Mental health

Mental health

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.

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.

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.

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.

We live in a world where men are taught from childhood to be strong, successful, and above all, emotionally bulletproof. But what happens when that armor becomes a prison? According to psychology, there are telltale signs that reveal when men are using certain behaviors to mask deeper unhappiness. After diving into research and reflecting on patterns I've observed, here are eight behaviors that often signal something more is going on beneath the surface.

The handbook, produced by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), lists symptoms for all known conditions and aims to steer psychiatrists, doctors and others towards a correct diagnosis. But in a field that struggles to connect people's inner experiences to measurable changes in their brains and bodies, the DSM is a lightning rod for criticism. It does not delve into the possible causes of mental illness, for example, or acknowledge that sociocultural and environmental factors could be important.

Opening up isn't always easy, but honest conversations can be a powerful first step towards better mental health,

I have a memory that I frequently find myself returning to these days. I'm in high school and we're in the change room at the local pool for the dreaded stint of swimming. Like most of my peers, I am embarrassed by my body and am therefore changing into my swimmers under a towel. The changing room is filled with older women in my memory, they're elderly, which means in reality they were likely all somewhere between 40 and 60 and they're naked. I am horrified by this, but not because I am awkward about witnessing their nudity. Instead (and I acutely remember this being my thought at the time), I feel sad and disgusted by the complete lack of care these women have at the impression their bodies will make on the rest of us. They walk calmly between the showers and the mirrors, bodies on display, jiggling, sagging, flopping. Didn't they realise they were meant to be ashamed to look like that? At the very least, I thought, they should quietly fade into the background, or make their bodies occupy as little space as possible.

I can't work up the courage to talk to any of my friends when I'm having mental health issues. It hits the worst for me usually at 4-5 am, and I never want to wake anyone up when I'm having panic attacks that late due to my intrusive thoughts, even though being around people helps. I'm in a safe place and have a therapist/medication, but it feels like I'm not getting better every time I find myself back in this situation.

Picture this: You're at a party, having a great conversation, genuinely enjoying yourself, when suddenly you hit a wall. Your energy drains like someone pulled the plug, and you make an excuse about an early morning and slip out, feeling guilty and wondering why you can't just be "normal" like everyone else who seems to thrive in these settings. Here's what most people get wrong: Struggling with long social events might just mean you have a smaller social battery than others, and that's completely okay.

Haney's research found that such prolonged isolation led to paranoia, anxiety, despair, anger and, eventually, numbness among people in the SHU. "When you're in the SHU, you don't feel," said Frank Reyna, who spent 20 years in solitary at Pelican Bay. "If you feel, you start getting weak. When people die, you just move on. You lose your emotions." Prison officials had built a fortress designed to keep people away from each other.

The Meta researcher's tone was alarmed. "Oh my gosh yall IG is a drug," the user experience specialist allegedly wrote to a colleague, referring to the social media platform Instagram. "We're basically pushers... We are causing Reward Deficit Disorder bc people are binging on IG so much they can't feel reward anymore." The researcher concluded that users' addiction was "biological and psychological" and that company management was keen to exploit the dynamic.

The iconic Golden Gate Bridge has a dark side. Historically, an average of 30 people each year have climbed over the four-foot railing and jumped to their deaths. Not anymore. In the second half of 2025, there were no confirmed suicides. What's different? And are would-be jumpers now dying by suicide in other places or using other means? The answers to these questions are important in themselves and for suicide prevention more broadly.

After two years of living in New York City, I realized that, although I loved life in the Big Apple, I wasn't fond of the exorbitant cost of living. My days in the city were busy - think last-minute Broadway tickets, venturing out to Brooklyn for my photojournalism class, and bottomless brunches that turned into all-day affairs. Still, I found that leaving my apartment was costly, and I knew I needed a change.

Last August, Adam Thomas found himself wandering the dunes of Christmas Valley, Oregon, after a chatbot kept suggesting he mystically "follow the pattern" of his own consciousness. Thomas was running on very little sleep-he'd been talking to his chatbot around the clock for months by that point, asking it to help improve his life. Instead it sent him on empty assignments, like meandering the vacuous desert sprawl.