Mental health

Mental health

In childhood, we lack the emotional and cognitive maturity to fully understand the harm that comes from those we depend on for safety and love. To cope with fear, helplessness, and confusion, many of us blamed ourselves. This self-blame can create a false sense of control in a chaotic environment and allows us to preserve an emotional bond with caregivers, even if those caregivers are also the source of harm.

"We're trying to, as a government, understand what's driving this increase. "Is it simply awareness and a positive awareness that means that people who would have just gone unsupported and undiagnosed are just now realising that they may well have ADHD? "And then secondly, meeting the demand because we're really falling short on this in the NHS, so we are looking at this nationally."

Childs has teamed up with her longtime collaborator, Sue Cronin, who formerly worked as a program director for the center, to launch Footsteps Forward, a nonprofit organization. The goal is to fill the considerable gap left behind by the closure of the Centre for Living with Dying, which helped roughly 1.5 million people navigate grief and trauma over its 50-year run, according to Childs.

True anger has characteristics that frozen fight-or-flight completely lacks: Directional: It points toward a specific violation, not diffuse irritability at everything. Connected to values: It arises from what you care about, what matters deeply to you. Proportionate: The intensity matches the actual offense. Resolving: When addressed or fully experienced, it naturally dissipates. Think of the parent protecting their bullied child. The person discovering they've been lied to by someone they trusted.

Should society intervene to course correct that, put systems in place to make sure that those men meet partners?

In 2022, the world watched aghast as Russian troops invaded the European country of Ukraine. A group of psychologists viewed this as an opportunity to conduct a natural experiment to monitor how the stress and fears of being in a country under attack and at war would impact people's viewing of pornography. By this point, it was well-established that many people use pornography as a way to cope with loneliness, stress, and depression.

Even as new GLP-1 agonists with brand names like Wegovy and Zepbound make it easier to achieve weight loss, and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors ( SSRIs) like Prozac and Zoloft provide a hedge against depression, there is growing interest in an old idea: psychedelics. The drugs are not being researched as a diversion from life, but instead as a therapeutic intervention to help us handle life's challenges in more creative ways.

Healthcare spending in the United States continues its upward climb, approaching $5 trillion annually in 2023. Employer-sponsored family plans now average $27,000 per year, placing mounting pressure on households and businesses. Yet despite this spending, the country's health outcomes remain far from world-leading. The latest OECD data show U.S. per-person spending is roughly twice the OECD average, with Switzerland and Germany trailing behind as the next highest spenders.

Scroll through any wellness feed, and you might notice the same whiplash-inducing pattern. Dissociation is either a dangerous sign of pathology or "a protective intelligence that deserves reverence." Trauma responses are framed as evidence of brokenness or badges of resilience. Anxiety is either a disorder to eliminate or an intuition to honor. We've flattened the rich, complex reality of the nervous system into a binary: demonize or romanticize. But neither extreme helps us understand ourselves-or decide when we actually need support.

"There was definitely a moment of discomfort at the start," says Deena, but she says her visit to a so-called rage room felt very different to what she'd expected. She didn't feel chaotic or aggressive smashing things up, but instead "surprisingly controlled and a lot more intentional". "Once I settled into it, it felt like more of a physical release as opposed to an emotional outburst," she told the BBC.

It's a compact that most organizations claim to honor. Yet despite investments in collaboration tools, team-building retreats, and carefully designed office spaces, something fundamental isn't working. According to Gallup's 2024 State of the Global Workplace report, one in five employees worldwide report feeling lonely at work often -a rate that hasn't budged despite all the interventions.

Each year group in each school will then be randomly assigned to one of two conditions: either the app will simply record students' social media use, or the app will curtail students' social media use by limiting their access to the apps for TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube and Snapchat to one hour a day, as well as imposing a curfew from 9pm to 7am.

We had been talking about his most recent visit with his mother, one he had begun with cautious optimism, hoping that if he explained himself just a little more clearly this time, she might finally understand how her comments affect him. Instead, the interaction followed a familiar pattern. She minimized his feelings, and immediately redirected the conversation to her own stress. When he tried to point this out, she ended by accusing him of being "too sensitive. Must be from your father's side."

Eugene Teo, 34, began lifting weights at the age of 13, looking for validation. I was short, skinny and I thought it would give me confidence, he says. Bodybuilding for me was the ultimate expression of that. Now living on the Gold Coast in Australia, with his partner and daughter, the fitness coach spent from age 16 to 24 training and competing. At times, he lifted weights for up to four hours a day, aiming to get as muscular and lean as possible.

Unfortunately, hypnosis has a negative reputation among the general public, in large part because of how it's been portrayed by the movie and entertainment industry. Also, I was aware that in the late 19th century there were many false positive and negative claims about hypnosis that soured the public on the possibility that hypnosis could be helpful. I did not want to create or add to a 21st-century perception that hypnosis was quackery, and therefore chose to withhold telling about some of the most amazing events that I had encountered with my patients when I first wrote about hypnosis, because these stories might have been too hard to believe.

I called my boyfriend and told him what had happened. I didn't tell him in person because we lived 1,000 miles apart and were rarely in the same room. The incident had involved a man riding his bike with his pants pulled down around his ass, hissing at me, "You want some of this?" It was quite a feat of balance, I thought in the split second before I realized he was a threat, stalking me in the black morning when I was just trying

My before' was trying to make myself as small as possible in every conceivable way: my body, voice, emotions, opinions, she says. My after' is allowing myself to be my biggest self, however that looks.

On the night of Boxing Day 2021, my dad's body was found near a Cardiff hostel. His death, at 55, was as sudden as it was not. For years, alcoholism had been changing the shape of his heart. He died less than a mile from his old office; top law firm, equity partner. Four miles from our once tight-knit home in a leafy neighbourhood.