Mental health

Mental health

We try to understand and grow it, but many of us cannot. This is not because we are damaged or less than. It is because our body feels unsafe. This is especially true for self-kindness, which is one of the domains of self-compassion. Offering ourselves kindness when our internal systems feel stretched out, out of control, and unworthy is simply not a possibility for most of us at this stage.

Suicide is a cause of death that haunts the living in perpetuity. After a suicide event, those left behind are tormented by questions. "Could I have done something?" "What did I miss?" "How could this happen?" "Was it my fault?" Even the best answers fail to return the person lost, and natural grief is often compounded with unnecessary blame. Discussions about suicide prediction and prevention primarily focus on known risk factors such as mental illness and suicidal ideation. 1

While some workers are being mandated to return to the office, a growing majority of workers now say they want to "microshift" their workday. Unlike hybrid or remote schedules, in which you work remotely some or all of the time, microshifting is about making small adjustments to your start times, breaks and hours rather than adhering to a rigid nine-to-five schedule.

For many veterans, returning home marks not resolution but the beginning of a quieter struggle. Despite decades of innovation in trauma-focused therapies and medication, a substantial number continue to live with psychological injuries that existing treatments only partly address. Their trauma is not merely a cluster of symptoms; it is a disruption of identity, moral coherence, and belonging. It reflects lived experience often shaped by early adversity, military culture, and the potentially socially isolating aftermath of service.

For most cases of mild to moderate postpartum depression, standard treatment with psychotherapy with or without an antidepressant works well. Treating severe PPD is more challenging. Fortunately, there is a new category of medication for PPD that is intended for severe PPD. The newest one is zuranolone (trade name is Zurzuvae). Currently, "existing efficacy data are limited to individuals with severe postpartum depression, where long-term outcomes need further study" (Miller, 2025). It has a different mode of action than older antidepressants.

We'd been working together for years to make my medication regimen-treatment for schizoaffective disorder-safe for potential pregnancy. Under her care, I was tapering off an antidepressant known to cause respiratory distress and hypertension in a newborn. I'd been experiencing wild mood swings, even suicidal thoughts. My beloved doctor's eyes were sad. "I'm saying no to a pregnancy, Meg." Even in the moment, I understood her priority as a physician was to keep me safe. Still, part of me hated her.

Arguments to begin in landmark social media addiction trial set in Los Angeles TikTok has agreed to settle in a landmark social media addiction lawsuit just before the trial kicked off, the plaintiff's attorneys confirmed. Read More Attendees visit the Meta booth at the Game Developers Conference 2023 in San Francisco on March 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File) Read More

But I would like to take a different approach. I would like to suggest that we can make some headway by considering that human behaviors are caused by their feelings, and if we can put words to the feelings (verbalization), we will go a long way to stopping physical punishment.

A growing number of people - including military veterans and former professional athletes - have spoken out about the benefits they have experienced from using psychedelics to address mental health issues, including PTSD. While there are some anecdotal reports of this phenomenon, a number of researchers have also conducted studies on it - and that has led in turn to a growing amount of data on psychedelics' use in this field.

Teens can retreat into themselves when they find themselves confronted by difficult emotional circumstances. At times it is important and constructive to leave them to themselves as they adjust to these challenges. Parents often find it emotionally troubling to watch as their child has difficulty and want to fix things. It is important for the development of independence that a child be left to learn how to work things out.

When you picture retirement, what comes to mind? Golf courses and leisurely brunches? Or carefully counting pennies and worrying about the next medical bill? The reality is that retirement looks dramatically different depending on which side of the economic divide you're standing on. Having grown up in a working-class family outside Manchester, I've watched this play out firsthand. My father spent decades in a factory, my mother in retail. Now, seeing how their retirement differs from some of my London colleagues' parents has been eye-opening.

Parents tell me this all the time, often with a mix of frustration and worry: My child just can't focus the way I could at their age. School feels harder. Emotions escalate faster. Distraction seems constant. But attention isn't a moral trait. It isn't a virtue some children have and others lack. Attention is a cognitive capacity-and it is deeply shaped by the conditions surrounding a child: sleep, stress, sensory overload, and the environment in which we're asking focus to happen.

1. Create predictability anchors, not just flexibility. When the world feels chaotic, people scan their environments for stability and safety cues. Identify one or two things that will not change this week-meeting cadence, response-time expectations, or decision processes-and name them explicitly. Predictability doesn't mean being rigid; it means offering a reliable foundation so teams can focus on problem-solving and collaboration. This steadiness becomes a form of trust, helping people stay engaged, resilient, and able to perform at their best.

You've undoubtedly heard it somewhere, sometime before: that you are unique, that you're here in this life for a purpose, and that your goal is to live a life that truly reflects who you are. It sounds good and feels right on a good day, but it is clearly easier said than done. But like a lot of things in life, the doing starts with knowing what creates the stopping-what keeps you from being you.

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.