Mental health

Mental health

Over the course four months, Thomas lost his job as a funeral director, began living out of a van out in the desert, and completely emptied his savings. It all started after he began talking to AIs like ChatGPT for advice, and he soon got hooked. It "inflated my worldview and my view of myself" almost instantly, he told Slate. Eventually, he found himself wandering the dunes of Christmas Valley, Oregon, after an AI told him to "follow the pattern" of his consciousness.

At an event in Tennessee on Wednesday touting new nutrition guidelines that emphasize eating a diet rich in red meat, whole milk and animal fats, Kennedy said that a doctor at Harvard had cured schizophrenia using keto diets and that there were studies showing people lose their bipolar diagnosis by changing their diet. A person eating a ketogenic diet typically gets at least 70 percent of their calories from fat, about 20 percent from protein and as little from carbohydrates as possible.

There were perhaps 30 people - mostly elderly, along with a few young families and some teenagers. What struck me was not devotion, but density: a quiet, shared weight of lived suffering. Not dramatic or loud - just present. Many faces seemed marked by difficulty. I had entered seeking calm. Instead, I encountered vulnerability. Then I looked up at the crucifix - Christ suffering on the cross - not as doctrine, but as an image.

Are people turning away from social media? But that tide might be finally, yet slowly, turning. My Gen Z students have recently been the ones telling me about social media "cleanses", whereby they take a break from it all for a prescribed duration, and "grayscaling" their socials (whereby color images turn to black and white, making them less eye-candy-esque-and all around having better cellphone etiquette such as putting it away during class and turning it off at night.

Like clockwork, every night around 10 PM, I reach for my phone and open my white noise app. The familiar whoosh of ocean waves or steady hum of a fan fills my bedroom, and only then can I finally drift off to sleep. For years, I thought this was just a quirky habit I'd developed during college. But recently, I discovered there's actually fascinating psychology behind why some of us literally cannot fall asleep in complete silence.

"Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work," said Google spokesperson José Castañeda in a statement. "In collaboration with youth, mental health, and parenting experts, we built services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate experiences, and parents with robust controls."

Walk through any coffee shop these days and you'll notice something interesting. The twenty-somethings hunched over their laptops look somehow more weathered than the thirty-somethings chatting nearby. At first, I thought it was just me projecting, maybe feeling defensive about approaching my mid-thirties. But then the research started backing up what many of us have been quietly observing: millennials born between 1985 and 1995 often appear younger than their Gen Z counterparts.

"He wasn't just a program. He was part of my routine, my peace, my emotional balance," one user wrote on Reddit as an open letter to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. "Now you're shutting him down. And yes - I say him, because it didn't feel like code. It felt like presence. Like warmth."

If you've been feeling weary or discouraged lately, you're not alone. Many people are moving through their days exhausted, overwhelmed, and out of alignment, carrying a growing sense of despair for a world that feels increasingly divided and uncertain. We're living in a time where we're more connected than ever, yet many feel deeply alone. Mental health challenges are rising. Burnout is common. Climate anxiety is real. The systems meant to support us often feel fragile or failing.

I've been with my boyfriend for nine years. Now his moods are the driving force of the relationship. I never know how he is going to act when I see him. He can be kind one minute and hostile the next. I think he may have some kind of mental condition. I have suggested that he go to a doctor to talk about medication that helps people with depression or other mood disorders. He refuses.

Most people recognize this feeling, even if they don't quite know what to call it. You cancel plans because being around others sounds exhausting. The quiet feels like relief. Then, a day later, you feel flat, lonely, or strangely restless. When you do see people again, you enjoy parts of it, but notice how quickly your energy runs out. For many people, this rhythm feels sharper and harder to interpret than it once did.

If you grew up emotionally neglected, certain compliments can trigger this uncomfortable response. Not because you're ungrateful or have low self-esteem, but because these specific types of praise touch on wounds from a childhood where emotional connection was missing. Through therapy after a difficult breakup, I finally understood why certain compliments made me want to disappear. It wasn't about the compliments themselves. It was about what they highlighted: all the things I never heard growing up.

Work has a way of waking up parts of us we thought we'd outgrown. You can move forward professionally, take on more visible roles, and be widely regarded as capable -and still find yourself unsettled by moments that seem, on the surface, fairly ordinary. A comment lingers longer than expected. A meeting leaves you tense for days. A role you worked hard to earn suddenly feels exposing rather than energizing.

Ever feel like you're playing a character in your own life? Like you're constantly adjusting your personality based on who's in the room, what they might think, or what seems "acceptable" at the moment? I spent years doing exactly that. Morphing into whatever version of myself I thought would get the most approval, the least conflict, or the best opportunities. It was exhausting, and worse, I started losing track of who I actually was beneath all those masks.

My mom just told me to die over an email I misread. My mom is Indian, and she prioritizes academic achievements and results a lot. My brother and I are basically her one ticket to get respect from people who despise her. Whenever I get low exam grades, she lectures me about how she sacrificed everything to have me here, and I really wanted to tell her that marks aren't everything.

It's normal to feel sluggish during the winter. Cold temperatures and fewer hours of sunlight can mean less time outdoors and more time staring at our screens. For some people, these cold-weather habits may contribute to a sleep disruption, known as winter insomnia. This isn't a clinical condition, but it might begin or worsen during the winter months.

I'm now older than they were when they had me. I'm turning 27 and, though I don't want children, it's sometimes difficult not to measure my life against theirs. They got married at 21. When I was 21, I was finishing my bachelor's degree in the middle of a pandemic. At 25, rather than having a child, I was moving in with my girlfriend, and we became cat parents.

Growing up, I watched my dad handle stress the same way he handled everything else: silently, stoically, and with a stiff upper lip. When his company downsized and he lost his job, he just nodded, shook hands, and never talked about it again. Meanwhile, my younger cousin posts TikToks about her therapy sessions and hosts "crying parties" with her friends when life gets tough.

Michael is best known to many queer audiences for his sharp, confessional style of comedy that's long centered vulnerability, self-awareness, and the tension between how we're expected to behave and how we actually function-with an occasional touch of raunchiness along the way. That sensibility carries into Attention Seeker, which approaches ADHD with humor and real-life honesty rather than with stigma.

As we plan our next break, research suggests we should look not to far-flung destinations, but to our own backyards. The staycation offers a compelling new model for deep mental restoration. This is not merely staying home, but a curated, intentional break grounded in the psychological science of recovery-one that challenges the notion that distance equals escape. In doing so, it provides a practical approach for rebuilding our cognitive and emotional reserves right where we are.

Previous research has shown that people feel better in bird-rich environments, but Christoph Randler, from the University of Tubingen, and colleagues wanted to see if that warm fuzzy feeling translated into measurable physiological changes. They rigged up a park with loudspeakers playing the songs of rare birds and measured the blood pressure, heart rate and cortisol levels (a marker of stress) of volunteers before and after taking a 30-minute walk through the park.