neuroscience

Nature versus nurture revisited

This week I have been reading the Power Threat Meaning Framework published by Lucy Johnstone and colleagues. This document is an attempt to challenge the dominant medical model in adult mental health with a more functional framework for formulation, based on the person’s experiences and circumstances. It is an interesting and challenging read, because it tries to cover the political and philosophical context of challenging the medical model, and input from service recipients about the benefits and challenges of different ways of conceptualising their difficulties. But at the core it rests on a pretty simple and (I’d like to think by now) well-established concept – that the adverse childhood experiences a person has prime them to use survival strategies that make them vulnerable to difficulties later in their life. Those early templates for dysfunctional relationships and the sense of self created by inconsistency and maltreatment also mean that people are more likely than others without those experiences to go on to have other relationships and experiences that are traumatic/harmful as they grow older, which compound the strategies and narratives with which they navigate adult life. The survival strategies which made perfect sense in response to their experiences at the time, have a lasting impact on the brain, body and behaviour. They change the way the person perceives themselves, understands the world and relates to others, and go on to have detrimental effects long after the initial trigger is gone.

As I have mentioned in previous blogs, a person exposed to high levels of trauma or adversity, especially if lacking protective relationships, will become more vigilant to signs of threat, less able to focus on the tasks that help us attain educationally and in the workplace. Where their early relationships have been dysfunctional, they are likely to struggle with forming healthy later relationships, and are more likely to express needs indirectly and in ways that cannot be ignored – including in ways that lead to negative societal responses, such as rejection and/or pejorative judgements by others, involvement with mental health services (and being given diagnostic labels), involvement of criminal justice systems. This leads to an increased risk of socioeconomic adversity, lower social connectedness and a greater chance of a range of adverse outcomes.

In short, thinking about adversity in both the person’s childhood experiences and current context, not only gives us insight into the biggest variable in personality disorder, attachment disorder and other specific conditions. It also explains a lot of the risk factors for wider issues with physical and mental health, challenging behaviour, addiction, violence, crime, homelessness, harmful relationship patterns and helps determine our sense of self and our ability to make healthy social connections. Adverse childhood experiences increase the risk of a very wide range of  physical and mental health problems, for a range of reasons including lower self-care and poor lifestyle choices, a lack of self-monitoring and seeking of appropriate care in the early stages of problems, and what seems to be increased propensity for ill-health mediated by the stress messengers in the body.

I’d go so far as to say that getting child protection and parenting right is the biggest task facing humanity, and the area where I believe we can make most difference for the future – hence dedicating my career to working with the kids who have experienced the most adversity and trying to improve their outcomes. But as I have explained above, it doesn’t just stop there, because the ripples of that early adversity continue to spread out into the lifespan for many people, forming a barrier to the protective factors of education and employment, establishing social networks, and the means to access pleasurable activities. This can then be compounded by financial hardship, hostile systems (such as benefits sanctions and fitness for work tests) and lack of access to resources (including finding it hard to identify and navigate access to social care and health services, to know and assert their rights, or appeal against decisions made by organisations). So the same people who experienced chronic developmental trauma and have unresolved psychological consequences from that are often struggling with their personal relationships, as well as practical issues like debt, homelessness and crime. In that context, dysfunctional coping strategies like substance abuse or presenting with challenging behaviour or mental health symptoms make more sense as attempts to obtain escape or safety.

There are also vulnerability factors such as being in a disempowered/minority population group, that also bring compounding adversity such as sexism, racism/xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, religious intolerance, etc. These can impact at all life stages. For example, a child with physical or intellectual disabilities is more likely to be the victim of abuse, to experience bullying, and (perhaps increasingly as they grow up) to struggle to access community resources, financial independence or a supportive social network. For people from cultures outside of the majority in the country where they live, there can be language and cultural barriers, prejudice and political/economic challenges, as well as exposure to poverty, war, terrorism and other threats to survival that are outside the experience of the majority of lifetime residents of developed nations. Certain population groups such as asylum seekers find things particularly challenging in terms of finding safety, housing, financial security, after already experiencing multiple traumas in the country they have left and during their journey to find safety. Each individual is unique and their story, current situation and past experiences are a huge influence on the way that they experience and interact with the world.

As Johann Hari rightly points out in his recent article to promote his new book, everybody knows that our experiences, relationships and living conditions impact on our state of mind. If a loved one such as a partner or child dies, you are likely to be sad (and perhaps angry, or relieved if they were suffering, or many other complex feelings). Likewise, if you are given a warning of impending missile attack most people would feel anxious, and become hypervigilant for signs of threat. Therefore, most people would not think of grief after a bereavement or loss, or anxiety when in an acutely threatening situation as pathological. Which makes it somewhat curious that the medical model has been applied to mental health in the way that it has. Why has it become that depression or anxiety or even addiction is seen as a disease, a neurochemical imbalance that needs to be treated with medication?

Perhaps the advances of modern science studying genes and neurochemicals made us think of ourselves as complex biological machines that could be understood at a physical level. Perhaps there is wishful thinking about biological models leading to potential cures. Perhaps the fact that brain injuries, tumours, dementias and neurodevelopmental conditions can make an impact on our feelings and behaviours made it seem that all feelings and behaviours could be attributed to brain changes. Perhaps the idea of massive numbers of people suffering is too distressing to think about and it is a common defence to depersonalise that, and to other the person suffering. Perhaps the narrative of mental illness has sustained the power and income of the medical profession as experts and gatekeepers to such treatments. Perhaps it was clever marketing propaganda by the pharmaceutical companies to sell more of their products. Perhaps it was so persuasive because it fits with the neoconservative narrative to think of individual failure rather than individuals showing the symptoms of societal problems (and therefore our collective responsibility to solve these problems and look after each other, rather than just thinking of ourselves). Or, more likely, it was a combination of these and many other factors.

Of course, we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. There are certainly people for whom psychiatric medication has made a massive positive difference. People who feel more able to concentrate and gain attainments when on stimulant medication, or who feel less hopeless, anxious or angry when on antidepressants, or people whose distress, confusion or aggression is reduced by neuroleptics. But we can’t work backwards from positive impact to considering that proof of a neurochemical deficit or imbalance. After all, the evidence for analgesics is very strong, but I doubt anybody thinks a headache is a symptom of lack of aspirin! We need good unbiased data to understand what is going on, not the cherry-picked examples that currently make it into the public domain. Alltrials is a good step in the right direction in this regard, but there is still bias in what research gets funded and what gets published, with bias towards the sexier topics of new technology, genetics, scans and hard science, and less towards the sociopolitical aspects affecting individual and population wellbeing.

I’m not saying that nature isn’t important. It seems likely that various medical/biological factors do mediate the impact of experience. For example, some conditions like autism, intellectual disability, and dementia do appear to have predominantly biological causes, whilst having impact on thoughts and feelings. Brain injuries and diseases can affect personality, mood and behaviour, and various hormonal and physical conditions can affect brain function and impact on mental health. There seem to be genetic differences (eg to telomeres) that make some individuals more resilient to adverse experiences than others. And some twin studies show genetic factors influence the incidence of conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, although again the epigenetic factors seem important, it is not clear whether the biological differences are a cause or a symptom of the condition, and the role of biology is not large enough on its own to explain who gets these conditions without also considering experience. Like most of these debates, the answer isn’t going to be one extreme or the other. I am glad that the pendulum has swung back towards considering nurture and experience more, and not exclusively the high tech science of genes, psychopharmacology and brain scans. It seems likely that who we are and how we feel and function in the world is affected by both our biology, our experiences, our circumstances and our relationships both now and in the past.

So, whilst Christine Courtois and Bessel van der Kolk’s efforts in the adult and child spheres respectively to get the impact of complex and multiple traumas and damaged attachment relationships recognised as a better way to understand attachment disorder and personality disorder than a neurobiological disease model (and their challenges to the DSM) have not yet been successful, I am heartened if this way of understanding the impact of experience is gaining more credibility in the field. I think the power-threat-meaning framework might be helpful for some clients, and the questions that they advise asking are certainly good way of starting a clinical assessment.

“What is your story?” Specifically:

1) What has happened to you? (How is Power operating in your life?)

2) How did it affect you? (What kind of Threats does this pose?)

3) What sense did you make of it? (What is the Meaning of these situations and experiences to you?)

4) What did you have to do to survive? (What kinds of Threat Response are you using?) and are you still doing this?

5) What are your strengths? (What access to Power resources do you have?)

It certainly resonates for me, and I wrote about a lot of this stuff in my book, Attachment in Common Sense and Doodles in relation to children who don’t live with their family of origin. I wanted to make information about attachment and the impact of trauma more accessible to carers, legal professionals and social care staff and other profesionals in the child’s network. It isn’t novel content, as it was based on themes that had been researched, written and spoken about by others before me, but I have tried to present it in an accessible and engaging way.

I am heartened that in the last few weeks the idea of experiences and nurture being important in mental health seems to be reaching the public consciousness. It seems to be being promoted more vocally by a lot more clinical psychologists, and to have reached me in various different ways. I’m glad if it is gaining traction and a wider audience, but it might be that’s wishful thinking on my part, and merely a product of my unrepresentative sampling. In light of how horrible a lot of the news is since the Brexit vote, Tory election win and Trump victory, I’m trying to be more selective about what I read and the social media I engage with, so it could be I’m in more of a bubble of like minded thinkers these days, and that is the explanation for hearing more about models that fit my own thinking!

Video games and violence

The relationship between playing video games and violent behaviour isn’t as black and white as most people assume. There is neither the causal evidence that would support the tabloid alarmist headlines that blame Mass Effect, Call of Duty or World of Warcraft for mass shootings nor the evidence that video games are entirely benign.

We know from research that trauma has a significant and lasting impact on the brain, a pattern widely accepted across numerous studies. For those who have already been traumatised and/or have maladaptive social skills, that increase in arousal sensitises the brain to further threat. It also makes them more likely to respond with anger or fear to a neutral stimulus, perceiving it as a threat. We also know from research that when the threat sensor in the the brain is activated (the amygdala and limbic system) the prefrontal cortex pretty much goes off-line until the threat is resolved. That significantly reduces the person’s capacity for empathy, complex reasoning, social skills and ability to be aware of the impact of your own behaviour on others. This effect is amplified where there is an absence of healthy real life relationships and/or physical exercise (which produce oxytocin, and help to mediate cortisol and adrenaline). And of course we know that people who have raised arousal levels deliberately seek out experiences that match or use that level of arousal, so they are often much more interested in violence and gore than their peers.

That’s all well established neuroscience. We also know that these brain changes can be perpetuated by exposure to violence or the representations of violence in our daily lives or the media we consume. Exposure to violence is an unseen public health epidemic. We also know that this pattern of being over-sensitised to threat and in a heightened state of physiological arousal gets ‘stuck’ for a proportion of maltreated children, particularly where there is an absence of secure attachment figures, and that ‘acting out’ with violence in this group is much more common. The neurological basis for moral reasoning and antisocial behaviour implicate similar brain regions. Similar areas are also implicated in violent behaviour when this is related to a lesion, dementia or atrophy.

Having reviewed the evidence, I think it is clear that video games do not in themselves cause violence. But playing violent video games increases physiological arousal levels (readiness for fight or flight) just as we know is the case for exposure to real life conflict such as domestic violence within the family. This can create a lasting effect which shows in MRI scans. But the effect is quite specific. We know that MRI studies show differences in the brain when people play violent video games but not when the video games do not involve aggression. We also know that it is dependent on the social acceptability of the behaviours chosen in the game.

It seems likely that watching films or TV can similarly cause an increase in physiological arousal, but this would only be the case with a high level of violence/action/drama, something which is not normally sustained for hours upon end the way it can be in some video games. Also, video games are more immersive because they are interactive, and I suspect you don’t become as habituated to them because of the fact that there is variation on every presentation of the stimulus, whereas rewatching the same film gets dull and predictable and no longer gives us that visceral response. Thus I think that it is reasonable to consider violent video games as a particularly concentrated form of this stimulus.

It seems from the meta-analysis that a small scale shift towards higher readiness for fight or flight and lower empathy/insight/reasoning is happening all over the place amongst people who play a large volume of violent video games with the result of small but measureable increases in the risk of aggressive behaviour. I’d extrapolate from this to what is currently happening with the threats and harrassments towards women and minorities in the gaming space, to suggest that this combination of lack of nurture and exposure to violent material may be contributing to the lack of empathy and insight into the impact of their behaviour amongst people involved. But I suspect that the impact of video game play on real life aggressive behaviour is only a significant issue at the individual level where this is combined with the presence of trauma and/or the absence of nurture. After all, the move from enacting violence in a video game to doing so over social media is much smaller than the move to take actions outside of home technology where you can see the impact on the recipient.

It is only in the extreme examples, where you combine violent video game use with people with horrendous histories, a lack of secure attachment relationships and/or who have entrenched extreme views (eg about women), nothing else in their lives to constrain them, an echo-chamber of harmful views including incitement to violence, and perhaps mental health problems on top that the mixture becomes truly toxic. Amongst this group a small proportion take the threat-talk that is so prolific online and in video game spaces into horrific real life actions.

I can’t see that being so different to the proposed mechanism for lots of other phenomena. As with the relationship between cannabis use and psychosis, or alcohol consumption and suicide, the former is something most people consume without harm so it cannot be causal in isolation, but for a much smaller number of  people with increased vulnerability (genetic, epigenetic or experiential) it can be a contributory factor towards a more negative outcome.

High on scare, low on science: a tale of charity, politics and dodgy neuroscience

In 2011 when I took a voluntary redundancy from the NHS I was asked to help set up a parenting charity* focusing on the period from conception to age 2. I agreed to be the founding Clinical Director and to help them set policies, sort out pathways of treatment and recruit staff. I worked for them one day per week. After less than six months it was clear that there was a divergence between what I felt was most clinically helpful to say about supporting parents in this critical period and the primary goals of the charity**. This was particularly evident in what was being said to promote the launch event of the charity. The title of the launch conference was the dramatic and pessimistic pronouncement, “Two is too late”. This title was cast in stone despite my repeated protests that parents would feel blamed and might think that there was nothing they could do beyond the age of two if they had not had a perfect attachment relationship before this point (when the evidence suggests that there are in fact many effective strategies for enhancing attachment relationships beyond this point, and many therapies for helping children and even adults to learn to emotionally regulate, mentalise and have successful relationships, even where there has been poor attachments, neglect or maltreatment).

The media were given soundbites to promote the event that suggested a baby is born with only one third of their brain active, and the rest relies on the quality of parenting received to grow. The news coverage in the Telegraph*** said that “a failure to help troubled mothers bond with their babies can stunt the development of the children’s brains”. The BBC coverage*** stated “a growing body of research suggests that the amount a baby is loved in the first few months of its life determines to a large extent its future chances” (when love and the quality of the attachment a parent is able to provide are quite different things, the most critical period is usually cited as 6-18 months of age, and the change in prognosis is most impacted by significant maltreatment).

Although our tiny pilot had kept 5 children out of 6 at home with parents successfully, despite them being referred on the edge of care, I had some misgivings about the marketing messages. We had feedback from service users and user groups that they felt stigmatised by some of these messages, but the organisation was unwilling to hear that. I am passionate about the value of improving attachment relationships and I had written a brief literature review on the impact of poor early care to ensure that the project was informed by the evidence. I was also writing a book about attachment and the impact of maltreatment, but I couldn’t match my views up with the politics of the organisation. I felt that to stay would conflict with my professional ethics, and my desire to honour the evidence base and respect the people who needed the service, so I quit before the launch. My colleague decided it would be unsafe to practise in my absence and left at the same time, leaving the charity with no clinical staff. Nonetheless, they decided to make a very big launch event, that I could only describe as one third professional conference, one third stately home wedding and one third party political broadcast for the blue party. It sold 500 tickets to health professionals and other interested parties, and I went along to see the show.

The speakers included a Conservative Peer, Ian Duncan Smith and Andrea Leadsom, along with Dr Amanda Jones (who shared a case study of parent infant psychotherapy). The fantastic Camilla Batmanghelidjh was also present (and made a good job of challenging the lack of empathy from politicians for the people they serve and quipping that this reflects their avoidant attachment styles). I had invited Dr Michael Galbraith (a Consultant Clinical Psychologist who has run community children’s services in Liverpool for many years) to talk about the health economics of early intervention. He did so persuasively and he also challenged the politics that came before his talk (with genuine zeal, as his entire service had been closed in a cost-saving ‘reorganisation’ a few weeks prior to the conference). But the biggest draw was that Baroness Susan Greenfield was invited to talk about the epigenetic effects of early attachment experience on the infant’s developing brain****. As I had not heard of her work prior to this event I was intrigued.

The talk that Prof Greenfield gave was baffling from the off. It massively overran her time-slot, and the program was rearranged to give her a second slot in the afternoon to complete what she wanted to say. My recollection was of a chaotic set of shock images and headlines, with provocative statements which appeared to contradict my knowledge of the literature, despite the fact she claimed they were scientifically founded in hard neuroscience research. Thankfully the pdf of the PowerPoint she used was circulated after the event, so you can see the content for yourself (zip file to download here).

Her title was “The mind of the 21st Century Infant” overlaid on a stock photograph of a baby using a computer. She immediately moved on to dramatic images of a youth celebrating in front of a fire during the recent riots, blaming the riots on the lack of attachment young people have grown up with, which she said had been replaced by technology. She then showed scary images of “artificial intelligence” before trying to define the mind. Then she made a knight’s move to demonstrate that “environment trumps genes” through a single study of rats given genes that cause Huntingdon’s Chorea which had less symptoms if they lived in a more stimulating environment. Then back to human babies, and images of how neurones proliferate during the first 2 years of life. Then a study showing that the Hippocampi of taxi drivers are enhanced, and then some blobs designed to indicate that mental practise of piano also activates the brain like physical practise. Then back to rats, showing more neural connections in a richer environment than when rats are isolated in boring cages. Then a description of how the mind shifts during development, from sensory processing to cognitive experience and gives greater meaning over time, with the view this is driven by experience.

She then claimed the mind might be “changing in unprecedented ways” due to interaction with technology, and showed alarming headlines circled in red, and book titles reflecting her view that internet use is changing our brains.

Prof Greenfield then showed a study counting children’s hours of screen time reported by parents, according to the child’s age. The source cited turns out to be a report saying that children have always used whatever media is current, mostly watching TV (which has been on for 7 hours per day since the 1970s) and although digital media is rapidly proliferating including learning toys, music and phones, total media use by white children had only increased by 38 minutes between 2004 and 2010, though it was more prevalent in low income families and had increased more in BME families. It states there is no evidence yet about how much is too much when it comes to media consumption but states that “media platforms by themselves are neutral; what matters most are the choices made by parents, educators, educational production companies, and other content providers in order to encourage a balanced pattern of consumption” using the metaphor of needing a balanced diet. This was not reflected in Prof Greenfield’s narrative about this amount of media being harmful, and it is unclear how she extrapolated the figures in her table.

Another leap, and we were onto how dopamine is the reward chemical and behind all addictive behaviour. Prof Greenfield said that it changes neural activity, inhibiting the frontal lobes. This is why children are becoming fat, sedentary and obsessed with technology. They are all addictions, and disrupt our frontal functioning. Then a leap to schizophrenia not having sufficient frontal lobe activity, and reverting the brain to sensory processing which is fragmented and without meaning. Another slide full of brains: The prefrontal cortex is not mature until your 20s. Then a claim that schizophrenia, gambling, over-use of screen technology and over-eating have a common pattern of prioritising our senses over reason, due to dopamine making us mindless rather than able to synthesise meaning. It felt very alarming to have schizophrenia and addictions linked to the same pathways as attachment difficulties and technology use. The implication was that parents could cause these difficulties in how they parented babies, or by allowing children to use digital media. These are claims for which I have never read any scientific evidence, despite being a clinician working in this area and trying to keep abreast of the research literature.

Another leap to social media and how it makes us “alone together”. Prof Greenfield told us how real communication is three dimensional, and little of the meaning is conveyed in the words, whilst 90% is in eye contact, body language, tone of voice, perhaps even touch and pheromones. But online we have only the words. According to her, this is why empathy has dropped over the last 30 years (another newspaper headline, not a scientific study, and with no reflection on the socio-political changes that might explain this). The lack of empathy required is why people with autism are so at home with technology and on the internet. People also have reduced identity, so they have to record their existence online. Prof Greenfield characterised the development of online communication as going from describing your cat sneezing on Blogger, to putting up a photo on Flickr, to a video on YouTube, to live Tweeting the action, saying that such activities reflected the author as a disconnected “nobody” who needs to prove they exist. She postulated that a rise in social networking is the cause of reduced empathy and people having a less robust identity, but it seems to me that even if these two things co-occur the direction of causality could be the reverse.

She then skipped on to the evils of video games, inserting a slide with MRI scans to show reduced listening when looking at something else, before blaming video games for the increase in methylphenidate prescriptions. Prof Greenfield claimed ADHD could be caused by video games because they lead to “fragmented attention, shorter attention span and increased recklessness” because they activate the dopamine system. Another headline in a red circle saying children who love video games have “brains like gamblers”. Then she showed us her own work bringing this together: a proposed cycle of how the intense stimulation and immediate feedback lead to high arousal and dopamine release, reward seeking behaviour and this makes brain changes which cause “conditions of childhood, schizophrenia, obesity” and a drive for sensation over cognition increasing the appeal of screen based stimulation in a continuous cycle. Again, I don’t believe any of these claims have appeared in peer reviewed publications or have any evidence to substantiate them, and even if there was evidence of co-occurrence the direction of causality is far from certain. There is however a growing body of evidence that some symptoms that could be interpreted as ADHD-like are caused by early trauma and maltreatment having an impact on neural development. To end that section, Prof Greenfield juxtaposed the “mindless” brain slide with a shot of World of Warcraft and mocked the lifestyle she believed was typical of those who play the game.

Then Prof Greenfield turned her attention to search engines, claiming they give fragmented information but nothing about meaning. By way of example she claimed that you can’t possibly understand what honour is from the search engine results produced by that term. Again, she claimed digital media is all fragmented content, lacking metaphor, depth and meaning. She strongly asserted that nobody could care about a character in a video game like you care about characters in a novel. Again, I would disagree with this. Like any media, video games are very diverse in style and quality and you pick ones that fit your taste, just as you would with a book or a film. If you don’t like violence, don’t pick a violent one. You don’t have the same expectations for the latest chick lit/flick as you do a weighty classic. Some examples are also of better quality than others, some focus on special effects over plot, others are low budget and whimsical. In my opinion if you feel immersed and the story is told well it feels like time well spent and you care about the characters and outcomes, whether the media is a video game, a book or a film. Its disingenuous of her to pick a random game she has probably never played and say nobody could care about a character in it as much as one in War and Peace.

Prof Greenfield then talked a little about the benefits for children of reading with a parent, and how we need to “make up our own minds”. She finished by advertising her books, and claiming that “mind change is the new climate change, the biggest issue facing us in the 21st century”. I’d share the comments on this claim raised here.

The whole felt to me like a mishmash of pseudoscience, headlines and speculation that didn’t even address the topic of the conference. Even if there was persuasive scientific research about the impact of using digital media (which I wasn’t persuaded), it wasn’t relevant to the conference as babies don’t use it. Her talk wasn’t about the importance of relationships between conception and two, which was what the conference was designed to highlight. She had come with a single agenda to sell. And it was clear that she was very much an outsider looking in when it comes to technology; judging it with minimal knowledge of social media, the internet, or video games.

As someone fairly immersed in that world, I could pick out numerous examples of violence in TV, film and video games, particularly violence against women and children. I might even be able to make a prima facie case that we are being desensitised to human suffering (and violence and sexism is being normalised). It is possible that the manufacturers of such products are buying into various ‘exciting’ neurochemical pathways that deal with arousal and reward (cortisol, adrenalin, dopamine), over those that deal with relationships, empathy, love and the ability to soothe (oxytocin and the work of the prefrontal cortex). But I think Susan Greenfield is making a huge correlation-causality error when she blames new media for people becoming isolated and lacking social skills and healthy relationships. I think there is much more evidence that real life experiences of maltreatment prime certain brain changes that make people more sensitive to later triggers and confer vulnerability for later mental health problems (see the work of Prof Eamon McCrory, for example) than that digital media is the cause of the problem.

I do think that if people lack templates for how to do real relationships in a healthy way, and haven’t learnt empathy and self-soothing skills, then these kind of media have a stronger attraction and a different effect on their brain, and can perpetuate rather than ameliorate this pattern. However, in the end I figure that people can always fill their time with something that disconnects them from others, or anaesthetises their pain. In other words, it isn’t the availability of the internet or video games that is the problem (any more than the presence of cheap alcohol, or drugs), it is the unhappiness and isolation that creates the void people want to fill with those things. And that has much more complex solutions, though it might generate less click-bait headlines.

* It is now nearly 3 years on, and I am confident that the clinicians recruited after I left have been able to establish a high quality service, so I would not wish to imply any concern about the services they provide.

** I felt, cynically perhaps, that there was a second agenda designed to promote the MP who founded the project and her political party which was of more importance than our clinical goals, although this was never explicit.

*** http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/mother-tongue/familyvideo/9273569/New-post-natal-depression-charity-will-address-huge-gap-in-provision.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-18117945

****The promotional flyer for the event said “We are honoured to announce that Baroness Susan Greenfield, Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at Oxford University, whose speciality is physiology of the brain will bring you up to date on the Science, Neuroscience and Epigenetics”.