Professor James Stone

Professor James Stone

Professor of Psychiatry

Email: j.stone@bsms.ac.uk

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Novel treatments in psychiatry and neuroimaging 

My research interests are focused on developing new and more effective treatments for people with mental illness, understanding the underlying neurochemical basis of psychiatric conditions, and working towards personalised medicine approaches.

My PhD students are currently involved in a wide variety of different projects including using functional MRI in people with depression with the aim of helping them to modulate brain activity in response to self-blaming thoughts; investigating the role of self-awareness and interoception during fatigue in people with multiple sclerosis; the effect of ketamine on brain chemistry during treatment for depression and the role of opioid receptors; the role of GABA in early psychosis and the use of probiotics as a treatment in people with major depressive disorder.

I am also currently working on projects around the detection and management of self-harm and suicide attempts in people with mental illness, and the early detection of people at high risk of developing schizophrenia. As well as my research work, I am also a consultant psychiatrist in liaison psychiatry, and have set up a pilot ketamine clinic for the treatment of people with hard to treat depression at Eastbourne Hospital.

I am a co-director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness and am interested in supervising research proposals around the interface between consciousness research and psychiatry using approaches including neuroimaging, neurochemistry and fMRI neurofeedback. Some possible PhD projects would be around the use of strobe light-induced hallucinations in the treatment of mental illness and its effects on brain chemistry including glutamate; The use of fMRI neurofeedback in managing PTSD symptoms, and the measurement imaging markers of brain inflammation, dopamine and glutamate in people with mental illness.

I am interested in meeting prospective students to discuss new projects around these and other areas.

Key references 

Visit James Stone's profile for more details and a full list of publications.

Collaborators within Sussex Neuroscience include:

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