Francesca Hirsch

[Dr Joanna Moncrieff @joannamoncrieff]

New research demonstrates the brain adapts to taking SSRIs by reducing its sensitivity to serotonin- a predictable effect (NB we do not know that serotonin makes you feel better, though- we know very little about its effects except that it's bad for sex).

[Dr Joanna Moncrieff @joannamoncrieff]

Even more tragically, people come looking for this label because they have been coached by decades of Pharma propaganda into thinking of their emotions as signs of illness.

[Malala Yousafzai @Malala]

The EU has invited Taliban officials to Brussels to discuss a migration deal — and today I am shaken and deeply disturbed by this.

This is the same Taliban that banned girls from secondary schools and forced them into marriage. The same Taliban that, earlier this month, arrested dozens of women in Herat for how they were dressed. The same Taliban that detains, beats and executes women who dare to speak out or break their rules.

Through its system of gender apartheid, the Taliban have erased women and girls from public life. Europe must not legitimise a regime responsible for one of the worst human rights crises in the world.

Any engagement with the Taliban must begin and end with the rights of Afghan women and girls.

[Katharine Birbalsingh @Miss_Snuffy]

Age 11 - feel free to block puberty.

But whatever you do, don’t go on social media until you are 16.

We have lost our bloody minds. 🤯😵‍💫

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

I've signed. This is an unethical experiment on children who can't give meaningful consent.
https://t.co/zHvzVIyq7g

[Roger Hallam @RogerHallamCS21]

Two things we know about AMOC:

1. In the coming years it will become more and more certain the greatest global catastrophe for humans since the last ice age is now locked in.

2. As it becomes more certain the elites and their far right foot soldiers will react with ever greater denial and make more cuts in research.

"If you tolerate this..."

https://t.co/dwuRc61W4J

[Dr Elisa Perego @elisaperego78]

We must be crystal clear about a few points. Long Covid is not a "poorly understood neuroimmune disorder" with no biomarkers. It is a widely studied biological medical condition. Pathology spanning basically all body systems is well documented, with damage in situ across organs

[Dr Joanna Moncrieff @joannamoncrieff]

Long-term use of antidepressants: little evidence of benefit and growing evidence of risks, including sexual dysfunction, emotional numbing, cognitive impairment, weight gain and increased risk of physical health problems in older adults.

[Dr Joanna Moncrieff @joannamoncrieff]

Blog on how psychiatry must stop misleading people that mental illness is caused by the brain. 'Taking psychiatric medication can be identity altering, for example making people feel different or damaged and reliant on medical expertise.'

[Naomi Fisher @naomicfisher]

This time of year, we put our 16-year-olds through a coming-of-age ritual. We make them sit in rows and write down things they have spent the last two years trying to memorise. We pit them against the clock, and prevent them from talking to each other. We tell them that this is the most important thing that they will ever do and their future life depends on it.

We don’t just do this once. For most of them, we make them sit in rows and write things down between twenty and thirty separate times in the space of about six weeks. Maths, English, History, French, Biology….Again and again, they have to keep at it. Each time, we tell them how important it is and they better not have an off-day or be ill.

Then we take their papers and we rank them. For some, the result will be accolades and glory. For others, failure and retakes.

We know for sure that this will always be true, because these rituals that we call exams are designed to rank them. A third will always fail. There would be no top grades if we didn’t also have the bottom. It isn’t possible for them all to pass.

And yet, every year, we talk as if this was not true. We pretend that it would be possible for them all to succeed, if only they and their teachers worked harder. Politicians talk about raising standards and accountability. We pretend that the problem is them not working hard enough, not an exam system designed so that hundreds of thousands fail. We blame them, not the exams.

For the truth is that we have a coming-of-age ritual for our teenagers which involves a third of them being told they haven’t met the grade, that they are not good enough. We launch them into adult life telling them that they will carry the stigma of not understanding quadratic equations for ever. We put them all through intense stress, and then when some of them cave in we say they have anxiety and send them to see a therapist.

And then we’re surprised when many of them say they just can’t carry on, that they don’t see the point. They don’t see potential in the future for themselves.

We need to take a step back and ask ourselves why we do this to our teenagers. For the problem isn’t our young people. It’s not their fault that a third of them fail and many are chronically stressed. The problem is what we make them do. We’ve designed a coming-of-age system with a very high cost in human misery.

Every year a new crop of teens will come of age, and despite their distress we just push them harder. We need to ask ourselves whether this is really the best we can do for our teenagers. We urgently need to think again.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. When they stop, something dangerous is nearby. When they continue, the coast is clear. This wiring predates primates. These kids are being sedated by the oldest safety signal in the mammalian nervous system.

The Max Planck Institute tested this in 2022 with 295 participants. Six minutes of birdsong reduced anxiety and paranoia with medium effect sizes. Six minutes of traffic noise increased depression by the same margin. The effect worked on people who had never left dense urban environments. Their bodies responded to a signal their conscious minds had never learned.

King's College London ran a larger study. 1,292 participants, real-time mood tracking through a phone app, 26,856 assessments over three years. Hearing or seeing birds improved mental wellbeing for up to eight hours afterward. The effect held for people diagnosed with depression. Trees, plants, and waterways didn't explain it. The birds themselves were the variable.

Now here's where Italy connects to Finland. 95% of parents in the Finnish city of Oulu let their babies nap outside starting at two weeks old. A 2008 study confirmed the children took longer, deeper naps outdoors. Parents reported letting them sleep in temperatures as low as -15°C. 66% said their babies were more active afterward compared to indoor naps. The practice started as a public health initiative from Nordic maternity clinics in the early 1900s and became cultural infrastructure.

The Italian kindergarten in this video is running the same program the Nordic countries have been running for a century. Outdoor naps, natural soundscapes, no white noise machines, no blackout curtains. Meanwhile, American kindergartens have been eliminating nap time entirely to squeeze in more instruction. A UMass study showed that children who skipped naps forgot 12% of what they learned that morning. The nap itself was the learning.

The irony is that the countries spending the least on sleep technology for children are producing the best sleep outcomes. No sound machines. No apps. Just birds.

[Johann Margulies @MarguliesJohann]

Cure ME/CFS and long COVID.

Tens of millions of people are lying in dark rooms right now, waiting for someone to crack a biology that medicine still barely understands.

With the right data, if AI can decode the mitochondrial dysfunction, the immune dysregulation, the broken energy metabolism, the autonomic collapse, it will have done something no institution has bothered to fund properly in years.

That would be historic.
Please save us.

[Dr Joanna Moncrieff @joannamoncrieff]

I can understand this is a difficult time for my psychiatry colleagues. I am sure they all have good intentions, but it turns out that the most widely used psychiatric treatment, antidepressants, causes significant iatrogenic effects (e.g. severe withdrawal reactions, PSSD), is not very effective (at best) and does not target an underlying biological abnormality after all. Although many people still seek a psychiatric diagnosis and a medical approach, increasing numbers highlight how misleading and disabling this approach can be. Their voices are starting to be heard, and we need to work with them to provide help for people who have been harmed by psychiatric treatment, and to prevent more harm being done. Trying to shoot the messenger doesn’t help anyone.

[Amanda Craig @AmandaPCraig]

Don’t look away. @camillalong is right.

[SK Tedeschi @skedeschi]

I'm a middle eastern historian. My own family were made refugees. And this is my honest view of the Nakba (“catastrophe”) - the displacement of around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs during the 1947–49 war surrounding the creation of Israel.

A thread. 🧵

[Will Hutton @williamnhutton]

A point of view you will not read in the Times, out to see only bad in Starmer as they hunt their prey.

[Dr Joanna Moncrieff @joannamoncrieff]

so well put!

[Zac Goldsmith @ZacGoldsmith]

This is the single most shocking testimony I have ever seen. 

Even more shocking is that so many people that I (& probably you) know decided on that day that the people behind this perversion deserved their active public support.
It is hard to have any faith in humanity when we see how easily large groups of people can be manipulated into supporting activities too cruel and disgusting even for the devil.
And not because they understand it, but simply because they see that as the fashionable position to take.

[Kosher @koshercockney]

This is extremely powerful.

On Mother’s Day (US date) - Members of the public, mothers, were invited to see what how Palestinian society acts as mothers and how they view their own children as Martyrs.

[Simon Schama @simon_schama]

This is deeply depressing