Sex, Drugs and Big Mutations

Sex does matter when it comes to mood disorders. Women are twice as likely as men to experience an episode of depression and it has long been recognised that childbirth is a time of considerable risk for episodes of severe mental illness. There are many potential explanations for these differences, from the social and psychological, to the biological, genetic and hormonal. I will discuss the research in Cardiff that is attempting to understand the causes of postpartum mood disorders and my work - with BBC’s EastEnders for example - to reduce the stigma that still exists for these conditions.

How frequent are mutations in humans? Do they cause psychiatric disorders? In this talk I will present a class of mutations called copy number variants, that can affect up to millions of bases of our DNA and lead to a variety of psychiatric and medical disorders. What happens to such large mutations, is there still selection among humans? I will demonstrate how copy number variants allow us to answer these questions without having all the data and what they teach us about severe psychiatric disorders.

Dr Mat Hoskins is a Psychiatrist and Clinical Lecturer who is hoping to start the world's first brain imaging study to explore how the novel psychedelic compound MDMA could be used to assist trauma psychotherapy in patients with chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD.