What is the blog about?

Psychiatric research, mental health, academia, food recipes, feminism and anything else running through my brain!

Who am I?

I’m a 33 year old senior post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford University. I’m interested in many aspects of psychiatry and mental health – the reason why some people experience serious mental health problems but others don’t, whether we can prevent mental health problems happening, how we can treat them when they do, why these treatments work (or don’t work), and whether we can predict which treatments will work for an individual person.

I’m also someone who loves food – reading about it, talking about it, spending too much on it, cooking it, photographing it, serving it up to other people, but most of all eating it! I like rich bold flavours, cosy unfussy food that you can’t wait to eat, recipes that you can adapt and don’t have to follow too closely.

Why this blog? 

For a while I’ve been considering science blogging, partly to address the many misconceptions about mental health, genetics, antidepressants, and psychiatry in general, partly to engage with interesting scientific ideas in my field, and partly just so that my non-scientist friends and family can get a better sense of what I do! But I’d also been considering shifting from just posting food pictures on my Instagram to sharing and discussing recipes, and there are various other scattered interests and ideas that I’d like to write about that don’t fit into “a science blog”.  And then I decided that there was something important and worthwhile about a blog that represents multiple facets of me, and maybe helps break down the alienating idea of “true scientists”.

And the name…?

I was NeonGolden27 on Twitter and still am on Instagram – Neon Golden is just the name of an album by The Notwist which I liked as a teenager and thought sounded pretty. I wanted some continuity with this username and also something which didn’t tie me down to a specific topic – but I wanted to sneak in the word brain to represent that many posts will be brain-related! So…. brainofneongolden!