MODERN Mind

Blog exploring mental health research, the research I am involved in, and snippets from the world of academia, psychiatry and health innovation

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“Design ways to include empathy, imperfection and human qualities in how we collect, process, analyse and display data”

Giorgia Lupia - How we can find ourselves in data TED Talk

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Visualising the quantitative

Becoming more accustomed to big data and how much quantitative data is generated to answer a few big research questions, I naturally came across data visualisation whilst completing my research paper. Being a creative person, this immediately stood out, and for lack of other words, I tentatively but obsessively stepped into the world of Tableau - a leading visualisation software.

A ted talk by Giorgia Lupi was a persuasive, well articulated introduction into data visualisation. Whilst I later came across various articles and TED Talks discussing medical data specifically, Lupi’s talk discussed the need to put humanity and contextualised narratives into scientific data (in any discipline) in order to make it accessible to a wider audience - this is the first time I had considered data in this way. She wants her audience to consider data humanism:

All types of data could be the beginning of the conversation, and not the end. Data alone will never give us the solution...we failed to include the right amount of context to represent reality - a nuanced complicated and intricate reality.

It was impossible not to consider the large amounts of data I had collected for my neuropsychiatry paper - data on diagnoses/comorbidities, hallucination phenomenology, referral outcomes and demographics...there are a lot of narratives that can be told with these collected ingredients, and an academic paper isn't the only methodological option to present this. In fact, the research question I addressed is multifaceted and fairly complex - it may not be easily understood by a non academic audience, and could potentially benefit from being visualised.

Based on this, I am currently working on creating understandable data visualisation with my data sets - beginning with simple designs that potray the fundamental narratives of my data. Tableau is a difficult software to master, which has led to me enrolling on two data visualisation MOOC run my Udemy and Coursera.

Watch this space as I develop my skills in building effective data visualisation, telling what should be a captivating narrative on neuropsychiatric hallucinations.

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It is always hard to return to regular blog posting after a hiatus - especially when the break is unplanned and simply due to not having enough time commit to it. Well after submitting my MSc neuropsychiatry research, changing jobs and moving on to a new challenge in student mental health, I am planning to get back on track with this blog. Above is my research presentation, created as part of my final assessment alongside the research paper and a blog post (which I will post in the coming weeks). The presentation was created on Prezi, which enables an engaging and non-traditional way to present quite complex concepts and information. Enjoy!

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With two days until the research project deadline, I feel as though the final polished product is nearly in grasp!

Throughout the process, I have been relying heavily on Trello, a project planning tool to help with keeping track of complex projects that are all in various stages of completion. I started using this around the same time that I started this blog, and as I just move through the most stressful period of writing, I can say with confidence that this has been invaluable. 

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Just returned from some time spent in Canada for a family occasion! Spent most of my time focused on my research project - time is ticking! There is an amazing exhibition in the centre of Toronto called #noblankbrains. It's comprised of various brain sculptures from local artists, with the aim of raising awareness for alzheimer's and dementia, and the result is beautiful.

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Academic staff usually have mixed responses to my mandatory mental health in academia training but this time round, there was some great discussion. 

Would love to hear thoughts on how universities deal with increasing mental health problems within the student population!

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Unearthing a research gem

So of course, the internet is a gift that keeps on giving, and when it comes to conducting research and wanting to do a good job, there is so much available online from researchers and postgrad students that have advice to share with the rest of us.

Looking for quality resources is a worthwhile task, even with limited time, although for me it is also a mischievous means of ‘constructive procrastination’. This sounds counter intuitive - it is when I procrastinate on the important tasks I need to do that lead to actual progress, and spend the time searching for resources instructing me on how to do it better. It can be helpful, but doesn't change the fact that I have more pressing tasks that need my attention.

A recent find from one of those instances is below; a medium feed on ‘writing for research’.  Written by a skilled and experienced professor from LSE, it has lots of great articles on how to creatively approach research and as its a feed, it is often updated with new articles.

Two of my favourites are How to write a blogpost from your journal article, something that I actually need to do for my postgrad research, and Becoming more creative in academic work, which covers the original topic I was procrastinating searching for that led me this feed.

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Thoughts pop up spontaneously, are unbidden and difficult to control. This is the normal experience of all of us; as our minds wander, we encounter unbidden thoughts, conversations we just had or are planning to have, and we can often “hear” the tonal quality of the other person’s voice. What converts this normal experience into a hallucination may be the sense that the experience is not self-generated.

Ford, J.M., 2017. Current Approaches to Studying Hallucinations: Overcoming Barriers to Progress. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 43(1), pp.21–23.

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Immersion in the study of Hallucinations at the British Library

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A call to action on student retention

Later this month, I will be speaking at a conference called:

Mental Health at University - Support for Students and Staff, Partnerships with the NHS and Creating a Whole-Institution Approach

This event is greatly timed after the recent Guardian blog post on how mental health difficulties are affecting student retention in universities. The data provided gives the shock-factor and puts this problem into a much bigger context; a multidisciplinary and multidimensional perspective is needed to help provide adequate support for students with mental health difficulties pursuing a degree. A response was written by UMHAN UK, the national organisation for all specialist mental health professionals (advisers and mentors) working in higher education.

I very recently took on the committee role of Mental Health Adviser Lead for UMHAN, and this will be my first speaking commitment since taking on the role. It has been such a busy month and summer term, that I have yet to write a post on this news and the future exciting projects that come with it. I will do as soon as possible!

The agenda for the event is excellent - the focus will be on heading towards a more collaborative way of supporting student mental health, and where possible, looking at innovating ways to improve the sector in response to its needs.

To book a place at this event, click here.

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Taking your phenomenological word for it

Of the many hurdles in Psychiatry, particularly in studying complicated symptoms like hallucinations, a specific problem linked to phenomenology stands out. This was highlighted after its reference in a paper published in 1999, which was reiterated in a paper by Ford, published this year.

Weiss and Heckers (1999) describe that for every mental state, there is an associated neural state. This provides evidence for the need to seek ‘accurate descriptions’ of a patient's mental state; it's suggested that if each slight change in an individual's psychiatric experience or state represents a different neurological explanation, we require reliable descriptions to help inform our understanding of this.

Ford (2017) recently published a paper focusing on the barriers we need to overcome in order to make progress on studying hallucinations. She highlighted equally as clearly that understanding the neurobiological basis of hallucinations is affected by the difficulty in assessing phenomenological experiences. Whereas Weiss and Heckers call for an emphasis on accuracy when a patient describes their experience, Ford raises a key point around asking patients to perform what is basically a ‘meta-cognitive’ task: that is, asking them, and in fact anyone, to describe the nature and/or content of their own thoughts. These thoughts could take the form of ideas or words...they could include structured sentences or be incoherent...they could have real meaning or not at all. The overarching message is, patients may not have the understanding or vocabulary needed to describe such an inner experience.

This is profound, and considering this dilemma is one which has spanned research of 18 years, it will not be an easily solved puzzle.

Despite this, the conclusion of Weiss and Heckers paper still holds weight. A combination of traditional phenomenology and the modern increasing power of neuroimaging could help in synchronising our understanding of psychiatry's biggest contributors: the psychological vs. neural states of the mind.

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Educational distress: procrastination in HE and counselling in high school

At this stage of the year, a main focus of my time at work is seeing final year students through their last deadlines, and evidencing the last minute extension requests of first and second years undergrads. The procrastination of summer term assessments is overwhelming in this population, worsened by the unknowing ‘next step’; going into the real working world or facing a long, empty summer. 

A constant battle with mental health advisers and support provisions in higher education is encouraging students to seek support earlier in the academic year - early intervention is obviously paramount, but there is a discrepancy (to over generalise), as students are less inclined to use help-seeking behaviours when facing mental health difficulties. 

Seeking help for mental health needs has been found to be linked to procrastination and high stress levels in a recent study: the more procrastination, the more stress experienced. This worsens a student's mental health, which lessons the inclination to seek help. 

The result is that the number of students that seek help from their university mental health service is much less than the number of students who actually need it.

This study was interesting as it highlights that under significant stress, decision making is affected and can also lead to a disparity between needing help and getting it - a blog post by Psychology Today also emphasised this point. The conundrum faced when supporting students is, if a student's delay in seeking help for their mental health is due to their innate or stress-induced procrastination, how do we reach them earlier?

There is a recent emphasis on early intervention at a secondary school level, which is at the forefront of my mind at the moment as I am currently involved in an RCT, collecting data that looks at the effects of therapeutic treatment on school students in secondary schools across London. The study is looking at the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of school based humanistic counselling, and is one of the largest controlled trials in this topic. 

My role as an assessor is to check for potential participants eligibility, go through the clinical measures with participants and randomise them to either counselling or the student's  treatment as usual, which in this case, is the school's pastoral care. As a double-blinded tester, I also carry out mid- and end-point tests to record new scores on clinical measures.

More students than I expected were extremely keen on the idea of counselling in their school, often highlighting their perceived importance of ‘having someone to talk to about their problems’. It seems that having this kind of intervention introduced at this age could play a key role in the potential willingness to use therapy in subsequent academic environments - cementing its place in a student's coping toolbox.

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Should patients be at the start of a ‘big data cycle’?

Although it may look complex, Stewart and Davis have highlighted that the process is simple - data resources such as electronic health records (EHR) shape the research questions we are able to explore. 

To broaden the scope, this big data could be collected with our research priorities in mind.

And how do we do this? 

We develop our research priorities to center around what benefits our clinical practice. 

And where do we start?

With the patients!