I have been the Senior Research Psychologist at the Department of Psychological Medicine in North Wales since 2005. I trained as a biological psychologist at The University of Leeds and was previously involved in the development of an international program aimed at improving the health and nutrition of young people, an intervention which has since been rolled out across several European countries and the US – and of course my family.
I am a founding member of Data Based Medicine, which has been responsible for setting up RxISK.org, a free searchable and independent drug safety website aimed at improving our understanding of the effects of prescription medications. The data from this has led to a number of recent publications on Post SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD) and the effect of treatment on cardiac QT intervals.
I am also involved in TheMadnessofNorthWales, a website that catalogues the rise and fall of some of the major mental illnesses such as melancholia, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and brings this quantitative data together with short stories, drama and patients records to create a unique insight on a hidden world. This is due to launch soon.
Having joined the RIAT team re-analyzing Study 329, while I was out of the room one day, I ended up with the job of mastering the GSK “periscope” to look at adverse events. This “simple” job took a year of my life between reconstructing the adverse events database and carrying out an audit of the original Clinical Record Forms (CRFs) and patient narratives of Serious Adverse Events (SAEs) from the study.