Animated and Excitable

I no longer participate in your academic research projects, if I can help it, and I am starting to blog about some of the many reasons why.  I haven't always been so jaded. I used to have a lot of sympathy for academics and clinicians looking to social media platforms for help to complete their projects, especially for students and early career researchers because, well, why not? Everyone needs to start somewhere; it's nice to encourage people and sometimes your research projects have seemed quite relevant and interesting. But I can't do it anymore. I can't bear to complete even one more clunky questionnaire. I don't want to be patronised by one more pompous professor. I don't want to be given one more 'opportunity' to have my say or to share my story, only later to suffer the indignity of seeing your own improbable ideas 'emerge' from my data.  It's over. I'm done. I have no more stories left to tell you, except this one. And I'm...

🔒 This password-protected post may not be used or reproduced for teaching, research or publication. A few weeks ago, I was following a conversation on twitter about whether depression is an illness, and I remember thinking that, while it's certainly true for me that depression seems like an illness, I couldn't clearly remember what it actually felt like to be very depressed. I could still remember what I looked like in the mirror at my grey-faced worst, and I could recall some of the things I could and couldn't do when I was depressed, but I found it hard to bring to mind what it felt like, physically or emotionally. But, this week, a dark cloud that had been hovering for months has descended and I'm writing this now, at three in the afternoon on a Sunday, tapping the words onto a screen, with my head under the covers and tears running down my face. For reasons I don't want to go into here, I have deleted a whole trail of my posting history from social media...