Archive for July, 2025

What better way you could spend a Saturday than running through the Dublin Mountains?

The Trail Festival is run by the same people that run the Dublin Mountain Backyard Ultra and takes you through 30k of hilly terrain with the option of doing one, two, or three loops.

The run starts at Kilmashogue Forest and goes straight up. There were about 30 of us taking on the 30 km single loop and I soon found myself at the back of the pack. The uphill was a lovely wide gravel track but also uphill. The downhill was single track and I’m not much of a trail runner so I didn’t pick up a lot of speed there. Luckily, there was a two-kilometre road section into Glencullen that allowed me to catch the back of the pack.

Trail is a word with a wide definition. Once we were through Glencullen, we ended up climbing a steep bank (I would have completely missed the turning if I hadn’t seen others) and then onto what the locals called the “bog road” where the path disappeared and we were running through small bushes. Then there was a small gully with a river at the bottom and ropes to help us climb down. The ropes did not save me and I fell over twice here.

We almost made it back onto the Wicklow Way track before turning again towards a trig point at the top of the hill. This offered spectacular views of the whole of Dublin Bay and Wicklow in one scene.

Here we got into the real bog. I stopped on what I thought was a solid bit of mud and found myself above submerged up above my knee and had to climb my way out. At around 15k, Dublin disappeared behind the hills and I felt panicked about being in the middle of nowhere even though I knew it was just over the horizon. That was an unpleasant half an hour.

At around 23k we came down into ZipIt where there was a water drop. I had brought enough food and drink for five hours but was drinking more than expected so glad to be able to refill my bottles. Then it was straight up the hill again and towards the finish. I was tired by this point and started stumbling over rocks a lot but luckily did not fall.

The final two kilometres were downhill again and my quads were on fire as I descended. I managed to find the correct turning point, which I was quite proud of, as almost everyon else that finished came in the wrong way. Very glad to be done. I’m not sure I had fun but I’m glad I did it :D.

It’s coming home… again!

Great resilience from England coming back from deficits in all three games in the knock-out stage. I thought Spain did themselves proud of the final. But the solid passing and ball control never converted into more than one goal, so the result felt fair enough.

Our current system of understanding mental health is typically based around psychiatric diagnosis. You go to your doctor and your doctor gives you a label like “social anxiety disorder” or “borderline personality disorder”. These labels are, on the whole, stigmatising and unhelpful.

Worse, they are not grounded in evidence-based medicine. After a hundred years of lookng, we cannot find the biomarkers for mental illness. Depressed people do not have lower serotonin, for example. Nor are there genetic markers. As far as we can tell (and research has been well-funded and plentiful), mental health issues are not an “illness” in the traditional medical sense.

So then we say “okay but they are functional”. Something happens to someone which activates underlying vulnerabilities and they develop social anxiety. But this does not hold up, either. There are no clear pathways of things that trigger specific labels (the everything causes everything problem) and the majority of service users meet the criteria for multiple labels (the everyone suffers from everything problem).

As a result, we don’t know what causes any of these labels (no biomarkers or pathways), what they look like (people’s symptoms transcend multiple labels) or what to do about it: most first line treatments like anti-depressants or single-diagnostic CBT seems to make things worse.

Much of psychology already recognises this problem and has suggested dropping the word “disorder” and changing the question from “what is wrong with you?” to “what has happened to you?” Trauma-informed approaches are opening up a much greater scope for what counts as trauma.

The Power Threat Meaning Framework goes beyond that. It asks how power been used in someone’s life (think oppression), what threat that created, what meaning the person made of it and what threat responses were activated. It suggests that all troubling experiences and behaviour, from mild anxiety and depression, to hearing voices, self-harm and eating disorders, can be understood from this perspective.

It also suggests that all behaviour is on a continuum, from “normal” to “clinical”. This is important because while some critics might agree mild anxiety is part of normal human experience, they often bawk at the idea that hearing voices or dissociation is typical. Even though most people regularly “zone out” (dissociate) on a regular basis.

The PTM Framework offers what it calls a general foundational pattern and seven provisional general patterns. These allow us to explore useful patterns without detracting from an individual’s personal narrative.

• Identities
• Surviving rejection, entrapment, and invalidation
• Surviving disrupted attachments and adversities in care
• Surviving separation and identity confusion
• Surviving defeat, entrapment, disconnection and loss
• Surviving social exclusion, shame, and coercive power
• Surviving single threats

The PTM Framework is a contribution to the movement away from psychiatric diagnosis which still has much work to do, and the document acknowledges this.

But we are already seeing improvements. Many services, such as educational support and some NHS mental health services, look at individual need rather than labels and many have switched away from using disorder-specific measures to general outcome measures.

I don’t claim to have done justice to this document in any way in this blog post. You should go read it; it’s fantastic, if quite a technical read.

Dundalk parkrun takes place on the Dundalk Institute of Technology campus and consists of three laps around the playing field. While it is not the most exciting of parkruns, it was well marshalled and I had fun.

The Prince of Darkness has left us. Like everyone learning guitar, Paranoid is a key part of my repertoire. And Iron Man is one of the songs I regularly serenade Elina with. I like to think Ozzy had all of this in mind when creating the heavy metal genre.

My current research paper is qualitative and I’m using descriptive-interpreative analysis to analyise the interviews. I decided to try using some of the data analysis software available out there and settled on MAXQDA.

Overall, the experience has been good. You can code your text and play any audio or video recording you have along with it to make corrects. You can also group and colour code your tags for organisation. It also has tools such as word frequency that allow you to do further analysis.

Triathlon is back! I took in Kilkenny Triathlon a few weeks ago and realised how much I had missed it. I decided to keep momentum rolling and sign up for Tro Provinces Triathlon, which takes place in Lanesborough. During the race you cross the border between Longford and Rosscommon, hence the name of the race.

Unfortunately, it was heat wave weekend. Temperatures were predicted to peak at 28 with typical British Isles humidity. I’m not a big fan of hot weather and I would have cancelled, except that I had just started to get my confidence back in open water and was determined to capitalise on it.

It is about a two-hour drive over, the second half of which is on small roads. I was in wave eight, which started two hours after transition closed, at around 12:30 meaning we got the impact on the day’s sun. I tried to leave my wetsuit off until the last minute to stay cool.

The swim

I was very nervous again before the race and getting into the water. The water in Lough Ree was a beautiful temperature, though. Maybe around 20 degrees. Warm enough to be pleasant to get into and cool enough to swim without overheating.

It was a triangluar course around a single buoy. I decided to take it easy and do heads-up breaststroke to the buoy. Once I rounded it I felt my confidence building and went into front crawl that I did all the way back to the swim exit. Job done and really happy with that.

The cycle

The cycle route was on closed roads and once you get through the first two turns it was a pure out-and-back affair. There was a tail wind on the way out so we were all flying. Slower on the return as we were going into a slight headwind but the aero bars really helped here.

I decided to go with arm sleeves to protect myself from sunburn. In addition, I took a second bottle on the bike with water that I could pour over my torso and arms every few kilometres to cool me down.

The run

Finally, onto the run. This too was a mostly out-and-back affair with little shade. Thankfully, the race organisers had put a real effort into keeping us cool. There were two water stations, so four chances to pass them on the out-and-back, and they put a series of sprinklers on the course so that you could run through them as well.

I took a soft flask of water to pour over myself again. However, having been sitting in transition the whole time, it was like bath water and I had to dump and refill it at the first water station.

The result

I managed to leave my timing chip in my car after I had registered, so I don’t have an official time. But according to my watch, my time was:

1:23:09

And my splits were:

I wasn’t interested in the time; I just wanted to have fun. Not miles off the 40-minute barrier for the bike, though. And a sub-26 5k in that heat was lovely. I worked pretty hard for it looking at my heart rate!

The race was well organised and they gave out free ice creams at the end. Thank you to all of the volunteers who made it happen.

Lovely zoo. The habits looked large and well-designed but we still got to see plenty. We got lucky with the elephants and the tiger was huge. The hippo was hiding, unfortunately. They also have rhinos, giraffes, zebras, chimps, sea lions and loads more. But the highlight might have been the wolves. There was a pack of them running around. The gorillas were also brilliant.

Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis is a book by James Davies discussing the rise in use of psychiatric diagnosis and antidepressant prescribing.

Davies charts the rise of the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the standard textbook for psychiatric diagnosis. Now on the revision of its fifth edition, the DSM has massively expanded over the decades to include ever more labels. These labels have no biological basis and are generally the consensus of small committees many of whom have financial links to the pharmaceutical industry.

The author then goes on to connect this to the rise of neoliberalism. As Thatcher dismantled trade unions, increased inequality and reduced working-class people’s quality of life, something was needed to explain this suffering that depoliticised and managed that suffering. The answer was labelling people as mentally ill.

Today, if you are sad because your zero-hours contract means you both have a job and still need to rely on food banks, it is not because of inequality it is because you have an anxiety disorder, or a depressive disorder. It is you, the individual, that is broken, and not that you are living in an unfair society, or so the biomedical model of mental illness would have us believe. And wouldn’t you know it, uber-capitalism can sell us the solution in the form of some antidepressants or a course of CBT.

Some people do find labels helpful. But currently, this is the only lens we are using. And often, the only solution is antidepressants, or if you are lucky some non-trauma-informed CBT.

Thus, mental health has been redefined to conform to the needs of uber-capitalism. Someone who is “mentally well” is someone who can work. IAPT was explicitly set up with the idea of getting people back to work. And programmes like mental health at work initiatives or Mental Health First Aid try to teach us that we should find new ways to handle the suffering caused by low wages, lack of job security and 24/7 work stress.

Work can be meaningful and promote self-esteem. But many jobs today do not provide any dignity. 10% of nurses are using food banks. People are being forced into the gig economy never sure if they will get a pay cheque. People work in warehouses that are gutting their local high street while their bathroom breaks are timed.

Crucially, everybody suffers. Even those with well-paid jobs find themselves lacking meaning and social connectedness. So we try to fix it by buying more stuff. This creates a cycle of consumerism, and then having to invest in security systems and increased policing to protect our stuff, and that in turn divides communities further.

So, what do we do about all of this?

First, we need a model of mental health that targets the root causes: inequality and social isolation. Putting more money into training counsellors will not help because individual distress is a symptom of wider social problems and not something that can be fixed in itself.

Second, we need a wellbeing economy. We need a form of capitalism that works for the benefits of individuals, not for the benefit of capitalism itself. A good start would be undoing the harms of deregulation and rebuilding trade unions to move away from uber-capitalism to more balanced social democracy. This is the exact model that operates in Nordic countries who have the highest quality of life.

Last weekend, Black Sabbath played their final gig. I wasn’t there but it sounded amazing. See the BBC News write-up.

Alongside them they had Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Slayer, Tool, Pantera, Alice in Chains, Anthrax, David Draiman (Disturbed), David Ellefson (Megadeth), Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Travis Barker (Blink-182), Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins), Ronnie Wood (the Rolling Stones), Steven Tyler (Aerosmith), Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Sammy Hagar (Van Halen), Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine) and KK Downing (Judas Priest). You couldn’t get that line-up anywhere.