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I woke up to the soothing pitter-patter of raindrops last week. Trees were swaying in an exhilarating dance on the music of rustling...

The war in Ukraine is still ongoing but more and more people are organizing conferences and building platforms to address an important...

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...

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

What comes to your mind when you hear the acronym TLC? For some (especially healthcare professionals), the first thought is "Tender...

Since the emergence of social media, debates have been consistently sparked about the line drawn between moderate use and a concerning...

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...

Fairy tales provide a framework for how to deal with the challenges and conflicts of growing up...

The total population of the world crossed 8 billion a couple of months ago. Although a clear milestone has been passed, there remain...

Around 10% of the UK population is estimated to be affected by claustrophobia at some point during their lifetime, according to the NHS.

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

Hospital setting. A child is born and cries at the top of his lungs. The hospital personnel carefully takes the newborn from the mother...

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

How first experiences impact the infant development Two days after my daughter was born, in Milan, Italy, I was in the hospital nursery room. When I was there, another baby girl was ready to go home with her parents, when her dad said, loudly (in Italian), “Can you see how all the other babies and parents are happy to see you go finally, so they can stop hearing you cry? We cannot hold you all the time darling, life is painful, so you’d better get used to it”. I found these w

Most of us think that a cat purrs when it is happy, however, there is much more behind it, from communication to healing properties. As...

An interview with genetic epidemiologist Dr. Ashley-Koch about which genes are correlated with suicidal behaviours and why learning about them is crucial for early intervention. Allison Elizabeth Ashley-Koch is a genetic epidemiologist at Duke University School of Medicine and she’s dedicated her life’s work to figuring out the genetic basis of several diseases, especially those pertaining to mental health. She has recently published a paper pinpointing four specific genes wh

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

If you find yourself tossing and turning at night, your mind buzzing with thoughts — among them why you are not asleep — you are not...

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

An interview with our new columnist, a psychologist and a mother, Dr Alessandra Biaggi Image source: Photo by Dominika Roseclay on Pexels Ahead of the launch of the new column “The Perinatal Journey - Walking through the first years of life” on Inspire the Mind, I sat down with its creator, Dr Alessandra Biaggi, to learn more about it. I first met Alessandra a few years ago, when she worked as part of the perinatal (the time between pregnancy and the first year of life) psych

Running a small independent business is already a challenge with small margins and the ever-increasing inflation. Try doing that under...

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

Chat GPT is the AI chat bot that is taking over the internet. At first glance it seems amazing and feels almost straight out of a Sci-Fi...

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