Mental health problems are more common amongst city dwellers – but why? Is it the stress? The noise? The lack of green spaces? A study involving scientists from King’s College London, architects from J & L Gibbons, artists from Nomad Projects and design experts from the Van Alen Institute, is trying to find out how the urban landscape affects how we feel. Continue reading
A campaign launched by Time to Change in Spring of this year aims to get rid of “headclutcher” pictures in articles about mental health. The campaign was started as a response to the wealth of images accompanying articles about mental illness which have someone sat with their head in their hands, as highlighted by twitter users with the #headclutcher hashtag. Continue reading
Last week the UK Government’s Child Mental Health Taskforce published a report: Future In Mind – Promoting, protecting and improving our children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing. Continue reading
“How does one human talking to another, as occurs in psychological therapy, bring about changes in brain activity and cure or ease mental disorders? We don’t really know. We need to.” Continue reading
Bring to mind something about yourself that you feel ashamed of, something you feel is a weakness: a character trait, something you said, something you did… Now imagine how you would feel if this thing were held up and talked about as if it were the worst possible thing: inhuman, scary, impossible to understand. Imagine a supermarket made a fancy dress costume based on how disgusting this thing was – turning it into a caricature. For the millions of people who have been to see a psychologist or psychiatrist because of deep distress of some kind, this is exactly what has happened. Continue reading
The Depressed Cake Shop is coming to London at the beginning of August. Continue reading
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) Edition V is in the limelight again. This new version of the American Psychological Association’s dictionary of mental illnesses is being released on May 18th. In the build up to this the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have released a statement announcing their intention to move away from the DSM diagnostic criteria. Continue reading
I am feeling a sense of learned helplessness about what the coalition government are doing to the NHS.
Learned helplessness is a phenomenon associated with depression. A classic animal model of depression, learned helplessness occurs when an animal is repeatedly hurt or subjected to a nasty situation that it has no power to change. Continue reading
Psychology magpie 