Our Latest Articles

Learning what the Mother and Baby Unit is like and how do occupational therapists work with mothers and their babies Welcome to the fourth week of our Maternal Mental Health series. This week I wanted to bring you the perspective of professionals in the community that help mothers that are struggling with their mental health. We often think of GPs, psychologists or psychiatrists, but other professionals can complement their work and, as a team, bring mothers back to health an

Everyone experiences loss at some point. Sooner or later, we all learn what bereavement, an unpleasant but unavoidable part of living,...

Co-written by Katie Hazelgrove. This is the third week of our Maternal Mental Health series, and it is dedicated to Postpartum Psychosis — a rare but extremely severe postnatal mental illness, which must be treated as a medical and psychiatric 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,

Intellectual ability, such as thinking, reasoning, and remembering, is tricky to measure. This may be the reason why no major advancement...

I am a Clinical Psychologist and Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Psychiatry at the Department of Psychiatry of Amsterdam UMC in...

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

This is the first blog of our Maternal Mental Health series. For the next six weeks, dear reader, you will read about the often misrepresented, largely misunderstood world of maternal mental illness. We will publish stories from lived experience perspectives and give you the researcher or clinician's perspective on the topics of perinatal OCD, postpartum psychosis, clinical and community mental health support, and childbirth-related post-traumatic stress disorder, and we will

As a student of psychology, and an aspiring mental health practitioner, one of my key areas of interest involves understanding new forms...

The Covid-19 pandemic has made life unpredictable, and accordingly, mental health concerns have grown exponentially. In fact, 13% of the...

Overlooked and Downplayed: The Difficulty in Getting an Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (EUPD) Diagnosis It took me years to...

An estimated 13% of new mothers suffer from postnatal depression , with symptoms including fatigue, sadness, low mood and insomnia. Despite positive results with medication and talking therapies , these are not beneficial for all mothers, or barriers to treatment (long waiting lists, fears around medication while breastfeeding) mean that other solutions are needed. To understand whether community group singing reduces symptoms of postnatal depression in new mothers in South L

Last year, I wrote a blog on how early life stress can affect how our bodies work and how it can lead to feeling depressed. In...

“Table for two?” It feels good being seated once again at my favourite local restaurant and I’ve never had a better excuse to spend my...

Recent estimates forecast that 1 billion people worldwide will be using wearable devices to track their levels of sleep and activity by...

A vision for changing the wellbeing of future generations by tackling the longstanding shortcomings in maternal healthcare The...

I am a freelance science journalist and I have previously written for The Guardian, BBC, National Geographic, Gizmodo, Wired, and more. I...

When it comes to diagnosing physical illnesses, there are a myriad of different biological tests that can be done to correctly diagnose...

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted fundamental truths about infectious disease in humans. First, the makeup of our societies helps...

This new study says there’s a difficult but effective way. In moments of heightened anxiety and stress, my intrusive thoughts take over....

After returning to work from my third maternity leave, one thought still plagues my mind. Is my child going to be okay? I am an incoming...

I can’t get the fog to lift: Deterioration progresses differently in people with different levels of memory problems Dementia research,...

The relational dimension of care has been core to our profession since its inception. Highlighted by Jaspers over a hundred years ago was...

In the last 5 years, hospital admissions for eating disorders have risen by 84%, with over 9,000 admissions for anorexia nervosa between...

A recent article in The Guardian highlighted the urgent need for research into sex-related differences in asthma mortality, claiming that...