Our Latest Articles

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...

As a stress researcher from Turkey, I was finalizing a manuscript on the long-term impact of trauma when my world turned upside down with...

As a person from Ukraine, living in Berlin, I never understood when people here complained about lousy winter weather. The temperatures...

When you hear ‘eating disorder’, there’s probably a particular image that comes to mind – a white, teenage girl, emaciated, anorexic....

On the morning of February 24th, 2022, I was woken up at 5 am by a phone call from my mother, who simply said: “A full-scale invasion has...

Co written by Prof. Andrew H. Miller and Dr. Charles L. Raison Despite substantial research showing that inflammation plays a role in...

A interview about the Science special issue on brain connectivity In the morgue. That’s where Stephanie Forkel, a researcher whose work focuses on neuroviability, first realized that there are differences between what people’s brains look like. “The first time I saw a brain, I was like, ‘hang on a minute!’ I thought my neuroanatomy was good, but this doesn't look like the textbook,” she says, laughing. “So that was my ‘aha moment’ of realizing that there is a huge degree of v

There are several seconds before a client enters my office or I open the “Zoom room” for a session, where I take a few deep breaths,...