"Government of Spain, in case you hadn't noticed, its citizens are committing suicide." This is how the researcher and science communicator Ignacio Roura Blanco (A Coruña, 1997), better known as @neuronacho, expresses himself in an Instagram video in which he criticizes the institutional campaign Let's talk about #SaludMental.
It is one of the issues that most concerns this Galician scientist determined to disseminate knowledge and combat misinformation in Spanish society, for which he does not hesitate to refute widespread beliefs or speeches of famous people such as Pablo Motos about dopamine or the potential of your thoughts.
A task that combines with his research into sleep disorders and his link with a group of neurodegenerative diseases among which Parkinson's stands out. Roura is one of the 105 brilliant young Spaniards who this year has obtained one of the doctoral and postdoctoral scholarships awarded this Wednesday by the "la Caixa" Foundation. After graduating in Psychology from the University of Santiago de Compostela and pursuing a master's degree at the University of Maastricht, he had options to continue his training abroad, but chose a doctorate in Medicine and Translational Research at the Institute of Neurosciences of the University of Barcelona.
"My thesis focuses on an early symptom called REM sleep behavior disorder and can appear 10 to 20 years before developing Parkinson's symptoms. While sleeping, the person performs the movements with which he is dreaming and that is something that we know that in health conditions should not happen. The main objective is to try to know what are the characteristics of the early stages of these neurodegenerative diseases for which there is no cure, because that will allow personalizing the treatment, "he summarizes in a telephone interview.
The year before the start of his doctorate he dedicated it fully to dissemination, giving talks in institutes in Galicia, and writing his first book, The Millennial Brain: "My goal was to try to provide some of the results in neuroscience on topics that are on the lips of many people of my generation, the millennial or Z generation. In social networks there is a lot of talk about sexuality, sexual orientations, pleasure... But it was necessary to provide rigor and above all a simple and attractive language that respected the scientific method." In addition, he stresses that "scientific knowledge is generated through public funds", and believes that "it is a right of people to be informed about the results of research".
"Although it seems not", this researcher believes that "in general, Spanish society is more interested in knowledge than is believed a priori, because communication has sometimes been done in a different code than the one that manages the street. I think that many people do not have the active will to be informed but I think it has been because it has not been explained that science can become very attractive.
More than the response of young people, he says that what has given him the most satisfaction has been the reception of older people: "They have come to the presentations of the book or have written to me, and I was excited that a lady of about 70 years told me that she had liked hearing about the female orgasm and the consequences of stress on her body. "
Roura thinks that her own generation has not received sex education formally, or within families, to embrace it as another dimension, because she considers that "either it is criminalized or there are certain stigmas, also with sex-affective diversity. Neither I nor my friends have been explained to us as children that your sexuality is enjoyable, that it is something we nourish ourselves on."
Regarding the sexual knowledge of young people, he believes that something similar to what happens with mental health happens: "It is true that we talk more than in the time of our parents and grandparents but it does not imply that it is necessarily spoken better. In that impetus to deal with these issues, I think that sometimes the rigor and the middle ground are lost. Mental health is on everyone's lips, influencers, on TV... And although it seems necessary to make it visible, there are risks, such as pathologizing normal processes of daily life or trivializing these issues," he says.
Her Instagram videos are followed by more than 85,000 people, of which 84% are women: "The global range between 13 and 65, but 50% of the people who follow me are between 25 and 34 years old." It is allowed to make relatively long videos at a time when synthesis prevails: "Before they reached 15 minutes, they are getting shorter but but they are still long for what Instagram usually rewards," he says.
He also wanted to explain why social networks work so well: "It is because they take advantage of brain mechanisms that we have been perfecting over thousands of years. And that is concentrated by platforms that aim to spend as much time as possible on them and if you buy, better. "
We asked him for examples of scientific misinformation: "There are a few but I would mention those that are related to the biological basis of mental disorders. There are professionals who continue to defend that they invariably have a biological basis, so many people think that depression occurs because you have alterations in serotonin, or that if you have a psychotic break it is something that will stay for life, "he says. "Depression is something much more complex, there are many types and, therefore, not all respond the same to a drug. It is not denied that biology and the organic part play an important role but it should be emphasized that the brain and brain chemistry is plastic."
The researcher stresses that "we cannot equate suicide, which is the leading cause of unnatural death in people between 15 and 29 years old, with mental health disorders, because not all people who commit suicide have a mental health disorder or vice versa." With regard to suicide, he considers that "the main thing is that at the institutional level money is allocated for a comprehensive national prevention plan, which is not limited to making a telephone like the one that has been made, 024, but that is a care carried out by clinical psychologists, which does not have an eminently pharmacological treatment. "
With regard to mental health disorders, he considers it important to increase the number of PIR (Resident Internal Psychologist) places and that two be added to the specialty of clinical psychology, neuropsychology and clinical psychology for children, "because nobody would think it normal for a gynecologist to operate on one eye. And all this has to be added measures at the institutional level of protection of human rights so that a person can live without being subjected to constant stress for being able to afford housing or feed their children."
Do you screw up a lot in the media? "Very, obviously the media and journalists know how the news is going to work. Although there are exceptions, I think there is a tendency to look for clickbait, to simplify the results of some studies as much as possible. It happens a lot in cancer research, a couple of times a year it seems that some type of cancer has been cured and then you see that it is in mice or in a very specific type of cancer. Neuroscience is extremely attractive because the brain is the most complex organ but there are very daring people when it comes to talking about it. There are two risks, you misinform and discredit the work of researchers in the field who see their research of many years reduced to a headline that does not reflect what you have done. "
We ended up asking him what keeps him up at night: "I always defend that sharing vulnerabilities and difficulties is a strength, and I understand it as an open door to create bonds of people who help each other, so I worry that many times this saying that we feel bad or that we do not see ourselves capable is taken as a symptom of weakness. If we all pretend that nothing happens to anyone, in the end we believe that we are the only ones who scratch ourselves for problems. There's nothing wrong with being vulnerable."
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