With a supportive environment on your side, you can successfully carve out your own bespoke professional and educational path, and wonderful opportunities will arise in the process

After graduating with a BSc in Psychology from UCL in 2021, I wanted to further explore human behaviour and mental health through a neuroscience-based approach, evolve my understanding of medical statistics and research methods, and learn more about healthcare policy and practices in the UK and globally. Finding a graduate programme that would allow me to take modules across my interests was difficult, and getting a full-time job offer in life sciences consulting made it unlikely for me to be able to pursue graduate studies in the near future.

Just then, I found out about the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care, and I knew it was the perfect fit – not only could I take the course part-time and continue working full-time, but I could choose most of my modules and was given a great degree of freedom when selecting essay and dissertation topics, ensuring the content I was learning aligned with my interests. I also had the opportunity to meet classmates from a range of interesting backgrounds, including medical doctors, vets, lawyers, engineers, and computer scientists; they were all very eager to discuss our common interest in health sciences, and openly shared their wealth of experience and knowledge with me.

I was also very lucky to have an amazing dissertation supervisor, Professor Mike Clarke, who also delivered a very insightful module on Systematic Reviews methodology. Under his guidance, I conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis on the antidepressant effectiveness of psilocybin, which is a psychedelic substance derived from certain mushroom species. This study produced some interesting results which had not been explored in relevant literature to date; for instance, we found that psilocybin’s treatment effects were positive overall, but also are significantly moderated by demographic factors, such as the patient's age, specific type of depression (primary or secondary), and prior experience with psychedelic substances, and factors related to clinical trial design, such as the type of test used to assess symptoms, and the influence of expectancy effects. More specifically, patients who had a physical illness (eg cancer) in addition to depression, older patients, and patients who had used psilocybin in the past seemed to benefit more from this type of treatment. The same was true for patients in clinical trials where depression symptoms were assessed by self-test, rather than clinician-assessed measures. We theorise that these findings can be to an extent attributed to the high prevalence of expectancy effects in psilocybin research, with many studies reporting that most participants could easily guess if they had been allocated to the psilocybin or placebo condition. Lastly, we suggested improvements that could be made in future study designs to reduce these expectancy effects, and discussed the feasibility of implementing such a costly and complex treatment paradigm in routine clinical practice.

With Professor Clarke’s support, I decided to try to publish my findings and to my surprise, our paper was accepted in the BMJ, one of the highest-impact medical journals globally. This is an opportunity I never expected to have, and I feel incredibly grateful to see my research recognised in such a significant way, especially since my path has not been that of a typical academic researcher. Overall, this is the greatest lesson I learned during my time in Oxford – with a supportive environment on your side, you can successfully carve out your own bespoke professional and educational path, and wonderful opportunities will arise in the process.

Find out more about the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care, and the Systematic Reviews module, which can also be taken as a standalone short course.