Difference between revisions of "Team:UCL/HumanPractice"

Human Practices

The main aim of our effort in human practices is to reduce the stigma around mental health problems by pointing out the fact that some of these, like depression or anxiety are actual diseases with physical causes and not a sign of weakness. Our lab work focuses on the connection between the gut microbiota and the brain to tackle mental diseases. Thus, we are directly tackling this misconception.

What is our plan?

We are talking with people who work in mental health charities, people suffering from depression, practitioners and scientists to find out more about the problems of people suffering from depression. We also want to use the opportunity to create awareness of the mind-gut connection which is quite a young field of research. This helps us to make our project relevant for actual patients.

We organize events in collaboration with artists, museums and mental health organisations in order to start a dialogue with people outside of the lab and incorporate their ideas into our project. So far, we have noticed two aspects that we need to consider in our project. One is that a lot of the research effort is not accessible to people due to technical language. This barrier needs to be overcome to tackle prejudices and to help patients understand their condition. Secondly, we realized that patients taking medication ,e.g. for depression, have to increase their dose in regular intervals. This is an issue we need to consider when building a genetic circuit that responds to triggers of mental illness in the gut.

Who we are working with

We are organising an event together with the mental fight club in Borough, London. We are going to give a presentation and do a Q&A about our project in this weekly cafe in south London which is open to all, but especially caters to those struggling with problems such as depression or patients from St. Thomas Hospital.