BipolarLab.com

This has been one busy, busy week. It is still not clear in my mind whether I am going through very busy weeks or I am simply too dysfunctional and inefficient to get everything done as quickly as possible and then have enough spare time for myself. I tend to think it is probably the latter but at any event it is 9pm on saturday evening and here I am finishing my work for today and writing this blog entry, this is really turning into my own self-therapy.

The project is going well, my participants are more or less all ok, but more work is coming ahead. I am about to start working on a new project looking at the childhood experiences and attachment style of people with early onset psychosis and bipolar disorder. I am quite keen to gain experience working with younger people. I tried to get younger people recruited for this project but it appears that symptom monitoring is not the ideal cup of tea for people early on with bipolar. And I am with them…it is still too early to understand, and digest the whole notion of bipolar illness, some are too afraid or are still in denial. It is not an easy condition to accept (despite the good publicity lately) and it takes time. Now imagine to have a weird bearded greek guy coming along with his latest gadgets from the infamous Institute of Psychiatry, trying to convince you to monitor your symptoms for 12 weeks on a daily basis. Yes, I would run screaming as well

But I am mourning for the work coming ahead. Here I am, once upon a time a hard-core Lovaas-trained behaviourist trying to look at childhood experiences. I just realised that the interview I need to use is so time consuming for the rater (not the person being interviewed) that for every person that I interview (1 hour), I will need to spend at least one day transcribing and doing the ratings. This is the famous CECA interview from George Brown’s Medical Sociology group originally at Bedford college and now currently with us at King’s. Their group has developed the most comprehensive and well validated empirical interviews around. They originally developed interviews for measuring Life events and then moved on to all other aspects of human experience. But I need the job to get through my PhD and continue running my eMonitoring project as my own funding is almost gone.

Two months down the line I am almost done with the ethics application form. The whole process of getting a research project started and passing it through ethics in UK has become so laborious that by the time you go through the bureaucracy of ethics you have run out of funding for your research workers (this is us - aka research slaves). It is a necessary evil and it ensures that the projects we do go through enough scrutiny not to harm anyone participating and we get the opportunity to think a bit better about what we do to our participants.

But it was a good week. I met another PhD student visiting from Holland who is working in a group where they also do daily monitoring studies. Actually they do the real thing there. Their studies are using the experience sampling method in which their participants are beeped randomly 10 times a day and are asked to report what they do. It is a great method for driving your participants insane…I meant, sampling their daily life and activities and also understanding the temporal dynamics of symptoms but luckily for their participants they only do this to them for 6 days.

I enjoyed thoroughly bragging to my participants about how easy our design is for them. Only 2 minutes in the evening or in the morning and just one 15-30 minute weekly chat with me. Tineke (the Dutch PhD student) also shared with me a glimpse of her expert knowledge. Apparently my study’s design is called “Low-Load, Fixed Interval, Long term, Daily process Design” (it is easier but it promotes cheating). It is indeed a lot sexier as a title rather than going around saying I am doing a daily diary study. She does “High-Load, Random Interval, Short Term studies” equally sexy. I think I managed to impress her with my electronic mood diary (they are still playing with paper diaries), my iMonitor and my little red treo (aka Velzevul), although the bloody iMonitor slider doesn’t seem to work as smoothly in the newest version of Palm OS of the treo. She didn’t seem to mind but as I am all about usability and user-friendliness, even a few seconds delay to me or any sort of confusion from the user is painful to watch.

Apologies to all for the no-comments blogging experience so far. My comments blog function is out of order and I haven’t managed to fix it yet. I am more or less a one man business, one man out of order business but I am self-repairing and I get there at the end.

Hope you are all well out there. Until next week. YM.

–
Captain’s Supplemental Log, StarDate 191007 A.S.:
We have been holding in a time standstill as we had to carefully maneuver our little starship away from the enemy territory. Negotiations have resulted hopefully in an amicable end. We are slowly re-starting operations having endured minimal damage. We are standing still and strong approaching close to the end of our second mission. OVER.
–

(written on 27/09/07 during silent operations, edited and published on 19/10/07)

Yes, yes, this is going to be one more blog entry about the iPod Touch/iPhone and all new things apple in general. I just love great products and smart companies. Apple is one of them and google is coming second best at the moment. Both companies really worth their money. Apple is making our world a more beautiful place to be (for a price) and google is giving us a better internet experience (for “free”). They are both smart in their own ways, and somehow they make sure that at the end of the day we pass on our paycheck to them and we are also happy about it.

Google for one I think is a much smarter company. Their “free” business model along with their great services makes people eternally happy. Most people don’t even realise how google make its money, most people don’t even realise that google is essentially an advertising company and we are all its customers. We use their free services and in return their google bots track our behaviour and know what we want and need at any given time (I once had a poor little student nicknamed the Gbot - I will write about my little ones in a different post). In return we are being served all the time without realising it or not with ads that sell things that we may actually need. It is a service to the end user and why not? Of course, Google’s big brother practices have created many critics. But they are smart and do what they do well and make our life better, so why is it so difficult for some people to accept and recognise superiority? Having been described a “big brother cheer leader” myself and given what I do with my research, it is not coincidence that I like and endorse such practices. But why not? What I guess I would like to see, is google’s technology to be used to improve our health (19/10/07 update: I have just been informed by one of my participants that they are on to it) and to be integrated to clinical and research programmes such as my own for instance! Is it too much to ask? I did try to get in touch once but I didn’t go very far, maybe I will have a better luck when my publications are out…I am sure they have a good bunch of manic depressive brains out there that they would see the point I am making. Be it as it is, we have already done a good deal of work for the eMonitoring project with their free Google Docs, Calendar, and Mail services. We can share our data and life charts as well as schedule and send reminders to our participants in a very easy, functional, and elegant way at no cost! With someone on my tiny budget at the moment, that’s a great service to have. Thank you Google!

But this post started about Apple. I just had the pleasure to taste the new iPod touch. It is what they say and much more. They have truly created a new mobile device. A device that will make mobile internet mainstream. And that touch screen! You can do all great things with it. You can really browse the internet with it and even take surveys and do our online studies! Along with a student of mine, George Salaminios, we recently launched a brief web study looking at positive mood states (…and yes, hypomanic symptoms) in the general population. I found myself taking our online survey in no time. It needs a bit of tweaking to be truly iphone/itouch compatible, but even as it is, it works and it can be done. They have given us mobile internet people, this is indeed headline news! Maybe my recent spending spree on .mobi domain names may pay off after all…(just giving false hopes to myself, don’t buy any of these anymore. Unfortunately, the .com is here to stay). Now with the iPod touch being what it is, I do not see the point of the iPhone really when there is the new Razr2 out there (this is THE mobile phone) and the Treo 680 (the most sexy pda/phone device at the moment with a mobile keyboard that works). I am a happy owner of the red one, just to be in line with the bipolar literature (there is a funny article out there by Hagop Akiskal associating red with bipolarity). My little red treo of course is proving a steady companion and helping me to keep in touch with my current and new participants at any time needed via mobile email.

This time I have managed to restrain myself. Yes, it has been payday but the spending sprees will have to wait until things are in order again (19/10/07: still holding still). Just because some of us may have a propensity to “consume” and “overspend” and “dysregulate” it doesn’t mean that we cannot self-manage and be patient. The good things come to those who wait as the guinneas ad taught us (it was the beer ad, not any philosopher as some intellectuals may claim…believe me I am a promising junior academic). And I have waited and I will continue to wait, until this project becomes self-sustaining, I get my PhD (and my ipod touch, razr2, and iMac of course) and we are all happy with our efforts.

Finally, I am all too happy to see that Stephen Fry has started blogging as well. I am not surprised that he is also a gadget lover (as I was not surprised he was bipolar). But for God’s shake - blogging is about writing small and frequent bits of interesting, funny or even informative chunks of internet junk - not book reviews of all the latest and greatest smart-phones! (19/10/07 update: Stephen is now on his second blog entry - this still reads like a book…can someone please give him a blog tutorial - he is such a great brain that is ashame not to write great blogs just because people are too polite to tell him their true opinion)

The Gadget Temple is closing and we are being kicked out. Time to end this blog entry and leave my lovely iMac behind for the night! Until next time… (19/10/07 update: You will soon be mine )…on to finally get some sleep and to another great day in my work Temple!