Mental health

Mental health

The last 30 years have seen heinous mass shootings of innocents become "ho-hum" events of everyday life - from Columbine (1999) to Sandy Hook (2012) schools; to just-engaged 20-year-old-Israelis walking (2025) in Washington, D.C.; to Laney college football coach John Beam (November 2025). Mental health issues do occur; 100 years ago, such shootings didn't. Grievances exist, but why think cold-blooded murder solves anything?

Leadership today demands more than vision and decisiveness. It requires staying emotionally steady, mentally flexible, and grounded-often while navigating constant pressure and competing demands. Yet many leaders operate in a near-constant state of stress without realizing how much it influences their reactions, decisions, and overall health. Burnout, irritability, poor sleep, and decision fatigue are often chalked up to time management or mindset issues.

But when Ko broke down wellness metrics, from if leaders felt anxious or depressed to mentally present at work, the results were starkly different: 48% of respondents reported being overwhelmed, and a quarter said they were feeling anxiety or depression. Moreover, 34% said they were mentally drained, and 40% reported being unable to be mentally present on the job. Half of the survey participants said they thought of stepping down from their positions.

I get a lot of calls for that topic at this time of year. Sadly, whichever way you cut the demographic mustard-men, women, younger, older, LGBTQ, BAME/BIPOC, neurodivergent, disabled-more and more people report feeling lonely some or most of the time. Sadly, those feelings can be compounded by Christmas, making the festive period difficult for many, for a variety of reasons. The solution lies in being more than a little self-indulgent. It's a call to be selfish, but with good reason.

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself crying in the park. It was supposed to be just a typical summer day. I was enjoying my usual stroll with my dog, Boni. The sun was shining, and the shade of the trees provided a very welcoming shelter from the burning sun. Children were running and laughing, and their joy drew me in. Two of them, tiny three-year-olds, were squealing, all happy, wearing Hawaiian-style skirts and flowers around their necks.

The questions were part of annual research carried out in the summer by pollster YouGov with 7,340 adults of all ages for Ofcom's Annual Online Nation report. Despite their increasing negativity, young adults in the UK spend significantly more time online than older age groups, averaging six hours and 20 minutes a day on personal (rather than work) devices, up ten minutes over the prior 12 months and much higher than the four hours and 30 minutes for all adults.

Coming of age alongside smartphones, however, has been linked to high rates of mental health concerns among Gen Z. A 2024 brief by the National Center for Health Statistics found that half of teenagers between the ages of 12 and 17 spent four or more hours on screens per day, and those teens were more likely to experience anxiety or depression symptoms.

Marina vd Roest hadn't faced the man who abused her in decades when she first sat down in front of the laptop. Confronted with his realistic, blinking, speaking face, she felt "scared ... like a little child again." "Sometimes I had to close the laptop and get my breath back before opening it and continuing with the conversation," she says. Vd Roest is one of the first people to have tried out a radical new form of therapy.

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A psychiatrist said if the accused is unfit to stand trial, he would likely be admitted to the Central Mental Hospital and be reviewed on a six-month basis Riad Bouchaker, who is charged with assaulting a care worker and attempting to murder three children on Parnell Square in Dublin, is suffering from a mental disorder and is unfit to stand trial, his lawyers have argued before the Central Criminal Court.

Taylor is a college student who feels more and more that he watches too much pornography and that it really bothers him, especially because he has been getting worse and worse grades. He started watching pornography in his early teens, but his habits have drastically changed over the past year. Night after night, he spends several hours scrolling through porn websites and binge-watching multiple videos without a break.

The topic of mental health is a crucial one, as security team burnout is a top challenge for many organizations. Those in the industry know stressors can be abundant when working security roles, and without proper mental health practices in place, many professionals can burn out. And when one team member burns out, it's possible that more will follow. "We're pretty much [on] 24/7, being security professionals," says Rodriguez.

Claney (2025) describes autistic masking as "a complex phenomenon in which autistic individuals consciously or unconsciously hide or modify their behaviors and traits to fit within societal expectations." Masking, Claney argues, takes a massive emotional toll on autistic adults and can be devastating to mental health. A substantial body of research supports these findings, with the entire neuroaffirmative movement as evidence of the psychological and physical costs of long‑term masking.

Jennifer Breheny Wallace: I shudder when I hear people bragging about perfectionism or saying perfectionism can be good; healthy striving, striving for excellence is good. Perfectionism? I just don't see any good that comes of it. Samantha Laine Perfas: Many people hold themselves to extremely high standards, but when the scales tip to the pursuit of perfection, it can result in anxiety, depression, and other serious mental health issues. So how do we know when we've gone too far in trying to do our best?

Recently, an acquaintance of an acquaintance (let's call her Dina) heard that I was a therapist and an educator and asked if she could chat with me (she approved this write-up). She shared that she had discovered her therapist was using AI to partially conduct their sessions. While I won't go into how the issue came to light, Dina mentioned that she felt shock and anguish. She was terrified that her protected health information (PHI) and feelings were "out on the internet."

In 1973, an American psychologist called David Rosenhan published the results of a bold experiment. He'd arranged for eight pseudo-patients to attend appointments at psychiatric institutions, where they complained to doctors about hearing voices that said empty, hollow and thud. All were admitted, diagnosed with either schizophrenia or manic-depressive psychosis. They immediately stopped displaying any symptoms and started saying they felt fine. The first got out after seven days; the last after 52.

Today, I want to share a goal-setting process I use in my life whenever I feel a change is needed. I also use it in just about every client session, both at the start of treatment and periodically along the way. This creates a sweet synergy: Using a tool yourself is the best way to learn what it takes to actually apply it.

Given the depth of these symptoms on psychological processes, such as forming and maintaining relationships, a simple evolutionary view would likely have predicted that schizophrenia "should" have been de-selected from the human gene pool. Studies have suggested the (genetic) fitness loss that results from schizophrenia can range from 20 to 70 percent. The ongoing stable global prevalence of schizophrenia is an example of an evolutionary paradox.

Just a few months ago, I wrote about how lucky I felt. My husband is a firefighter with long shifts (and overtime), and I'm a morning radio personality who wakes up hours before the sun rises. Though our work schedules can be difficult, we have a village that includes both my mother and my in-laws, and not only are they close by, but they're also dependable.

"Hi." The 20-something man approached my table, the corner of his mouth curving up. He looked away and rubbed his chin before making eye contact and telling me: "I just wanted you to know that if you'd come in sooner, my girlfriend and I would've invited you to join us." I smiled at him. It was nice of him to want to create community with me, although I was perfectly happy just as I was. But he wasn't quite finished.

Gen Z is never beating the " unemployable " allegations. For Gen Z, a growing confidence crisis means common workplace interactions are now a major source of anxiety. Working with unfamiliar colleagues, making small talk, using the phone, and waking up early were among the biggest anxieties for young workers, according to new research from Trinity College London. ​These fears have also been echoed online.

The audit, commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership and funded by NHS England, found there were more community teams to support children than there were for adults. On average, adults with eating disorders had to wait twice as long as children for an assessment, and more than 10 times as long for treatment, the report found. The eating disorder charity Beat said the growing disparity between child and adult services was particularly worrying.

After the blaze destroyed his uninsured home in the Palisades Bowl mobile home park - which the owners, to this day, still have not cleared of fire debris - the boat docked in Marina del Rey became his home. "You either rise from the ashes or you get consumed by them," he said between tokes from a joint as he watched the sunset with his chihuahua tucked into his tan Patagonia jacket.

My mom loved a Pepsi. One thing about my mother, that's her favorite drink,

It's a chance to see your fam, wear your favorite pajamas from high school, and regress to childhood, in the best way. It feels like all is right with the world - until it's time for bed. When staying with your parents as an adult, it's not uncommon to find yourself in an odd sleeping situation. On TikTok, people are discussing being relegated to uncomfortable couches and cots, often because a married sibling got the guest room

My mom joined a religious cult when I was about 8 years old. I wasn't buying their shit even as a child and was not going to let them drag me in. I was still around for a couple of years and saw everything that was going on. She's still in it today, over 30 years later. My uncle is there, and two cousins. One cousin got out/was kicked out and has been out for about 15 years.

"Don't  underestimate the fact that your life has changed now forever. And yes, it's going to be better, if you play your cards right. The life you once had has gone forever now. It's OK to feel a sadness about that, but people then get caught in the spiral of beating themselves up over feeling sad about it. "It's a case of, 'Oh, hold on a second, I have no right to be sad', but you actually do, because there is a grieving process of the life you once had."

When people hear the words domestic violence they usually think of intimate partner violence, but there is another form of domestic violence that's just as real and often just as dangerous, although few want to talk about it: Parents who are abused and sometimes killed by their own children. This is called filial domestic violence. In my work, it's not rare and it's not mild.

There's something about walking into our childhood home that can make many of us feel like we're 13 again. We arrive as capable adults with our own lives, and 10 minutes later find ourselves defending choices we made years ago or falling into arguments we swore we would never have again. It can be hard to watch ourselves from the outside and think, I don't act like this anywhere else, so why do I do it here?

Foster's experience aligns with a well-known and disturbing trend in American health care: more children are having mental health problems. In 2023, 40% of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and 20% had seriously considered attempting suicide, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study. Studies also found that more young people are going to emergency rooms for care an expensive option that can cost thousands of dollars.