Sorry Uncle, I never became a psychiatrist.

That may seem like a strange way to begin an article, but there is a reason behind it.

Decades ago, when I was a young university student, I studied psychology, among other subjects. My uncle, a friendly and outgoing fellow, would make jokes about my grandfather (his father) getting free therapy once I became a psychiatrist. Indicating towards me, he told my grandad, ‘he’s going to be a psychiatrist, so you can get all the free therapy you need!’

Beneath the joking around, I sensed that my uncle carried a certain pride that his nephew was going to be a psychiatrist. I did not have the heart to tell him that I was never going to be a psychiatrist. Psychology is a distinct field from psychiatry – I did not want to spoil the moment.

Psychiatry is based in medicine; psychiatrists are medical doctors who specialise in workings and disorders of the brain. They are trained in neuroscience, and approach patients from a clinical and neurological perspective. They can prescribe medications if required.

Psychologists are not medical doctors, but they study human behaviour, emotions, cognitive processes and development, and the neuroscience of the brain and nervous system. They approach mental health through talk therapy, solving mental health problems through nonmedical techniques, such as behavioural modification and cognitive changes.

This does not mean the two fields are in direct opposition – far from it. Psychologists and psychiatrists can and do work in tandem, both intending to achieve the same goals of managing and improving mental health. Psychiatrists are graduates in medicine, while psychologists possess a doctorate in social sciences. Psychiatrists approach mental disorders as malfunctions in the human brain, prioritising a medical approach. Psychologists examine the social, emotional, cultural and environmental conditions that impact mental health.

Every one of us is an amateur psychologist of sorts, examining and trying to make sense of people’s behaviour. Other people are such an important part of our daily lives, we must continue our interactions within a social and cultural matrix composed of networks of people. Understanding patterns of human behaviour partly explains the persistence (and ongoing popularity) of astrology.

The particular pseudoscience of astrology exploits our basic need to understand ourselves, our cultural environment and the behaviour of the people around us. We want to know what the future holds for us, and people are an important determinant factor. Horoscopes give us ready-made tools to approach human behaviour. Astrology is still generalised balderdash, but it is widespread.

We can laugh it off, but then consider the following. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration, with its finger on the nuclear button, employed astrologers as consultants for its foreign and domestic policies. When the US administration, with its power to obliterate life on Earth, listens and takes seriously the ‘findings’ of astrology, then that is no laughing matter.

We are all aware that nuclear conflagration would mean the end of life as we know it. Surely no one is mad enough to advocate a strike that would predictably provoke a nuclear response from rival powers?

Well, in 1958, then US President Dwight Eisenhower rejected demands by his military chiefs to launch a nuclear attack on China. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the leading body of uniformed officers in the Department of Defence, advocated attacking China with nuclear weapons, in particular to support Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist militants. The latter had been launching commando raids into mainland China from two northern Taiwanese islands.

Eisenhower overruled the Navy and Air Force top brass, but this incident is very revealing. Psychopaths are not always the creepy loners depicted in the movies, but also wear uniforms and business suits, ingratiate themselves into society’s institutions, and are high functioning individuals, making decisions impacting our lives.

In this day and age, we cannot talk about mental health without addressing the issue of artificial intelligence (AI). We can all see the widespread impact of AI over numerous fields of human activity, and mental health is no exception. AI chatbots are currently providing a growing avenue of mental health applications. Talking to a chatbot – is that beneficial for our mental health and wellbeing?

The answer to that question is – it depends on how you use it. Chatbots provide an easily accessible, 24/7 readily available service of mental health. The privacy of the chat is appealing, and its immediate accessibility is important. Appointments with psychologists and psychiatrists take time, and there is still the stigma surrounding seeing a therapist. For instance, the New York Times has been running a series of articles attacking the efficacy of psychiatry and psychotropic drugs.

Whether the NY Times is correct or not, I do not know. I do know that telling only one side of the story – the ‘psychiatry is bad and relies on pushing drugs’ claim – only adds to the stigma of seeking out help for mental illnesses.

While AI chatbots may be beneficial in the short term, they lack a crucial dimension – empathy. The emotional support and connections provided by human interactions cannot be replicated by AI. Chatbots are great for chatting, but they cannot diagnose and treat mental health disorders. Emotional intelligence is just as important as technical abilities when addressing mental health issues.

I feel compelled to ask how AI chatbots are going to assist the Palestinian children in Gaza, currently undergoing a catastrophic trauma facing the relentless attacks by the Israeli army. Their trauma is going to be generational, as they experience the destruction of the society in which they live. Palestinian children in Gaza are dealing with severe anxiety, depression, nightmares, and a worsening humanitarian crisis. Human solidarity and connection with the outside world is needed more than ever.

How about we construct a society that measures its success, not by the number of billionaires it has, but by the number of people lifted out of serious mental health issues?

The US Energy Department, every few months, recycles a particular proposal for approaching the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence (AI). The proposal, last mentioned in July by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, is that the United States requires a new Manhattan Project for AI. The US, it is argued, faced with strong competition from international powers in the AI area, needs to achieve predominance in AI technology so rival nations will be forced to acquiesce to US demands.

This analogy, while seductive in its simplicity, is based on false premises, and will lead to a mutually destructive AI race. New technologies must be developed, not on the basis of national paranoia and a desire for military superiority, but in a collaborative and demilitarised setting – there is enough knowledge capital and glory to go around.

The Manhattan Project was the American government’s effort to construct an atomic weapon. That project, while seemingly successful with the detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as culminating points, contains dangerous illusions. Rather than a template for success, the Manhattan Project provides a cautionary tale about a runaway arms race, a case where a scientific project was unguided by ethical considerations.

The militarisation of nuclear technology rested on the false assumption that security and safety reside in superseding other nations. Eric Ross, writing in Common Dreams magazine, states that US President Harry Truman regarded the Manhattan Project as the biggest scientific gamble in history.

The premise for building a nuclear weapon was that Nazi Germany was rapidly constructing an atomic bomb – a premise the Allied powers knew to be false. American and British intelligence had penetrated the communications network of Nazi Germany’s military. While German scientists were working on a controlled nuclear chain reaction, they were decades away from creating anything resembling a nuclear weapon.

By 1945, with Germany’s armies in retreat, and Japan actively considering terms of surrender (months prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the original premise of nuclear weapons construction – that our enemies were building one – evaporated.

Indeed, the first human-induced controlled nuclear chain reaction was achieved in the United States in 1942. Dubbed the Chicago Pile 1, this successful nuclear chain reaction was done under the supervision of Italian-born American physicist Enrico Fermi. The scientists working in the Chicago laboratory were well aware of the potential military application of nuclear power, and fought tooth-and-nail to prevent the militarisation of atomic power.

Throughout the war years, the Chicago scientists, such as Leo Szilard, adamantly opposed the development of nuclear weapons. Their appeals and protests were ignored by the emergent military-scientific complex.

The Chicago physicists were acutely aware of the catastrophic consequences of building atomic weapons. They asked the US government that if these weapons were to be used against Japan, it would be advisable to first demonstrate the power of the atomic bomb by targeting a militarily neutral, uninhabited region. That would give the Tokyo authorities time to reconsider their position, should they witness the devastating effects of the atomic bomb. Such proposals were ignored by the US military authorities.

July this year marked the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test project, the first controlled nuclear explosion on Earth. Detonated at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16 1945, the location was in desert country, but was totally uninhabited. New Mexico residents downwind of the explosion – the downwinders – suffered the effects of radiation poisoning, and died of numerous types of cancers.

The Trinity explosion was conducted under the supervision of the Los Alamos laboratory, the heart of the Manhattan Project. The scientists who protested the military application of nuclear research made their voices loud and clear at the very inception of nuclear technology. Their ethical concerns, and their warnings regarding the starkly nightmarish scenario of nuclear war, was suppressed.

Soon after the end of World War 2, the Soviet Union and other nations quickly embarked on their own nuclear weapon projects, thus ushering in the arms race predicted by the Chicago scientists. Drawing parallels between the onset of the nuclear age, and the dawning age of AI, is not completely wrong, but we must not replicate the problems and hazardous outcomes of the Manhattan Project.

Being at the forefront of a new wave of technology, numerous scientists and computer engineers have warned of the harmful consequences of untrammelled AI. In fact, more commentators are pointing out the deleterious consequences of AI data centres on the environment. Data centres, which are the powerhouses generating answers to our AI questions, consume vast quantities of water to cool down – and consume enough electricity to power small cities.

Each query that we make with AI requires natural resources to power the computer processing required for a successful answer. AI is being used as a digital substitute for human activity, answering everything from our medical questions, addressing our mental health, matching us with potential romantic partners, designing our graphics, writing our essays – and hallucinating its fair share of bullshit in the process.

It is not exaggeration to say that AI is being used to con all of us – replacing human judgements with a stochastic parrot. Are there no useful purposes for AI? Yes, we can answer our basic questions in record time. However, relying on AI will be our collective downfall. The AI arms race between nations has already begun in many ways. Note the hyper-anxiety of the Anglophone corporate media when China released its own cheaper, more easily accessible version of AI, DeepSeek.

China’s DeepSeek AI burst the US Silicon Valley AI bubble, and signalled to the world that the United States (nor any other single nation for that matter) would be able to achieve AI unipolarity, monopolising the technology as a way to coerce other countries. The United States has a long history of deploying nuclear weapons superiority as a form of geopolitical blackmail.

It is time to divest the big tech oligarchy of its power to control and deploy AI in a way that displaces human labour. AI can actually supplement labouring activities, and serve our needs, not the profit margins of the tech giants.

It is difficult to overstate the impact of ancient DNA on multiple scientific fields. Since the 1980s, the explosion of research into ancient DNA has positively impacted the fields of genetics, biology, archaeology, palaeontology – just to name a few areas of scientific enquiry.

Ancient DNA – any DNA that is over fifty years old – is brittle and can be difficult to preserve. Extracting ancient DNA from fossils is a painstaking and meticulous process, but one that yields significant results for scientific investigators. It has provided insights into the genetic heritage of modern day ethnic groups, as well as revealing information about human migration patterns.

Let’s start with a basic question that illustrates the diverse impact of ancient DNA. What image comes to mind with the mention of the word Vikings? The stereotype is that of tall, blonde, fair-skinned marauding warriors in horned helmets. While there is an element of truth to that image, the reality is far more complex. Vikings does not refer to an ethnicity or race, but a job description, similarly to the word pirate.

Indeed, the Vikings were not the pure white master race of all-conquering giants as the white supremacists of today would have us believe. Ancient DNA has revealed a surprisingly different reality from the one bequeathed to us in stereotypes. The Vikings were an ethnically mixed society of people, and they traded and intermingled with the peoples they interacted with much more than we have been led to believe.

In new research into the ancient DNA – from Viking skeletons – archaeologists and historians have hit upon a conclusion they have long suspected. The Vikings were a mishmash of genetic materials from across Europe and the lands they conquered. Southern and Eastern European genes were included in the Viking admixture, and their increasing scope of conquest meant further diversification of their genetic makeup. The Viking society did not always equate with purely Norse Scandinavian ancestry.

Viking occupants of what are today Denmark and coastal Sweden shared more DNA with Anatolian people, rather than with the residents of inland Scandinavia. Trading with Constantinople as the first stop, the Vikings found that city as a stepping stone for interactions with peoples from the Islamic and Asiatic East.

The Vikings actually traded with the Islamic empire, and sent emissaries and traders to venture along the Silk Routes, an interconnected network of trade roads connecting China to the Islamic work and the West. It was the mercantile superhighway of its times.

Close encounters of the medieval kind are not the only insights garnered from ancient DNA.

We have all been taught that Homo sapiens, migrating out of Africa, went on to conquer the world. This is an appealing story of triumphant progress, but it is also misleading. Over the last few decades, we are steadily discovering that ours is only one of several ancestral hominin species – and humans have interbreed with Neanderthals, Denisovans and others.

We like to think of human prehistory as one of raw and unbridled competition, where humans ultimately triumphed in a hominin gladiatorial Thunderdome. Outcompeting ostensibly weaker rival hominins appeals to our hypercompetitive capitalist ethos, where (supposedly) only the most efficient and competitive entrepreneurs survive and flourish, while all others fall into oblivion as a result of their own inadequacies.

Actually, intermixing and interbreeding were just as important, and ancient DNA is providing insights into this topic.

Humans shared the world, the resources and genes, with hominin cousins, the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other types of extinct hominin species.

The human story is not just that of migrations, wars, conquest and cultural assimilation. As people have travelled, so have words, languages and syntax. What has this got to do with ancient DNA?

Well, ancient DNA is helping to solve a longstanding linguistic mystery; the origins of Europe’s Uralic language speakers. The Uralic language group includes Estonian, Hungarian and Finnish. These languages are quite distinct from Slavic. How did they end up in Eastern Europe?

While Indo-European languages were brought by mass migration and invasions, the Uralic languages spread in a more cautious, step-by-step way. Investigators have tracked the movement of Uralic speakers across northern Asia and Europe, originating in a region of Siberian Russia called Yakutia.

Closer to Alaska, Yakutia is a vast expanse of boreal forest in northeastern Siberia. The genetic markers of Uralic speakers have been found in Yakut populations, and these speakers spread throughout the taiga forest, all the way to the Baltic and Hungarian Europe.

The importance of ancient DNA lies not just in the sophistication of the scientific techniques used to extract it from fossils and preserve it. It lies in the collaborative approach among biologists, geneticists and archaeologists towards resolving persistent problems in science.

I did not want to comment directly on the so-called ‘march for Australia’ held in multiple locations across Australia on August 31, because there has already been a tsunami of commentary regarding these anti-immigrant, racist marches. There were sustained and numerous anti-racist counter protests, which was wonderful to see.

What I wanted to do in this article is address a frequently heard complaint by the Aussie-first MAGA-copycat crowd – that once in Australia, migrants should speak English and assimilate. Throughout my life, I have heard (and my late father heard) the highly intelligent admonition to ‘speak fucken English’ from an intelligent Anglo observer.

First, let’s clarify – my father, born in Egypt to Armenian parents, learned multiple languages in school. The usual practice in Egyptian schools at that time (1940s and 50s) was to teach students more than one language. Indeed, learning different languages is highly recommended by educators and teachers, making students better thinkers and global citizens. Embracing multilingualism is a key part of a child’s education.

Secondly, my father learned English (as well as Armenian, Arabic and French) not for the express purpose of emigration. He learned from textbooks written and published in England, and he listened to the BBC. In the early 1960s, he arrived in Australia – and he encountered an obstacle. The English he had learned in school was not the language spoken in Australia. He had to learn Australian English.

Australian English is a uniquely parochial product of the intermingling of English, Irish, Scottish and a smattering of Welsh – a melding of words and accents. Throw in the contributions of First Nations words – kookaburra, kangaroo, Burramattagal (which the convicts corrupted into Parramatta) and this unique admixture poses a passing resemblance to what my father learned in school.

So if the highly intelligent participants in the March for Australia feel so strongly about migrants speaking English, I invite them to become English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers, so they can pass on their developed English language skills to incoming migrants.

There is the standard Aussie ‘Strayan accent, consisting of elongated vowels and liberally sprinkled with swearing. The late Steve Irwin had that accent, or the comedian Julia Morris does today. Then there is the cultivated accent, closer to the Received Pronunciation (what used to be called the Queen’s English). Malcolm Turnbull speaks with that accent. Cate Blanchett, while not strictly speaking with the Received Pronunciation, maintains a difference from the common Australian strine.

The Armenians do not need lessons in assimilation. We have been doing that for centuries. Wherever Armenians in the diaspora have landed, they have contributed to the new host nation, while also remaining true to heritage.

William Saroyan (1908 – 1981) was an Armenian-American short story writer, playwright and poet. Living most of his life in California, he wrote extensively about the experiences of diaspora life. His birthday was August 31; the 117th anniversary of his birth just passed without fanfare or publicity.

Stephen Fry wrote that Saroyan is an under-appreciated writer, who should take his place alongside Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner.

Before you think that Saroyan refused to assimilate or was unconcerned about the lives of his fellow Americans, think again. His novels and stories display a deep concern about the social malaise, the difficulties and tribulations of the Great Depression. He did not isolate himself in an exclusionary and insular Armenian community, but did his utmost to engage with the social and economic issues of his times.

In February last year, French President Emmanuel Macron honoured French Armenian World War Two resistance fighter Missak Manouchian (1909 – 1944). Inducted into the Pantheon, the often overlooked Manouchian was a poet who arrived in France after surviving the 1915 genocide.

Taking up arms against the Nazi occupation forces, Manouchian bravely led resistance fighters against the fascist tyranny. He was caught and executed in 1944. He witnessed the same underlying genocidal logic of the Pan-Turkish state’s exclusivist ideology, and that of the white supremacist Nazis. Fighting and dying for one’s adopted homeland qualifies, I think, as a successful example of assimilation.

Before you shout at us to speak English, or the equally puerile ‘fit in or fuck off’, take a look at how Armenians have assimilated into, and contributed to, their adopted homelands for centuries.