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Please give us a brief overview of your current position and your main responsibilities.
I mainly work as a Lecturer in Neuroscience in the Institute of Neurology. I work with mathematical models of information processing in the brain which are relevant to psychiatric problems. For example, I have led the development of models of self-esteem as applied to social anxiety and worked with models of trust and paranoia. Of course, all these builds of the wonderful work of others! I also supervise and teach students, especially at Masters and PhD level. I have some management and pastoral roles, e.g. co-leading a mentoring scheme and consulting to the Mental Health First Aider team.
I also work for the Neuropsychiatry department of the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, specialising in Functional Neurological Disorders (FND). FND is a group of conditions, for example involving seizures, weakness, but also anxiety or loss of memory. The psychotherapies that I specialise in help these patients, but that does not mean that FND is caused by ‘psychological damage’, nor by ‘brain damage’.
What is your understanding of equality, diversity, and inclusion?
There is a basic level of understanding of equality, diversity and inclusion that comes from the lived experience of all of us during our youth, in our families, our schools. We had to live with others, like siblings older and stronger than us, or kids who bullied others. Indeed, the roots of understanding fairness are found in infancy! We can all remember how young people suffer when families or communities neglect their needs, when some are deprived of their fair share, when youngsters are ridiculed or excluded because of being less quick-witted, plainer, smaller, bigger, unusual. This is the half the journey – of understanding Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI).
So, my first level of understanding of EDI is the personal one. Is my co-worker, my student, even my senior experiencing barriers due to being different, or social exclusion, or inequality? Is this about where they are in life? What do they – we – make of such experiences of unfairness?
The second level of understanding is the sociopolitical one. It’s a complex, incomplete, always evolving understanding. E.g., I learnt about Nazi racism at school, but my understanding of how antisemitism feels is now very different from what it was then.
Tell us about a challenge you faced related to diversity and inclusion and how you overcame it. What did you learn from that experience?
The most difficult challenge is one I experience as a scientist and medical doctor. Medics and scientists are obsessed about how to find the truth about what makes people suffer, and the truth about how to fix it. This ‘how truth’ is the biggest challenge when it comes to EDI, because EDI cannot do without privileging the lived experience of the powerless, the disadvantaged; but it cannot do without asking what the true meaning of self-report is, and what the true causes of the experience of discrimination are. Even the disadvantaged, like all humans, can be very wrong.
My most difficult challenge is, therefore, to give full voice to the disadvantaged, while also putting their claims about how the world works to the test. In technical terms when it comes to social injustice, we are far from a satisfactory synthesis of critical theory and quantitative science.
What is the best thing about working at the Institute of Neurology?
My best experience at the Institute of Neurology (IoN) has been working to bring together my scientific (computational neuroscience) and clinical (mental health) self. My long experience with mental health combines with my work experience as a scientist to promote the mental health of my colleagues and students, the best interests of my patients, and at the same time to advocate about research priorities closer and more relevant to mental health stakeholders. At IoN, I can shout that ‘Diverse Brains Research Matters’.
The 2023 Mental Health Awareness Week (MHAW) was an example of the rich opportunities we have in the IoN, to link up mental health and academic life. I had the privilege to work with the wonderful MHAW team to organise and enjoy academic events (for example, an LGBTQ mental health lecture by Dr. Gemma Lewis), experiential and taster events (nature, mindfulness, personal experience of mental ill health) and awareness of men’s mental health and suicide. MHAW has moved from awareness of the basics to communicating the most wonderful developments in mental health at the IoN.
Who has inspired your career?
My Physics teacher at school, a certain Mr. Papachristou. There’s nothing on earth which is more beautiful than Physics. The fundamental unity that it brings to different facets of the world – for example, that Energy in the inanimate world is fundamentally similar to Value in brain networks – fills me with awe. I would not be able to love what I’m doing now, i.e. computational psychiatry, without physics. Mr. Papachristou was the kind of inspiration that I want to be for my own students. As an adult, my career was inspired by Walter Freeman (modelling oscillatory neural networks), the psychoanalyst researchers Joseph Weiss and Peter Fonagy, my PhD supervisory team Richard Bentall, Peter Dayan and Wael El-Deredy, and more recently Karl Friston and several wonderful IoN peers and students.