The Anxious Physicist

Personal blog of Dr Alex Mendelsohn

Category: Physics world article context

I realised during the editing process that I have made a lot of quite bold claims. So I ended up writing some contextual documents that seemed to help the editing process. The following blog posts contain this contextual information.

The story of how my Physics World article came to be

August 31, 2022 /

Referring to the article: A physicist’s experience of the mental-health system

and podcast: Start-up simulates quantum photonics devices, a physicist’s experience of the mental-health system

Alex wrote a manuscript about their experiences with mental illness that they shared with a psychiatric researcher, but received no response. Undeterred, they cold-emailed psychiatric researchers and scientific magazines but only received rejections. Eventually, the editor of Physics World magazine reached out and expressed interest in publishing the manuscript. Despite being surprised and skeptical at first, Alex’s article was eventually published after six months. Alex thanks the editor for being courageous enough to publish something not typically seen in a physics magazine and wonders if there are more people out there willing to act and care about mental health issues.

A while ago, my counsellor asked me to write something to give to a psychiatric researcher she knew from her work at a mental health hospital. She felt strongly that the things I was talking about in our sessions needed to be heard.

I obliged. I wrote a sort of manuscript looking thing. At that time I didn’t have the energy to write it in any sort of structure to help the reader. All I could do was splurge what was in my head onto paper. I cleaned it up as much as I could, then sent it off to her.

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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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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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