Director, UCL Institute of Mental Health
Joined August 2012
- Tweets 5,208
- Following 136
- Followers 3,496
- Likes 3,006
132 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
20 Aug 2024
Read more - 'Into the Abyss: a neuropsychiatrist's notes on troubled minds'
oneworld-publications.com/wo…
20 Aug 2024
🙋🏻♂️
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Anthony David retweeted
Jun 12
“When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented brains. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library.
A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called ‘leaves’) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”
— Carl Sagan
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Anthony David retweeted
Jun 12
Simon Schama on the pleasure-giving, life-affirming art of David Hockney ft.com/content/3862cf23-855b… via @ft So sorry to hear of the departure of the great DH.. here's what I wrote for the Vuitton show catalogue last year with some lovely images including "travel" along Mulholland Drive.
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Anthony David retweeted
Jun 11
Jun 11
New paper out in Alzheimer's & Dementia 🧠 We combined resting-state pupillometry-fMRI, neuromelanin MRI of the locus coeruleus, and cognitive testing in 64 people with Alzheimer's and 26 controls to ask how arousal shapes cortical dynamics in AD. 🧵
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Anthony David retweeted
Jun 6
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
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May 13
Changes in insight and outcome over the early course of first-episode ... sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
Early improvement in insight in people with psychosis is NOT associated with adverse effects (low mood)
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Anthony David retweeted
“I am the king of football!” 🤴🏼
Gianni Infantino’s been up to more nonsense at the FIFA Congress in Canada.
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Anthony David retweeted
May 4
Happy Bank Holiday! Here's a tongue-in-cheek parody song about @Nigel_Farage accepting a massive gift from a cryptocurrency billionaire and then hiding from a BBC interview - to the iconic tune of the legendary @The_Proclaimers. We're calling it: "Five Million Quid" 💰🤑💰🤑💰🎶
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Anthony David retweeted
29 Apr 2025
#Psychosis of autoimmune origin? What are the features? Is there a therapeutic response to immunotherapy?
Welcome to our new paper!
🧠💭🧵
1/We studied the psychopathological patterns & outcomes following immunotherapy in 164 cases of autoimmune psychosis
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
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Anthony David retweeted
Apr 27
The latest suicidally stupid blow in the MAGA war against science; against knowledge itself - instead we get a casino ballroom, a Las Vegas- classical arch and a screaming blue swimming pool . And instead of history we'll get statues and a cage fight.
Apr 26
Trump just fired all 24 members of the National Science Board. Every single one. By email. No warning. No reason given. The board has existed since 1950.
The National Science Board is the independent body that oversees the National Science Foundation, the agency that distributes $9 billion in research grants every year.
Its members are scientists and engineers from universities and industry. They serve six-year staggered terms specifically so they cross presidential administrations and stay independent of whoever is in power.
On Friday, every single one of them got the same boilerplate email from Mary Sprowls of the Presidential Personnel Office: "On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service."
That's it. That's the whole letter. For 76 years of institutional independence.
The NSF funds the basic science behind MRIs. Cellphones. LASIK eye surgery. GPS. The internet itself. The Antarctic research stations. The deep-space telescopes. The research vessels mapping the ocean floor. Every breakthrough that made America the world's leader in science for the better part of a century traces back through grants this agency made and this board approved.
The board chair, Victor McCrary, was actively advising Congress on Trump's proposed 55% cut to NSF's budget. The board was helping fight back. So Trump fired the board.
Marvi Matos Rodriguez, one of the fired members, told reporters she had been reviewing an 80-page report as part of her board duties just days before being terminated.
Keivan Stassun, a physicist at Vanderbilt, said NSF's leadership had already stopped responding to board oversight requests months ago. "We would ask them, 'Are you following board governance directives?' And their answer would be, in effect, 'We don't listen to you anymore.'"
Now there's no board to answer to.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the House Science Committee, called it "the latest stupid move made by a president who continues to harm science and American innovation. Will the president fill the NSB with MAGA loyalists who won't stand up to him as he hands over our leadership in science to our adversaries?"
That's the actual question.
Because while Trump is firing American scientists, China is building research universities at a rate we cannot match. The CDC just buried a study showing vaccines work.
RFK Jr. runs HHS. The EPA is gutted. The Forest Service is being broken. Half of American children are breathing dangerous air. And now the people who decide what gets researched in the United States have all been fired by email on a Friday afternoon.
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Apr 22
Such an interesting and honest post. All research ever done on *insight* / self awareness finds that the lower the mood, the better the insight. Call it depressive realism if you will
Apr 22
ourselves predicamentally downstream from them, its humbling work, and we (I) don't always like to change. (Even so, trying to shift ignoble depressive habits is our (my) duty.) 8/8
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Apr 19
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Apr 19
What is the maximum age a young player can play ‘without fear’? Calling @FootballCliches
"He doesn't seem to feel any of the pressure." ✨
Will Arsenal's Max Dowman start against Man City? 🤔
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Anthony David retweeted
Apr 14
"Take two aspirin and call me in the morning."
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Apr 14
Looks really interesting - an update of Davison and Bagley's classic
Apr 14
New from us:
🗞️Special issue on secondary ("organic") psychosis just out in Schizophrenia Research edited by @_GrahamBlackman and me, but very much led by Graham:
sciencedirect.com/special-is…
Excellent articles on pressing clinical and scientific issues from a host of authors👇
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Apr 13
Still time to apply for @SecretaryINA travel fellowship in honour of Solomon Carter Fuller - Biological Psychiatry Conference, Cape Town Nov 26-30th
biopsychsa.co.za/
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Anthony David retweeted
Trump’s Easter tweet does that sound like a mentally well person? Grok’s response:
No, that post does not read like the writing of a mentally well person in any conventional, professional, or diplomatic sense.
Here’s why it stands out as erratic and concerning, even by Trump’s long-established personal style:
• Profanity and casual vulgarity: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards” — this is raw, unfiltered street-level trash talk, not the language of a head of state issuing a high-stakes military ultimatum. Presidents (even blunt ones) have historically used stronger rhetoric through channels that maintain some gravitas. This feels like an angry late-night text.
• Bizarre, childish phrasing: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one” sounds like a kid describing a theme park event (“it’s Christmas and birthday all in one!”). Framing potential bombing of critical infrastructure (power plants and bridges, which would cause massive civilian suffering) as cutesy “Days” is surreal and detached.
• Incoherent religious flourish: Ending with “Praise be to Allah” right after threatening hell on a Muslim-majority country is jarring, tone-deaf, and reads like a troll or a confused mash-up. It undercuts any serious message and adds to the sense of rambling.
• Overall tone: All-caps yelling (“JUST WATCH!”), exclamation overload, and threats that mix bravado with vagueness. It lacks structure, policy context, or strategic clarity — it reads more like emotional venting than calculated statecraft.
This fits a broader pattern with Trump: impulsive, hyperbolic social media posting that often blurs the line between negotiation tactic, personal grievance, and performance. Supporters often call it “unfiltered” or “strong”; critics (including some in his own orbit over the years) have repeatedly described similar outbursts as unhinged, erratic, or evidence of declining impulse control.
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Anthony David retweeted
Mar 28
This has made my day, no make that week, month and most likely, year. 🥰😃😻❤️🎼🎼🎼 Humans - especially small ones - can do glorious things...
11 & 8-year-old prodigy sisters just played Vivaldi’s Winter with me on the violin… at Rome airport! 🎻✨
They were so cute and insanely talented—the whole airport stopped to listen 😍
#ClassicalMusic #Violin #Prodigy #Vivaldi #Rome
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