of Venlafaxine would have confused the reader and distracted from the points they were trying to make. The post goes on to discuss the complexity of antidepressants and the importance of understanding their binding affinities for different receptors. Alex believes that misinformation about antidepressants led to their prescription of Venlafaxine.

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:

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Physics World article context #3 – the problem with rating scales

March 31, 2022 / / 0 Comments

This 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.

Alex discusses the use of rating scales in the mental health system, which he encountered during his rTMS treatment. Alex provides an analogy of how rating scales can be problematic by comparing them to rating the weather over a two-week period. He explains that symptoms of mental illness are complex and unpredictable, and that they fluctuate and change over time, making it difficult to provide accurate ratings. Alex attended a support group meeting with other patients receiving treatment and found that none of them knew how to answer the rating scale questions. The author concludes that rating scales are not very good at capturing the complexities of mental illness.

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.

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Why has no one taken any measurements of my brain?

March 10, 2022 /

This 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!

The article is a personal account of a physicist’s experience with mental illness and the mental health system. Alex describes their experiences in experimental physics and how it taught them the importance of accurate, precise, and direct scientific measurements to derive meaningful understanding. They then go on to talk about their experiences with the mental health system and how they have not received any concrete measurements or tests to diagnose and treat their mental illness, which has led to a lack of progress in their treatment. Alex questions why mental health treatment is based on generalizations and guesswork instead of direct measurements, similar to how their work in physics evolved from guesswork to accurate measurements.

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”.

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Spring 2022 blog previews

March 7, 2022 /

Spring 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

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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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Welcome

January 6, 2022 /

Hello 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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The one neuron model

September 4, 2021 / / 0 Comments

The article discusses the bottom-up approach of physics and how it can be applied to mental health conditions. Alex presents a model of the brain as a single neuron to explain anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder. According to the model, anxiety is an increase in the firing frequency of the neuron, depression is a slowing of the ticking clock, and bipolar disorder is a quickening of the clock followed by a decrease to normal, then speeding back up again. Alex believes that this model may be a fundamental first step in understanding mental health conditions. He also criticizes the insufficient models used to describe mental health conditions in generalizations.

As I will likely parrot in most of the things I write, physicists think ‘bottom up’. That is, to find some fundamental equation that underlies the whole of whatever it is describing, even if it itself does not give a very accurate portrayal of reality. Think of those classical problems in school physics lessons of a 2D ball being launched by some force at a specific angle. I’m sure some of you have nightmares after the mere mention of SUVAT equations (apologies).

But these Newtonian equations describe the fundamental physics of classical objects travelling along a trajectory really well. To then accurately describe the forces (wind resistance, spin, friction etc.) acting on a 3D real-life ball flying through the air, terms and perturbations are added to the fundamental equations. Importantly, however, terms are never taken away.

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