Christmas is one of the most eagerly awaited events in the whole year, but for many people, Yuletide cheer comes at a price. According to the mental health charity, Mind, one on five adults say that they suffer high stress levels during the festive season. “Although it’s a happy time for many, as the countdown […]
Autism brings into sharp focus what it is to be human. I’d summarise autism as being a different way of living. Autism is a lifelong disorder affecting some 700,000 people in the UK. Many (55 per cent) are below the historic cutoff point of 70 IQ. Others, often described as having Asperger’s Syndrome, are highly […]
Around 850,000 people in the UK are living with dementia, but the number of people who actually have the condition without being given a formal diagnosis is thought to far exceed this. People who have undiagnosed dementia are much less likely to receive the specialist help they need, and they deteriorate more quickly than those […]
‘Many of my patients are experienced frequent fliers who develop a phobia of flying after spending decades hopping on and off shuttles, and who have previously found air travel no different to any other travel mode like a bus, train or boat. They tend to cite something I call ‘the cat with nine lives’ syndrome. […]
The outrageous acts of terrorism that happened in New York on 9/11 have certainly meant that more people who are affected by fear of flying cite terrorism as one of their worries. Images of the two jetliners crashing into the Twin Towers have been seen by billions of people world-wide and are still widely disseminated […]
People who have migrated to a country from their homeland are much more vulnerable to mental illness. Between 1993 and 2014 the foreign-born population in the UK more than doubled from 3.8 million to around 8.3 million. Studies carried out in various countries have long indicated that migrants often have higher rates of mental illness […]
Mindfulness, which is essentially meditation rebranded for the squeamish, is embedded in the history of Indic consciousness traditions such as the Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists going back thousands of years. Essentially a journey of self-discovery, ‘mindfulness’ is a word created to make meditation palatable to a new generation of people who don’t want to be […]
Are we becoming a nation of digital technology addicts? Surely the figures speak for themselves. The average iPhone user unlocks their device 80 times per day, according to figures released by Apple earlier this year. Researchers from Nottingham Trent University in 2015 showed that young adults spend around one third of their waking hours using […]
People with mental health problems are not ‘the other’. They can be you or I, our children, friends, colleagues. Every family is affected directly or indirectly as between 1 in 4 or 1 in 6 of us will develop psychiatric illness in our adulthood. They have a wide range of diagnoses from phobias to personality […]
Alzheimer’s disease is by far the commonest form of dementia affecting around 5 per cent of all people over the age of 75. There is still no cure but research has shown that loss of higher brain functions is associated with deposition of a protein called amyloid which, in Alzheimer’s disease folds into an aberrant shape to form insoluble […]