How to remain stable in an increasingly unstable world.
Can early onset be avoided.
Resilience & best practices to remain Resilient.
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I’m not sure if it is "ground braking, but you might try “the interaction between mental illness and substance abuse”. They have been doing what they call “dual diagnosis” group treatment for people who have both substance abuse problems and mental illness in the psychiatric care profession. There are a fair number of such groups. This topic has probably been done before, so you would probably need to come up with a new perspective on it. … You might try “access to mental health care among people who are living on the street”. Those are just a couple of suggestions you might consider.
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Thanks for your ideas guys! That’s a few interesting ones. I consider working out two or three ideas briefly. Then ask a psychiatrist I know for advice what is most worthwhile. I don’t know the field that much.
My thesis took philosophy of science as a starting point. This centers around the idea scientific knowledge is not neutral. But coloured by the interests of those in power. And proposes practical ways to give a bigger voice to groups with less power.
I consider building on that. But now with psychiatry. I can use that same theory on all sorts of topics. As an example:
I don’t know much yet. But feminist philosophy of science seems to do the same. But with women as the non-dominant group. I can use that as the hook to hang all my women’s mental health studies on. And sell myself by linking it to my former research. @flybottle, what do you think?
I worked in the pharmaceutical world for years. I could analyse the conflicting interests around meds. E.g. the user (@Happy_H) wants to know longterm damage. The seller absolutely does not. How can we give mrs happyh a bigger voice. Saying pharma is not neutral isn’t exactly groundbreaking though… 
I could study shared decision making between patient - doc - family from this perspective.
I could let it lose on the peer support movement and fora.
Hm. Sorry for the long post. Maybe it’s vague. And not groundbreaking. But I can make it fit my old work. And it makes my mental illness an asset. What do you think?
i think a thesis based on older meds vs newer meds would be great…I am on generic prolixin, fluphenazine, 10 mg twice a day and I swear by it…it’s the most superior older med out there in my opinion.
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I’d love to know that… I’m on haldol (parttime). I hate it. But I hate the newer medication more. And doubt they are the revolutionary improvement they were said to be.
I’m not medically educated enough to do true biomedical research…however much I like it.
I could do the philosophy-of-science look: pharma’s interest is to sell newer meds as improvement. Doctors have also interests in using newer meds. But do the newer meds genuienly benefit the people who need to use them? What are their experiences? How do they impact their lives? As compared to older meds?
Hm. Maybe I could secretly sneak that medical topic into the social science club. 
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Yes exactly, position women as an oppressed group, position mentally ill people as an oppressed group, posit that the intersection of these two oppressions raises underappreciated problems that give rise to further oppression. You can sell your own ‘standpoint’ as providing a priviliged position of knowledge into this problem etc etc. You can run the script. To me it’s not groundbreaking and not science but activism but in these fields that is said to be a meaningless distinction anyway (somewhat to do with the power aspect of knowledge you mention) - nevertheless, if you’re interested in writing something like that you got the times on your side so go for it!
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Yeah, it’s rather activism than groundbreaking in my eyes. I do not see it as scientific research. But. 
I can use it as the theoretical uhm…chatter they like to hear…to sneak in the topics that I genuinely like. Like the more indepth medical themes around women’s health.
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You might want to look for something measurable that does not require a large group of people involved with gathering information.
Personal ideas off the top of my head:
- Finding and correlating the figures of published reports of how many families are going for vacation on a yearly basis, what type of vacations, and how many times overall within a year, on different budgets, etc…
- Study on how big people’s vocabulary is, in both active and stored use of various words. What words of specific meaning are the most popular use or known of in the widespread population.
- A study on differences of popular social/political issues between groups of people who use a internet media as information sources and people who live without outside information being projected, such as the Amish or people without tv/computers.
- A psychological study on people who view the same object and are asked to make a simple question or short narrative/story on that object, in the most creative manner they can do. In order to see possible correlations of ideas within certain population groups, that leads to further studies on why the correlations may exist, or why conversely they do not exist/diverge in results.
But realistically you would want to use ideas as a form of marketing to the college/research bureaucracy, as something that would catch their attention or is align with the past patterns of how they used their research money. Knowing your bureaucracy and where the money comes from can help with diagnosing those specific traits. So ask what other people around you would research or have a incentive to research, to get clues of what is in current focus.
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Thanks. After having lived offline a long while, I find doing something with that rather cool. I’m a member of an organisation of non-internet-users (I think I’ll be excommunitcated if they know how often I’m online again… :)). I dont know how to make it ground-breaking. I think I have pretty strong arguments for us all quitting the internet…which is rather radical at least…but…yeah…not sure how to sell that. We don’t have amish here…but I am connected to the tiny group of people here that lives offline…and fights for that lifestyle to be possible.
I have a problem wringing myself into this bureaucratic system. I feel thinking of groundbreaking thoughts and fitting into the existing phd system bite each other.
Also, I see psychiatry as a faith that I do not believe in. I find it hard to think of minor things to tweak this system, like certain women’s health topics…without thinking we should leave psychiatry behind and start a whole new system.
I have a rather colourful network of people who are involved in alternative psychiatry initiatives…open dialogue, soteria, integrative psychiatry, runaway houses, peer support academies, medicinefree hospital, etc. And I think they are valuable. But it’s not new. And my personal creative thinking is a bit…stuck. :-/ I think I need to let it rest. And I might just prefer practically cheering up a disabled kid than writing fuzzy papers.
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Hm. Asking too much of myself. Can’t do this now. My thinking is broken. Need to start small.
My doc and I decided to write a small case study report together. We made a kind of cool switch from old to new psychiatry together.
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Yes, so am I (very curious about long term outcomes of medication use). I read about the cognitive losses and aberrations associated with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and I feel the need to know to what extent are the cognitive losses attributable to the meds, as opposed to the illness itself?
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It’s something I’d love to know as well…
I see docs fighting among each other…but no decent info. I know only a handful of studies on longterm effect (2+ years). And they have flaws.
I’d really want to research the biological side of it all…not the sociological.
Long-term effects of antipsychotics | BJPsych Advances | Cambridge Core
Long-term Antipsychotic Treatment and Brain Volumes - PMC (nih.gov)
The case against antipsychotic drugs: a 50-year record of doing more harm than good - ScienceDirect
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