This week we talked to Kaye Blegvad, author of the incredible “Dog Years: An illustrated Book About Mental Health” her experience of living with depression, including friendships, genetics and stigma. How did you come up with the idea of a naughty black dog to represent your depression? I…
Recently I attended the annual Behavior Genetics Association (BGA) meeting in Oslo. Having gone every year for the first decade or so of my career, since having children it has been a rarer pleasure, and I was delighted to be there. Before going, some of us had talked about writing…
This blog is a bit different from our usual pieces. It is a review of a new book called “Inside out parenting; how to build strong children from a core of self-esteem”. It is written by a colleague of ours Dr Holan Liang, who after motherhood turned her skills as…
I was recently chatting with an early career researcher in a colleague’s group, who had read some of the pieces on our blog about balancing different activities. He was particularly interested to hear my thoughts about saying no… So here they are.
As a developmental psychologist I’m pretty aware of the signs and symptoms of depression and anxiety. However, our school recently ran an evening lecture on supporting well-being in our children and It really made me think about things in a different way – and in particular, to consider how anxiety…
One of the things most academics get little if any training on is how to build a well-functioning team. Yet this is also without doubt one of the most important aspects of a career in academia. Here I share some ideas on what I have found works for me over…
I found the transition from Early Career Researcher (ECR) to Principal Investigator (PI) much harder than I expected, and not just for the obvious reasons. One clear distinction between these stages is grant income, and I, like most academics have had difficulty building up a solid stream of grant funding….
Do the words we use to talk about different psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety and schizophrenia, have an influence on how we view them? Does the fact that we all have days when we are anxious make us feel that anxiety disorders are less severe, less important than other disorders…
One of the hardest things about academia is that the activity that is most important, is most likely to get put the bottom of the list by other apparently more critical or urgent tasks. I am talking about writing. As a mum of three young boys, my working week is…
With 3 children (now aged 8, 10 and 12), a flexible but full-time job as an academic, and a host of activities I enjoy outside of work (most notably singing in a lot of concerts), one of the things I most often get asked about is how I balance these different interests…
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