About me

I am a 41 year old man living in the north-east of England. I started out by doing a PhD in molecular biosciences in Cardiff followed by postdoctoral research up here in the NE. After navigating research for 10 years I recently made the leap out of the lab into research administration and support.

There’s so many things I could write this blog about: the research sector, running, University professional support (alas, unlikely to get me many followers), but what I really want is to use this as a platform to talk about my experience of mental health problems. I know this is a kind of a trend at the minute – every other person seems to be doing it, but I just think that there isn’t much out there from people of my demographic (not that I really have one) – middle-aged, straight, British men (not that any of this doesn’t apply to people who don’t fit that rather “traditional” viewpoint). It’s a widely publicised issue that men don’t tend to open up about mental health problems. This leads to the highest rates of death from suicide of any group. I myself have been there on and off since I was 15 years old and have attempted suicide several times over that period. It’s a sad fact that, even amongst the most educated sectors of society, men in general just will not talk frankly with each other about feelings and emotion. I’ve lost count of the number of conversations that I haven’t had with friends and colleagues who have cut me dead or changed the subject when the topic of mental health has come up. It seems that the only way to unload as a man is to create something like this blog (anonymously I’m afraid) as a way of “opening up”.

I specifically have experience of depression, anxiety, ulcerative colitis (UC) and have recently been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). I hope that any insight that I can give from my experiences can be of interest to anyone reading this. If you are interested, I have a Twitter (see embedded link) – where I very occasionally put random musings.