My name is Niall Crumlish. I am the guy above on the left with the happy dazed expression like “That’s Mark Eitzel right there!!” I am a psychiatrist in Dublin but before I was a psychiatrist I was a music fan and music writer. I’ve written for Hot Press and State and a few other places. I started Psychiatry and Songs in 2015 to respond to a piece I disliked about ECT in a Sunday paper and my first few posts were psychiatry-themed but since 2016 it’s been essentially all songs. Still, I’ve been working in psychiatric care since 1999, and I’m sure that perspective comes across in the posts. I’m influenced in my way of writing about music by the close reading approach of Narrative Medicine, in which I qualified in May 2022. In Psychiatry & Songs posts I typically document a close listen to an individual song rather than attempt anything on a larger scale. There is such a wealth of information in one fine song that one song is as much as I can cover in a few hundred words. I also use this site to post some pieces first published in Hot Press and some pieces that were originally on State, a great energetic site that sadly went offline, archive and all, in 2018. My email is niall@psychiatryandsongs.com.