Dr Arish / आरिश 🏳️‍🌈

With over 2500 members from 96 countries, @network-alba.bsky.social is a global community dedicated to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the brain sciences. 🧠

👉 Learn more and become a member here: buff.ly/EKMC9Pq 
As an ALBA member, you'll enjoy 👇️

The "Szilard Point."

When we talk about The strain and the drain on scientific publishing, it's this.
Researchers are working more just to stay afloat, and less on what we actually want them to do: research, discover, innovate.

Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820

🚨 Postdoctoral Opportunity for Female Scientists🚨

The University of Vienna is awarding at least 20 fully funded 4 year postdoctoral positions to outstanding female scientists

Interested? Get in touch via direct message
careers.univie.ac.at/en/postdoc/e...

#MicroSky 🧪

#PostDoc @univie.ac.at

I'm old enough to remember having a reasonable expectation that a Labour government would be better than a Tory one.

A Health Secretary who repeatedly implies that chronically under-diagnosed things like ADHD are somehow over-diagnosed, bans trans healthcare & promotes NHS privatisation is not it.

Looking forward to speaking with the Edinburgh University Global Health Society later today for #WorldAIDSDay. We will discuss recent advances in HIV care, emerging priorities for the community, and the intersections of LGBTQ+ rights, mental health, and HIV.

Kigali Declaration

#WorldAIDSDay is especially important this year.

US has cut nearly all support for HIV care and research, while UK has cut £150 million from its contribution to Global Health Fund.

HIV activism and NGOs continue to save lives while govts betray people with HIV.

www.iasociety.org/kigali-decla...

2.5 million people had access to HIV prevention medicines in 2024. Now...

Funding cuts led to a 28-65% drop in people starting HIV prevention medicines in 13 countries

2.5M people accessed HIV prevention medicines in 2024.

But this year’s sudden funding cuts disrupted access to this essential tool.

If we want to prevent a resurgence of HIV infections, we must re-prioritize prevention, NOW!

Read more: www.unaids.org/en/2025-worl...
#WorldAIDSDay

Today is #WorldAIDSDay.

The HIV response has always shown what humanity can achieve when we stand united.

Global collective action has saved millions of lives, but shrinking funding now puts this progress at risk.

Leaders must recommit to ending AIDS and saving lives.

#WorldAIDSDay2025 | Spotlight has launched a new HIV dashboard and graph generator based on outputs from the Thembisa model.

Our hope is that this dashboard will help the public and people working in healthcare to find important HIV numbers more easily: www.spotlightnsp.co.za/hiv-dashboard/

These two have made a difference. This prize will help them make even more of a difference.

@hubmetpsych.bsky.social

Bringing together researchers, clinicians & lived-experience experts to drive innovation in metabolic psychiatry.
🌟 Focus: genomics, data science, biomarkers, metabolic intervention, lived experience.

🔗 metabolicpsychiatryhub.com
#DiscoverMHPHubs #MentalHealthResearch

Key take-away:
Trajectories of depression may not be explained fully by HIV status alone, but better predicted when accounting for other risk factors such as inflammation.

Huge thanks to colleagues in US and Uganda - a fruitful collaboration that started with a chat at @interestconf.bsky.social!

New preprint!

TL;DR We looked at depressive symptom severity in a large sample of children in Uganda, and found that
- in children without HIV, symptom severity decreases over time
- in children with HIV, symptoms actually get worse *if* they had high baseline inflammation

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

It was lovely speaking to @harmitmalik.bsky.social for @dmmjournal.bsky.social Infectious Disease Special Issue. We chatted about his work on host-viral evolution, the importance of blue-skies research and his approach to creating a supportive lab environment
journals.biologists.com/dmm/article/...

Our #METPSY study explores how metabolism connects to mental health.

Yesterday, we hit 25% of our recruitment target! 🎉

Interested in taking part? Recruitment is still open! Get in touch with the team or visit our website to learn more 👇

📩 metpsy@ed.ac.uk
🔗 tinyurl.com/metpsy25

// We must be able to speak about failure without folding it back into a neat part of the narrative of success and without tidying away the hurt that accompanies it.

Sometimes, our research doesn’t feel good, and sometimes we are ill. That’s ok. //

// The chrononormativity of UKHE is manic. Overwork and urgency are the normative experience for academics, and conforming to these strictures of time is rewarded through the systems of recognition in universities which seek to extract ever more from ever fewer human resources. //

Incredibly powerful and personal article. How often have we rushed to meet last-minute ("rapid") funding calls or squeezed projects into financial year-end deadlines? Time in academic does feel 'manic'. The authors describe so eloquently why this encourages us to disguise failures as learning.

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

I've been getting this a lot on ResearchGate too - and occasionally no amount of verifying will let me get through. Perhaps I am not human enough for the bots anymore...

MG at EACS. Slide with UNAIDS data from 2024.

Monica Gandhi delivered a powerful plenary at #EACS2025 on the history and the future of HIV treatment.
Although HIV and AIDS have largely dropped out of the headlines, the pandemic is not over.
More than 40.8m people are now living with HIV (Russian data is missing) more than at any other time.
1/5

Our latest data presented at #IAS2025 tracks global policies harming migrants, students & workers living with #HIV.

Explore Positive Destinations www.positivedestinations.info/news/17928-g...

Book cover of the book "How Fascism Works" by Jason Stanley

Seems very timely

"What normalization does is transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. It makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been."

—  Jason Stanley. How Fascism Works

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Fas...

First-Person Psychiatric Accounts A Substack Collection

First-Person Psychiatric Accounts: A Substack Collection

Personal accounts of mental health challenges and mental healthcare, many of which are among the most widely read and appreciated posts in Psychiatry at the Margins.

www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/first-pers...

a sign that says we 're hiring in orange on a white background ALT: a sign that says we 're hiring in orange on a white background

🚨 New Job Opportunity! 🚨

We are seeking a #ResearchAssistant to support active clinical research studies within the Hub (principally the METPSY research study) at the University of Edinburgh.

📍Edinburgh
📆 Apply by 11th September
🔗 More info 👇

elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

🚨Update: METPSY is now recruiting adults aged 16–35! 🚨

Adults aged 16–35 living in Scotland can now take part in our METPSY study (previously 16–25). Open to those with a diagnosis of depression, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia.

Interested? Get in touch 📩 metpsy@ed.ac.uk or visit our website!

What kinds of support do early-career researchers need? Help The Transmitter and Neuromatch bolster the next generation of neuroscientists.

Calling all early-career researchers!! @thetransmitter.bsky.social & @neuromatch.bsky.social want to know: what kinds of resources do early-career researchers need? Share you thoughts anonymously at the link below:

www.thetransmitter.org/early-career...

I love when this happens, and also feel frustrated when I can’t show them to the world. My human just ends up having to deal with me showing him all the pretty plots.

@arishmrl.bsky.social & colleagues have found that people with autoimmune conditions are at nearly double the risk of mental health issues - depression, bipolar, anxiety - compared to the general population. Read the full paper: edin.ac/40jxw9h; highlighted in the Guardian 25/06: edin.ac/44pQyfF

Our work leveraged the large scale of Our Future Health to generate new hypotheses and provide insights into the relationship between #autoimmune and #mentalhealth conditions with unprecedented statistical precision. Future research should explore the causal mechanisms behind these associations.