Outlines my neuroscience career, from a three-year Postdoctoral Fellowship with Nobel Laureate Arvid Carlsson in Sweden to running my own research laboratory for 14 years in the UK. Our laboratory’s research was focused on the regulation and function of brain dopamine systems, with a particular interest in addiction. In 2000, I closed my laboratory, as I did not think that neuroscience research was helping people overcome addiction. (3,492 words)
1. Learning About Drugs and the Brain
In the third year of my Psychology undergraduate degree at the City of London Polytechnic (now London Guildhall University) in the mid-1970s, I did not know whether I wanted to go on to become a Clinical Psychologist or conduct research in Psychopharmacology (study of brain function, and the effects of drugs on brain and behaviour).
I loved my undergraduate Abnormal Psychology course—although I now hate the words ‘abnormal’ psychology—and decided that I ultimately wanted to help people overcome psychological problems.
In mid-June 2008, along with my Wired In colleagues Lucie James and Kevin Manley, I visited the North-West of England, where there was a fast-growing Recovery Movement.
I first posted this blog about Kevin Kennedy’s book about his recovery on Christmas Day, 2013. It was taken from an article from the now defunct Addiction Today. Kevin will be 25 years in recovery this October!
On Sunday, I uploaded 
It’s always wonderful to see new initiatives developed by people in recovery. Here is someone who has been doing lots since she began her recovery journey. I am in awe after reading this recent Facebook post from Meghan Perry about the initiatives that she has developed or been involved in over the years since she found recovery.
Professor Peter Gøtzsche is someone I hold in the highest regard. He is a Danish physician, a medical researcher, and co-founder of the Cochrane Foundation, a ‘British international charitable organisation formed to organise medical research findings to facilitate evidence-based choices about health interventions involving health professionals, patients and policy makers.’ (Wikipedia)
I recently drew up a list of topics I wanted to cover in my Revisiting Old Memories series in the future, and then selected a topic using a random number generator. Here is the blog post on that topic, which is based in part on a post I wrote for my ‘the prof speaks out’ Google blogspot on 
The Recovery Stories on this website were written in 2012, ready for our launch in 2013. Some of these Stories were written by the person, whilst others I wrote after interviewing the person (or people) on a number of occasions. In these latter cases, the stories went back and forth across the world, as most involved people lived in the UK and I had moved to Australia.
Here’s some wise words from one of my favourite people working in the mental health recovery field, Pat Deegan. This blog first appeared on Pat’s 
Over the past year, I’ve been writing new articles for Wired In, as well modifying some of the old articles. I’ve also made pdf documents for each article. I hope you will find some of the articles of value and enjoy reading them. Please feel free to download the pdf documents and pass around to other people.
I was greatly inspired by the book Community Building on the Web by Amy Jo Kim back in 2002, before Facebook was launched. Through reading this book, I became convinced of the power of web communities for helping tackle social issues. My vision was to build a Wired In virtual meeting place for peers to communicate with, and help, each other. A place where ideas could be developed and exchanged, and stories told.
When you ask people what difficulties a person faces when trying to overcome heroin addiction, most will focus on the early withdrawal symptoms, which comprise both physical and psychological elements.
In October 2006, I took early retirement from my Professorial position in the Department of Psychology at Swansea University in South Wales, in part to focus full-time on developing our Wired In grassroots initiative. In January 2008, I settled down to develop a new Wired In strategy, as well as write a Wired In Charter, which was published in April. I wanted people to get a better feel for what we were about. Here is that Charter:
I hold Dr. David McCartney in my highest regard. He not only overcame his serious alcohol problem, but also set up Lothians and Edinburgh Abstinence Programme (LEAP), a programme that offers structured treatment based in the community using a blend of evidence-based interventions. The patient group in treatment operates as a therapeutic community. I used to love visiting LEAP in my Wired In days, interacting with staff and patients as described in my last blog post.
