Key take-away:
Trajectories of depression may not be explained fully by HIV status alone, but better predicted when accounting for other risk factors such as inflammation.

Huge thanks to colleagues in US and Uganda - a fruitful collaboration that started with a chat at @interestconf.bsky.social!

// We must be able to speak about failure without folding it back into a neat part of the narrative of success and without tidying away the hurt that accompanies it.

Sometimes, our research doesn’t feel good, and sometimes we are ill. That’s ok. //

// The chrononormativity of UKHE is manic. Overwork and urgency are the normative experience for academics, and conforming to these strictures of time is rewarded through the systems of recognition in universities which seek to extract ever more from ever fewer human resources. //

I've been getting this a lot on ResearchGate too - and occasionally no amount of verifying will let me get through. Perhaps I am not human enough for the bots anymore...

Our work leveraged the large scale of Our Future Health to generate new hypotheses and provide insights into the relationship between #autoimmune and #mentalhealth conditions with unprecedented statistical precision. Future research should explore the causal mechanisms behind these associations.

We found that the risk for experiencing mental health conditions was *almost double* in people with autoimmune conditions compared to the general population. Interestingly, this risk remained high after adjusting for relevant factors and was virtually identical for most mental health conditions.

Mental health issues were more prevalent in women, in particular, even when compared to men with the same autoimmune conditions.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found that people with autoimmune conditions were more likely to report lifetime diagnoses of mental health conditions, and also current symptoms of depression or anxiety (measured using screening tools as part of Our Future Health questionnaires).

We analysed the associations between lifetime diagnoses of 6 autoimmune conditions and 3 mental health issues (depression, anxiety, bipolar).

Our analysis accounted for many relevant factors such as age, ethnicity, household income, chronic pain, and more.