Dear Friend,
I hope you’ve been well, and had a lovely Christmas and New Years spent with family and friends. I’m writing this to you from Nottingham, after a month-long (perhaps too long, for someone like me) trip around Europe.
That’s lovely, but what is this? Well, this is a letter to you, a friend that I’ve known for years… whom I suspect would enjoy reading my ramblings and reflections.
This letter was sparked from an experience in London. When we first arrived, Alice told me she was particularly keen to go view the old manuscripts in the British Library. Turns out, they keep old letters and original handwritten drafts from great authors and works, including letters from Sylvia Plath (and her husband, Ted Hughes - you may remember Pike from highschool), author of The Bell Jar.
As we read through these dozens of letters, I found myself in awe of how candid and heartfelt (and beautifully written) these letters were to their friends. I thought: Wouldn’t it be lovely if people wrote more letters to their friends?
This is my attempt at sharing a few thoughts from the year that I think you might resonate with, some personal life updates (saves me typing the same things over and over on messenger), as well as an extensive laundry list of fun links that I think you might enjoy (if you’re friends with me, your brain may be wired a similarly odd way :)).
If you enjoy any of this - please write me back, in any medium you choose! I’d love to read any reflection or life updates of yours, too (this isn’t a para-social relationship, after all).
P.S. I will periodically write something here, when something catches my interest. Leave your email if you want life updates in your email, or if you’d prefer me to say them to you in-person instead.
*
2025 was difficult for me, and for parts of you, too, I suspect. It was, after all, the Zodiac year of the Snake - which I unwittingly learned was a sign of bad luck! I tried to keep the Chinese gods away with my red wristband, with some success, and also some failures.
Throughout my conversations with you this year, there were a few things that kept sticking.
We are at an age where family is always on our minds. Whenever we meet, we talk about our families. Our parents are not as young as they used to be, with illnesses and chronic pains. Our grandparents are struggling with becoming children again, whilst coming to the end of their lives. Our siblings have all their different challenges and we are left with larger responsibilities than ever. Doesn’t it feel hard growing up? There’s a sort of excitement in becoming our own person, but a loss of what once was. Whenever I do things that remind me of New Zealand: play video games, table tennis, or just joke around with you, I always think back to those silly, carefree times.
The other thing about our 20s is coming to terms with moving from the early to the dreaded mid (and, I daresay, late). We are running out of excuses, popular culture says - we need to have done the things we are destined to do, else we have fallen into a life of mediocrity and a banal existence. Everyone I’ve talked to this year feels this ever-present quarter life crisis. We are told that our twenties are the ‘best years’, when every ‘great’ individual is their most productive. And yet: we’re told to focus on work-life balance, to take mental health days, to explore the world, to have fun. Who do we listen to?
So many cultural forces push us to feel this sense of urgency, that we are ‘missing out’ on all these experiences that social media (our Pandora’s box) has opened up for us. AI probably doesn’t help; it’s remarkable to me that despite my niche interests, I find myself having these conversations in every discipline; in tech of course, but also in medicine, in law, in music, in the arts. AI seems as pervasive as religion in the current zeitgeist; apt given some prophetise it to be the coming of a machine god.
Do you feel this too? Amidst all this uncertainty, here is the perpetual, universal question for all of us: What should I do? Amidst rental crises, global wars and international tensions, loneliness epidemics, violent extremism, with one battle after another, I think we can be forgiven for being at a loss at times.
I certainly spent much of 2025 struggling with this question and feeling stuck. Many long reflections, many conversations over coffee and food, many flashes of inspiration starting in bursts of energy and followed by fizzles. Many tired nights.
If you do not struggle with this, I am very glad. I suspect you have a more stable media diet than me. If you do, my work-in-progress answer is this: We move forward.
If the world ends in 2027 (it won’t), all the more reason to move towards our passions. If not, all the more reason to have done it anyway. But the key is to move in a direction, any direction. Our future selves will be infinitely more grateful that we’ve had the courage to try something different, than to have lived in a world of perfect imagination.
So here’s to a year of moving forward, in any direction that you choose, in 2026.
Sincerely,
Kevin
*
Personal life updates, on where I am and what I’m currently up to…
(Of course, with the caveat that these are only the public-facing, filtered highlights ignoring all the difficult lows)
Finished up 3rd year of med school, ending with my psychiatry term which was the best time I’ve had in med so far.
Working at Resonait, startup that aims to translate EEG research on depression. Helped make some software and talk to a lot of psychologists/psychiatrists.
Got into fencing at the beginning of the year again, then stopped due to an injury… Instead switched to swimming.
Life Happenings -
Apr: Explored Stanford via the ASES program. Pretty cool place - I can see why there’s so much energy in SF.
May: Went to the annual psychiatry congress in Australia (RANZCP) via PIF support. Met some fellow psych-keen nerds.
Jun: Started writing a blog called Reverse Psychiatry, which hosts a bunch of thoughts on psychiatry and more. My proudest two essays are: 7 student reflections on psychiatry, and the limitations and potential of LLMs in psychiatry.
Aug: Finally finished my MD research project on diffusion MRI structural connectivity of the DMN - and also my time at the lab. Probably the most challenging work I’ve done to date.
Dec: Travelled a bunch of Europe. First across the Baltics/Balkans with Shayan/Matt, and then around central Europe (Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Berlin) with Alice. Plenty of anecdotes and stories here - about friends, flashbangs, dogs, Kafka, libraries, and hostels.
Upcoming Projects
Jan: In London for a research elective with Matthew Nour + Veith Weilnhammer exploring the dynamics of sycophancy and adverse mental health outcomes of LLMs
Jan-Mar: MoE: Building LLMs Safely project with Steve Duke - interview series with researchers, engineers, policymakers on how to reduce negative mental health outcomes from LLMs
Thursday Psychiatric Society: Thinking about starting a journal club around mental health and technology…
Feb: In Shanghai to shadow Dr Jiang Hai Feng, an addiction psychiatrist at the Shanghai Mental Health Centre
May: RANZCP with Louis Ereve - presenting my Jan research + debate on AI
Mar-Sept: Second Tongue project - interview series with Chinese-Australians and families with lived experience of mood disorders
Nov: Planning to run a triathlon - we’ll see if my body agrees
Problems Domains I’m Interested In
How can we reduce the psychological second order societal effects of AI?
How do we enable progress in psychiatry? (exploring both ‘mild’ and severe mental illness)
*
As you know, I am a Notion-fanatic - so much so that a little personal website I made this year pulls data from some of my databases.
One database is called Media List - which houses all of the random articles, books, movies, plays, and in general any form of media that I’ve consumed over the year.
Because you might share some of my interests, I wanted to throw the highlights here as my recommendations - I’ve bucketed them into sections on China & Culture, AI & Technology, Psychiatry, and Everything Else.
(WARNING: This is a long list. Explore at your own peril - organised in topics you can hopefully find something interesting!)
On China & Culture
Books: Wild Swans (Jung Chang) was a gripping story of 20th century China, following three generations of women who lived through WWII and the cultural revolution. I’ve found history much easier learnt through narrative; but *The Shortest History of China* (Linda Jaivin) also gives a nice chronological account. Both were great conversation starters with family.
Newsletters: ChinaTalk (Jordan Schenider et al.), *ChinAI* (Jeffrey Ding) are both great newsletters on China and technology.
Articles: A smattering across different publications, my favourites include -
Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race (Nov 2024) - The article that foretold the DeepSeek rush that occurred across CNY.
**Is China Racing to AGI? (Apr 2025)** - A socratic dialogue to the ‘AGI race’ debate, which gives a good overview of Chinese Tech.
**The Real China Model (Aug 2025, Dan Wang & Arthur Kroeber)** - Dan also published the book Breakneck, which coined the ideas of China being an engineering state, the US being a lawyerly state - reference across the media zeitgeist.
**america against china against america (Aug 2025, Jasmine Sun)** - A candid recount of a SF-based tech writer’s experience exploring Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou.
**The China Tech Canon (Oct 2025, Afra Wang)** - A great summation of the philosophies, great texts, and ideologies that govern Chinese tech thought.
Apps: GeoTrainer is hands-down the best app for learning geography. As someone shamefully embarrassed by my lack of knowledge here, this immensely helped boost my confidence from ‘completely silly’ to ‘acceptable world citizen’ - very worth the annual $15. China Provinces Free is an okay version for China.
Films: Yi Yi (2000) was one of my favourite films watched this year - a slice of life of three generations of a Taiwanese family. Turns out, I really like this format!
On Artificial Intelligence and Technology
Newsletters: Reboot is a cool group exploring how we make technology more humane,
Articles/Videos
**AI 2027 (Apr 2025, Kokotajlo & Alexander et al.)** - ****One of the most influential pieces of the year, which spurred significant debate. Certainly pushed me to consider dropping my MD for a moment.
**We’re Not Ready for Superintelligence (Jul 2025)** is the companion video essay by 80000hours, if you dislike text.
**AI as Normal Technology (Apr 2025, Arvind Narayanan et al.)** - Provides the foil to AI 2027. Big read.
**The Vanguard of Human Interaction (Aug 2025, Me!)** - Selfish plug, I wrote an article which links all of the key developments of AI in medicine from big tech.
**How To Become A Mechanistic Interpretability Researcher (Sept 2025, Neel Nanda)** - Great guide for anyone interested in the space.
**How Afraid of the A.I. Apocalypse Should We Be? (Oct 2025, Ezra Klein Show)** - Good layman summary of the AI safety crowd’s position, as proposed by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
**Andrej Karpathy - AGI is still a decade away (Oct 2025, Dwarkesh)** - Good pod from a well-respected ex-OpenAI founder giving more credence to the fear around AI - a foil to Yudkowsky.
**Taking Jaggedness Seriously (Nov 2025, Helen Toner)** - Great piece that gives a more nuanced opinion on the AI doom & gloom.
**The Thinking Game (Dec 2025)** - Excellent documentary on the current status quo, and going through the biography of Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind. A great predecessor to the first documentary that got me excited about AI, AlphaGo.
**2025 Letter (Zhengdong Wang)** and **Reflections on 2025 (Samuel Albanie)** - Both provide sober, frontier perspectives on the current status quo of AI, while pushing the case for the Compute Theory of Everything.
Research Articles (Both empirical, and psychiatry-AI specific)
**On the Biology of a Large Language Model (Mar 2025, Anthropic)** - What kicked off all of the excitement this year.
**An Intuitive Explanation of Sparse Autoencoders for LLM Interpretability (Jun 2024, Karvonen)** - Good for explaining how SAEs work
**The Platonic Representation Hypothesis (Jul 2024, Huh et al.)** - An earlier paper that also led to excitement
**Circuit Tracing: Revealing Computational Graphs in Language Models (Mar 2025, Anthropic)**
**Persona Vectors: Monitoring and Controlling Character Traits in Language Models (Jul 2025, Chen et al.)**
**Technological folie à deux: Feedback Loops Between AI Chatbots and Mental Illness (Jul 2025, Dohanny et al.)** - Paper from my supervisor that spurred my interest in the psychiatry x AI space!
**Understanding Reasoning in Thinking Language Models via Steering Vectors (Jul 2025, Venhoff et al.)**
**AI Induced Psychosis: A shallow investigation (Aug 2025, Tim Hua)** - A great primary survey across the reality of AI psychosis, across different models
**In Search Of AI Psychosis (Aug 2025, Alexander)** - Epidemiological study and thoughtful musings from a psychiatrist (and prolific blogger).
**The Circuits Research Landscape: Results and Perspectives (Aug 2025, Neuronpedia)** - Strong overview of circuit-based interpretability
**Stress Testing Deliberative Alignment for Anti-Scheming Training (Sept 2025, Apollo/OpenAI)**
**Protecting the well-being of our users (Dec 2025, Anthropic)** - Anthropic’s summary of their implemented measures and safety research to date.
On Psychiatry
Books: Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis (James Davies) was a great read exploring the entanglement of the pharmaceutical industry and misaligned incentives in government.
Newsletters: Psychiatry at the Margins (Awais Aftab) is my favourite and all-round great thinker, Rational Psychiatry (Thomas Reilly) for good research perspectives, Polypharmacy (Nils Wendel) for good drug takes.
TV, Videos, Plays:
The Pitt (Aug 2025) - Not psychiatry, but felt relevant to put here given medicine - a great TV series that seems to be universally recognised as most accurate portrayal of Emergency medicine to date.
**Bipolar Express (Sept 2025, Yeung)** - Engaging play which depicts mania well.
**lifewasters (Nov 2025, vewn)** - Victoria Vincent is probably the best internet content creator that explores a modern world entangled with technology, with such a unique art style.
Articles:
**Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease (May 2010, Alexander)** - Referenced in my reflections, best article I’ve seen which attacks the fuzzy philosophical question of what a disease is, particularly relevant in psychiatry.
**Cost Disease In Medicine: The Practical Perspective (Jun 2018, Alexander)** - Outlines the economic case on what is the truly most utilitarian method of delivering psychiatric outpatient care.
**Looking to the Future of Depression: Instant Diagnosis and Medication-Free Treatment (Jul 2019, Mansson)** - Unique early interview of Flow Neuroscience founder, Daniel Mansson on his philosophy and starting the company.
**On mental health, psychedelics and life (Aug 2024, Felix Hill)** - CW: Suicide. An incredibly vulnerable letter of a DeepMind researcher who struggled through depression, warns against ketamine, who took his own life.
**On Priesthood (Jan 2025, Alexander)** - Phenomenal article that shaped my worldview on the limitations of institutions, and the driving motivation for my article on the legitimacy of psychiatric interventions
**How Antidepressants Work (Apr 2025, Aftab)** - Seminal article which summarises modern understanding of antidepressant mechanisms, far beyond just monoamine hypotheses. Inspiration for article on depression.
**Rich Girl Rehab (Jul 2025, Sorbie)** - Candid and nuanced lived experience story depicting a private mental healthcare journey.
**An open mea culpa to Martha Linehan (Oct 2025, Sorbie)** - Great article on BPD.
**You Aren’t In The DSM (Oct 2025, Aftab)** - One of the best articles this year on the limitations and overdiagnosis spurred by the diagnostic criteria.
**Return of Psychiatric Eugenics (Dec 2025, Reilly)** - Provocative and fascinating description of modern issues around genetic screening and its historical roots in fascist Nazism.
**Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. At What Cost? (Dec 2025, Rachel Aviv)** - A psychological in-depth biography of one of my favourite authors, Oliver Sacks.
Journal Articles/Academic Works:
**Lithium salts in the treatment of psychotic excitement (Sept 1949, Cade)** - One of the seminal articles from a prominent Australian psychiatrists who discovered lithium as a treatment for Bipolar, which spurred this article on mania.
**Mental Health of Chinese Immigrants in Australia (Mar 2021, Minas)** - Perspective and historical account of the Chinese diasporic population in Australia and their acculturation
**Psychometric origins of depression (May 2021, McPherson & Armstrong)** - Discusses the evolution of depression rating scales from WWII.
**Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines: From publication to practice (July 2024, Horowitz et al.)** - Presentation on how to describe, and the incidence of psychiatric medication usage across Australia
**Depression: A Decision-Theoretic Analysis (Feb 2015, Huys) -** One of the earliest articles that sold me on the field of computational psychiatry as doing something special
On Everything Else
Newsletters
*Astral Codex Ten/LessWrong*: Have really dug into the rationalist community a lot more this year; found it to have lots of great insights in the right doses. Scott Alexander consistently has paradigm-shifting articles (as referenced numerous times throughout this).
Asimov Press: Great newsletter on deep science and technology.
Asterisk Magazine: This publication just keep cropping up across things I’ve read.
Experimental History: Great witty commentary on science and how we can do it better.
Escaping Flatland: One of the first bloggers that inspired me to start writing, more personal reflective of the substack genre.
The Hemingway Report: Unique publication on the economics and science behind mental health businesses.
Works in Progress: Only just started this at the end of the year, but boy, are these some awesome articles featuring the theme of progress studies.
Ruxandra’s Substack: Best perspectives I’ve seen on biopharma and reforming clinical trials.
Articles
**We Need a New Science of Progress (Aug 2019, Collison & Cowen)** - Seminal article on how to reject modern stagnancy; I think we need a mental health/psychiatry subfield.
**The Parable Of The Talents (Nov 2021, Alexander)** - The limits of meritocracy and the issue of the ‘growth mindset’.
**Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (Mar 2015, Yudkowsky)** - The same guy worried about AI and founder of LessWrong also wrote a fanfiction on Harry Potter - something that I binged over 2 weeks.
**What will it take for AI to change drug discovery? (Nov 2025, Teslo)** - Incisive perspective on the limitations and utility of AI in drug development.
Podcasts: Ezra Klein Show is a great all-rounder podcast on political topics, Freakonomics/Capitalisn’t are enjoyable listens on economics, Dwarkesh Podcast is where I still get my beats on AI.
If you made it here, congrats. Let me know if you read any of the above! I’d love to hear if any of this huge list was helpful.