Mental health

Mental health

Each of our cells holds a set of biological instructions (our genes). The creation and growth of cells and the proteins inside of them are activated by our genetics. As we grow during pregnancy, our genetic blueprints tell our cells to separate into different types of cells that then grow into different organs, such as our brain. From the growth of our physical command centre (our brain) comes the scaffolding of how we are able to form thoughts and see the world.

It is estimated that nearly 90 percent of suicide attempts among high school students under age 18 and as many as two-thirds of adult suicide attempts are directly attributable to ACEs. Individuals with 6 ACEs are 13-30 times more likely to attempt suicide (depending on age), while those with at least 7 ACEs show up to a 51-fold increase. In other words, if we prevent and treat ACEs, we could prevent the majority of suicides.

Marla Mase knew something was wrong when she heard someone had jumped off Manhattan's George Washington Bridge on July 26, 2017 and at the same time hadn't heard from her 25-year-old daughter, Lael Summer. Lael had struggled with depression, eating disorders, and suicidal thoughts since the age of 13. Relief swept over Mase, who lives in Brooklyn, after Lael's first attempt to take death into her own hands in her Los Angeles apartment some years earlier failed.

These boys were playing for Colebrook Royals, a football club in Chigwell, Essex. It was 2019 and they were in the dressing room before team practice for a photoshoot arranged by the charity YoungMinds. The plan was that, after the photos, the boys would speak to two dads Nick Easey and Ryan Smith who had lost their teenage sons to suicide. The fathers wanted the boys to share their own feelings about mental health, to normalise such conversations,

I have no trouble falling asleep. Most nights, my head hits the pillow, and that's all I remember. But several times a week, I find myself wide awake at 2.00am stressing about a work deadline, wondering if my daughter is adjusting to her new school or making a note on my phone to get the car washed. Usually, I get back to sleep in an hour, but when my 8am alarm goes off, I feel groggy, wishing I'd had that extra shut-eye.

Happy Birthday: Be cautious about sharing too much information or agreeing to something without verifying the facts and what others expect of you. You need a clear conscience to move forward without regret. A domestic change will impact your emotional well-being and require time, patience and personal effort to maintain the freedom necessary to fulfill your heart's desires. Trust your instincts, not what others tell you. Your numbers are 8, 14, 23, 28, 31, 37, 42.

Thomas White, who is serving an abolished indefinite jail term described by the United Nations as psychological torture, developed paranoid schizophrenia and psychosis in prison as he lost hope of being freed from his Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence. Last year, The Independent revealed how he had set himself on fire in his cell as this newspaper backed his family in their six-year battle for him to be transferred for inpatient mental health treatment.

Disenfranchised loss refers to grief that isn't acknowledged or validated by society, which makes it harder for people to openly express their pain. For me, that definition hit home. My wife, Jane, died of leukemia in 2017. In my memoir Ride or Die: Loving Through Tragedy, A Husband's Memoir, I chronicled our ordeal and my own isolation. Being "Jane's husband" became my identity during her illness.

The streets of Gaza no longer hum with the familiar sounds of everyday life. Since October 7, 2023, they have resonated with the sounds of destruction, followed by a silence so profound it feels almost physical-an absence that suffocates words before they can even form. Trapped within Gaza's crumbling walls, we live inside a storm in which language itself has broken down. Simply put, we are losing our very ability to speak. I don't mean that metaphorically. It's all too real.

Julie Bentley, the mental health charity's chief executive, told the Guardian the organisation will set up three-year regional projects co-created with volunteers to develop more efficient ways of working, including branch mergers and closures. She described the changes as evolution not revolution, but conceded the Samaritans would operate a smaller branch network in future. Change needs to happen, let's make sure it happens in a clear and considered way, she said.

One of the most significant changes is the elimination of Florida's commercial rental tax, which has been in effect for decades. First enacted in 1968, it added state sales tax to commercial leases, making Florida unique among the states. As of October 1, the tax will disappear, a measure that is expected to save businesses nearly $1.15 billion this fiscal year and more than $1.5 billion next year.

Psychobabble replaces mental health misconceptions with liberating truths that can help readers avoid misinformation, navigate important debates in the mental health field, and better maneuver their own therapy journeys. The problem is not that therapy has gone mainstream, but that some of the assumptions we have absorbed from therapy culture are actually holding us back from healing, growing, and solving our problems.

I was hunched over the kitchen table, tracking ounces on a laminated chart with a dry-erase marker, crying so hard I couldn't see the numbers. It was 2:40 a.m. My nipples were bleeding. Lily was screaming. And the book said she should be sleeping. "Stretch feeds to four hours," it said. "Teach her to self-soothe." So I shushed. I swaddled. I walked in circles around our dark apartment, whispering affirmations I didn't believe.

Trauma is a devastating and all too common experience. It influences relationships, self-esteem, self-worth, physical health, mental health, and overall well-being, and chronic trauma can induce lifelong maladaptive patterns. What can make trauma even more devastating is when victims are retraumatized in some way, as it immediately launches them into their past, evoking feelings of powerlessness, grief, and pain. Retraumatization can feel as if the original traumatic experience is occurring all over again.

Over the course of 17 years, I lost three of my children, Johnny, Reggie, and Miah, each under devastating circumstances. My son Johnny died in a drowning accident in 2005 at just 13 years old. Reggie, who had catastrophic epilepsy, passed away in 2016 at 17 years old. And Miah, my beautiful daughter, died suddenly in 2021 at the age of 21 from the same rare neurodegenerative disorder that took Reggie: dentatorubral-pallidoluysian atrophy. My husband has also passed away from this same inherited disease.

Kristen Johansson's therapy ended with a single phone call. For five years, she'd trusted the same counselor through her mother's death, a divorce and years of childhood trauma work. But when her therapist stopped taking insurance, Johansson's $30 copay ballooned to $275 a session overnight. Even when her therapist offered a reduced rate, Johansson couldn't afford it. The referrals she was given went nowhere.

We often conceptualize resilience as an abstract or fixed concept-inaccurately believing that you either have it or you don't. We mistakenly assume it is a personality feature that determines how or whether we recover from adversity. What we don't often realize, however, is that resilience is more like a skill, or a set of skills, that can be built and used to enhance our capacity for living.

I guess we probably all do, right? Especially at this stage in my life - a grown-ass woman with a tween and a teen who have the drama thing on lock in our house - I try to be pretty proactive about protecting my peace. And yet, somehow, chaos seems to find me. Or could it be that I'm subconsciously seeking it out?

As young carers, they felt disconnected from their parents' compromised behavior, and the heavy weight of coping with it by themselves. They at once loved and resented having to take care of them. One participant shared: "I hated to spend all the time caring for my father, accompanying him, having no 'me time'. I still loved him, enjoyed the closeness with him, never wanting to lose him, even if he was so dependent on me."

We live in a world where it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell where reality ends and virtual life begins. Whether you're donning a VR headset to explore new identities or endlessly scrolling through polished images on your social media feed, the lines between self-expression and self-distortion can get blurry. Studies from psychology and neuroscience show that when these boundaries fade, our self-esteem, body image, and mental health can become vulnerable.

As social animals, we humans are hard-wired to learn, thrive, and grow through our relationships - our engagement with and observations of others. Early in life, we rely on teachers and role models for guidance and support. Through engagement in formal and informal settings, in school, games, and other pursuits in our young lives, comparison begins to seep into our daily lives.

We live in a culture that celebrates speed. We respond to emails at all hours of the day, have packed schedules, and feel pressure to be constantly productive. This drive to keep going is fueled by expectations-our own and others'. Yet when we push beyond our limits, we risk not only exhaustion but also the loss of vital resources like physical and mental health, our capacity for emotional regulation, and strong relationships.

For most teenagers, stress is part of daily life. Poor grades, awkward encounters with friends, or being anxious about the future can all trigger worry. These stress-inducers are occasional. But when the stress is tied to family, it feels personal. It lingers after the school day ends, seeps into late-night hours, and becomes impossible to escape. Imagine a teenager seated at their desk trying to focus on homework while raised voices are heard from the next room.

The state laws take different approaches. Illinois and Nevada have banned the use of AI to treat mental health. Utah placed certain limits on therapy chatbots, including requiring them to protect users' health information and to clearly disclose that the chatbot isn't human. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and California are also considering ways to regulate AI therapy.

Other incidents this year, including a 56-year-old man who killed his mother and a 29-year-old who took her own life, have been linked to the ChatGPT, which wasn't bound by the same mandatory reporting rules that apply to human therapists. How it works: Parents can now regulate how minors from 13 to 17 years old use the chatbot. Parents can invite teens to connect accounts, and they can modify their children's settings.

Why do I think that death would be manageable if I knew in advance when it was coming? Death is not manageable, and the answer to the question of when is never going to be anything more than a good guess.

My friend David Enoch, who has died aged 99, made his greatest mark as a campaigner for humane mental health care and was a founding fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. In the 1960s he served as a medical adviser to Barbara Robb, the psychotherapist who exposed neglect and abuse in long-stay NHS psychiatric wards and, through her controversial book Sans Everything (1967), pushed for major reforms.

Think about the last time you had to make a difficult choice, or had to wait to figure out what to do. For some people, any decision-making process is stressful, can elevate blood pressure, and may cause distress. How do you feel in spaces of uncertainty? Do you tolerate ambiguity well, or do you find the state of unknowing insufferable?

Western Society, Childfree by Choice, and Tokophobia A societal assumption that pregnancy and parenthood are part of the natural life cycle shrouds both the tokophobia population and the childfree-by-choice community. Because of this assumption, people choosing not to be parents often feel misunderstood or excluded. Likewise, very few evidence-based resources are available to address fears about pregnancy and childbirth, even for women who would like to have children. It is often assumed pregnancy should be met with excitement, not with a whole range of emotions.

I believe there are two versions of purpose. Big P Purpose is audacious and goal-oriented. It has an all-or-nothing focus and often leaves us chasing huge, distant outcomes. The end result, more often than not, is anxiety. Little p purpose, on the other hand, is about process rather than goals. It's abundance-oriented. You find things that light you up and simply do them. Failure becomes almost impossible, because the reward is in the doing.

Synchronicities can be dismissed as quirky experiences, an anecdote to trot out at a dinner party, but they can also be profoundly transformative and healing. It's for this reason that synchronicity-informed psychotherapy informs my clinical practice. As a refresher, synchronicities are events in the external world that coincide in a meaningful way with the internal world of thoughts, feelings, images, sensations, memories, and dreams, but not due to causal reasons.

According to a new study by Bar Ilan University's Leeav Sheena-Peer and colleagues (2025), emptiness isn't unique to BPD-but, unlike the form it takes in other disorders, it tends to be more chronic. Even so, as the authors note, "the high prevalence does not necessarily imply that it is static over time" (p. 404). Maybe, they proposed, by tracking emptiness on a daily basis, these fluctuations could be captured and better understood.