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My name is Laura, I have never written a blog post in my life and if I had to define myself with a simple description, I would say that I...

The romanticisation of mental illness isn’t a new phenomenon. In fact, it’s something that defined a lot of my teen social media experience

I am 63 years old. I have had bipolar since I was 21. I have experienced one prolonged manic episode, many profound depressive episodes, and

It is no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world on a global scale. As individuals, we experienced huge changes to our daily...

The historical journey of a retired professor. I was appointed to the Chair of Psychiatry at Newcastle University in 1990. I was involved...

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a behavioural disorder marked by instability in relationships, exaggerated fear of abandonment,...

I was a child morbidly obsessed with anything spooky, landing me with the affectionate nickname ‘ghost girl’ during my primary school years.

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

From despair to action Spring is coming. A strong sun warms my back and burns away the morning’s frost. One of the many things I love...

Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash It was May 2019 and I’d recently turned forty. I didn’t feel right. In fact, I felt so little like myself I went to see a doctor. ‘I can’t sleep,’ I said to her. ‘Everything overwhelms me. I’m on the verge of tears all day, my mood swings are erratic. I have pins and needles in my hands and feet and sometimes my face goes numb. I get headaches and feel faint. I think I’m perimenopausal or deficient in something.’ She asked me some questions, I

You have probably had to deal with quite a few challenges over the years. Most of us have. Sure, some people seem to have been dealt a...

Trigger warning: This blog talks about eating disorders and disordered eating. Eating disorders have long been a rather taboo topic, and...

A personal account I’ve been studying Psychology for over five years, first as an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh, then...

My Dad was such an interesting character. I remember as a kid, he had this incredibly soft side, where he would bounce me on his knee and...

Trigger Warning: This blog discusses sexual violence, rape and self-harm, which some readers may find distressing. My name is Lindsay and...

Christmas is fast approaching, with just a couple of days to go until many of us are sat around tables with mismatched chairs from...

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

Can poetry help our mental health? While I’m convinced of this, so much so that I’ve written a new book on the links between verse and our emotional wellbeing, I wanted to know if there was any research which attests to poetry’s power to heal our minds. I had my own personal reasons to see whether there was any scientific data on the subject, because it’s not an exaggeration to say that poetry saved my life. In my thirties, I fell so ill with severe depression that I went to

I’m an English instructor, so of course I’ve had the opportunity to teach horror writer Shirley Jackson’s legendary short story “The...

Me and my phobia I wasn’t always scared of spiders. I remember being very little and happily letting tiny red spiders run over my hands...

In my early twenties, I suffered with agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is a fear of crowded places, open spaces, or being in places where it is...

This is the fifth week of our Maternal Mental Health series, which is dedicated to postnatal post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We are publishing two blogs: one by Becky Fisher, sharing her personal experience with postnatal PTSD, and another one by Professor Colin Martin focusing on describing the clinical and scientific perspective of postnatal PTSD. I knew my life would change that week; I was about to become a mum, but I had no idea that the next few days would also t

This is the third week of our Maternal Mental Health series, which is dedicated to Postpartum Psychosis —a rare but extremely severe postnatal mental illness, which must be treated as a medical emergency to protect the safety of the mother and baby. This week we are publishing two blogs: one by Eve Canavan on her personal experience, and another by researchers Alessandra Biaggi and Katie Hazelgrove from King’s College London, focusing on what we know about the illness and wh

This is the second week of our Maternal Mental Health series, which is dedicated to perinatal Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In honour of OCD awareness week, we are publishing two blogs, one from Maria Bavetta, co-founder of the charity Maternal OCD , about her personal experience of dealing with and overcoming perinatal OCD, and another by King’s College London researcher Dr Fiona Challacombe that focuses on what we know about this condition and the challenges that nee