It is such an exciting time for psychiatry right now

This blog post interview with Dr David Mongan is part of the 2024 Choose Psychiatry campaign.

What role do you feel research plays in mental health care and psychiatry?

Psychiatry is just like any medical speciality in that research helps us to move forward in everything from highlighting health inequalities and identifying groups and populations at need, to enhancing our understanding of why people develop mental health challenges, to developing new treatments and prevention strategies. 

It is such an exciting time for Psychiatry right now because mental health is now rightly seen as vital to our health in general. However, we still need better understanding of why mental illness develops in the first place, and how we can better serve people with severe mental illnesses such as psychosis through biological, psychological and social interventions.  

For example, we’re finding out more and more all the time about the role of the immune system in relation to mental health. We now know that our psychological and social environment can have an impact on our physical health, potentially through inflammation and effects on the immune system. 

So by helping to shed light on these sorts of relationships we might be able to better understand why some people develop certain mental illnesses, and maybe even to identify people at risk at an earlier stage so that we can better target preventative interventions.

That sounds exciting - can you tell us about the research you’ve been doing specifically, and why it is important?

My research has focused on early psychosis, for example young people with psychotic experiences (such as having odd paranoid thoughts or low-level hallucinations), and the identification of biomarkers that could help predict the development of psychosis. We’ve found some promising findings, for example, that young adults with psychosis have increased inflammatory markers in their blood compared to young adults without psychosis. 

I’ve also recently been looking at omega-3 fatty acids in relation to psychosis. Using a longitudinal cohort called the ALSPAC study, we found that people with persistently low blood levels of omega-3s across childhood and adolescence had higher symptoms of psychosis in early adulthood, which might be related to the anti-inflammatory effects of omega-3s. 

Other recent research I’ve been involved in has used a technique called proteomics to look at blood markers of the complement system part of the immune system) and found promising biomarkers of treatment response in early psychosis.

That sounds like a lot of work, do you treat patients too?

 Yes, at the moment I do 100% clinical work with patients, but my training programme has allowed me to be flexible in terms of my academic work as well. I completed a three year full time research PhD during my higher training, and then held an Academic Clinical Lecturer post for 3 years which was 50:50 research and clinical work. 

Why did you choose psychiatry, and has the profession been as you expected?

I chose Psychiatry because I was interested in seeing people and their health in a more holistic way – not just the symptoms they present with or the medications they take, but them as a person within the context of their development, family, culture and wider society. 

I’m also really interested in the two-directional complex interactions between body and mind, mental health and physical health – and in actual fact that they are really two sides of the same coin.