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Imagine, if you dare, being in charge of the care of a notorious, licentious writer whose idea of conducting research for his depraved novel

Good Girls Die Last is feminist reality wrapped in fiction I was so tired of crying. It was the summer of 2021 and the news was full of the horrors of Sarah Everard’s rape and murder in London, the MET policeman who killed her, and the peaceful vigil to honour her that the same police force broke up, resulting in yet more women getting hurt. The country was angry and so was I. Women were scared and I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t been. England’s capital city was once

Why do we need rituals? For a number of reasons, in many settings and situations people need rituals to give them a degree of comfort,...

Every summer my grandmother would ask my childhood self what my favourite colour is. By the time winter rolled around, she would have...

As a researcher in perinatal psychiatry, and having grown up in India, I have had the privilege of understanding pregnancy and birthing...

Once again, the consequences of prioritising financial gain above real human wellbeing and mental health are being broadcasted, clear as day

I hear it often — "You’re so lucky!" In itself, "you’re so lucky" is a perfectly innocuous phrase. There are a lot of things in my life that I can attribute to luck; the safe and affluent country in which I was born and raised, the loving family I’m surrounded by, or my happy, healthy children. Yet, when people call me lucky, they’re rarely talking about those things. They’re talking about my career. Photo by Dayne Topkin on Unsplash According to research conducted by Remitly

After a three-year-long hiatus, the Festival of Italian Literature in London (FILL) has made an exciting comeback on Saturday 22nd of...

A festival of literature and ideas bringing together writers and thinkers from different backgrounds After a three-year break due to...

I've been captivated by flamenco since I graduated from the Laban Centre London where I trained in contemporary dance and ballet in the '80s

Photo by Sophie Grieve-Williams on Unsplash With Spring comes hope. After the gloom of Winter, the days lengthen; the daffodils bloom; the sun reappears. Yet for some, counter-intuitively, the arrival of Spring can be desolate. It turns out that people attempt suicide and die more often by suicide far more often in the springtime. Things get tough just as the tulips begin to unfurl. T.S Eliot, it seems, got it right when he wrote "April is the cruellest month," in his poem T

When Inspire the Mind asked me to write a new batch of history-based articles on mental illness, in the same style as my pieces on "Glass...

While taking part in online meetings, I started to notice that, for most of the time, I look at myself onscreen. Surely not out of...

Exploring mental health through art In this article, I share some of my learnings from taking part in The Big Anxiety festival in...

‘Ted Lasso’ is an award-winning show that tells the story of an American-football coach hired to manage AFC Richmond, a British football...

Image Source: Pixels Phew. I’m not alone, it seems, in my enthusiasm for poetry’s healing power. No less an organisation than UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) also believes in banging the drum for verse: March 21st is World Poetry Day, established by UNESCO. It was back in 1999, it turns out, that UNESCO set up World Poetry Day during its 30th General Conference in Paris in 1999. Its aim was to support “linguistic diversity through

Photo by MLucan on Wikipedia, CC SA-BY 3.0) I am an Italian writer and contributor to Inspire the Mind , and I was born in a country known for the wrong type of political avant-garde. We had the first fascist party in Europe and managed to switch sides in both world wars. The social reform movements that started in the 60s descended into violence in the 70s, taking the country on the brink of civil war. Twenty years later, Berlusconi invented the modern populist political sty

There are two types of creatives in this world; those who are hounded day and night by ideas forcing their way into the mind with jagged teeth and sharpened claws refusing to be ignored, and those who sit before an empty notebook eager to write, to paint, to compose, but don’t have any inspiration. There is torture in both, but as someone who has been plagued every second of her life by uninvited muses and ideas that she will never live long enough to utilise, believe me when

A prospective interdisciplinary curriculum integrating arts, health, and humanities at King’s College London A group of academics at...

How do you become a success in the arts without losing your mind? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for decades. Unlike other industries where hard work and talent equate to more money and longevity, art of any kind is not a meritocracy. Photo by No Revisions on Unsplash In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell stated that you can be an expert in anything if you practice for 10,000 hours — but the truth is creativity takes more than just time, it t

Odd as it might sound, often the most comforting poetry is the darkest. I know this from personal experience, as a mental health advocate who has been running Healing Words workshops in prisons and for mental health charities for five years now. I set up the workshops as I myself had found poetry helpful during two severe depressive episodes when I was in my thirties. During the workshops, I explain and share poems which help us to understand and allow our feelings, whether d

Can poetry help our mental health? Image source: Freepik In my last piece, I spoke about my personal experiences with poetry, and the life-changing impact it has had on me, so much so that I’ve written a new book on the links between verse and our emotional wellbeing. However, now I am here to share the evidence that attests to poetry’s power to heal our minds. Author's own image I set about to find what research existed, and came across a number of studies which I divided in

Don’t worry, there are no spoilers. I haven’t stepped into a theatre since December 2019. I decided to change that by having a solo...

My experiences in the mental health service, and my experiences as an artist, have led me to develop new ways to engage people in...