Given how important it is to be properly loved by one’s parents in order to have an emotionally sane grown-up life, one may wonder with some urgency why – in cases that range from the regrettable to the truly tragic – the process can go so wrong. Why do some…
One of the most striking features of relationships is that, after a while, if things are going well, one or both partners will almost naturally start to refer to the other…
When we imagine the difficulties involved in a so-called ‘bad childhood’, we most readily think in terms of children who are physically harmed – beaten, underfed, sexually abused – or else…
A central fact about early childhood is that babies are born into the world entirely at the mercy of others. They have no native strength, intelligence or utility, they cannot fight…
For a long time, we may cope well enough. We make it to work every morning, we give pleasant summaries of our lives to friends, we smile over dinner. We aren’t…
We would – of course – like any encounter with mental illness to be as brief as possible and, most importantly, to be isolated and singular. But the reality is that…
It may sound odd or impolite to suggest that most of us, when we are in the grip of mental illness, are no longer capable of thinking. That’s not how it…
One of the cruellest aspects of mental illness is that it strips us of any ability to believe that other people might be suffering in the way we are. We aren’t…
The one ingredient on which any recovery from serious mental illness depends is also one which, curiously and grievously, never makes an appearance in any medical handbook or psychiatric diagnostic, namely…
Part of the reason why many of us have a tangled and unhelpful relationship to sleep can be traced back to the way we first learnt about the subject many years…
A standard strategy, when we are physically unwell, is to head to the doctor, take a pill and then expect, in a short while, to feel a lot better. This recourse…
One of the great contributing factors to mental illness is the idea that we should at all costs and and all times be well. We suffer far more than we should…
So efficient and hushed are our brains in their day to day operations, we are apt to miss what an extraordinary and complicated achievement it is to feel mentally well. A…
When we are feeling well in our minds, we hardly notice that we might be harbouring in ourselves anything as formal or as dramatic-sounding as ‘reasons to live.’ We simply assume…
One of nature’s odder creatures is the firefly, a soft bodied beetle that emits a warm yellow glow from its lower abdomen, typically at twilight, in order to attract mates or…
Some of the reason why we are far more fearful, inhibited and sad than we should be is that we are – unbeknownst to ourselves – wandering through our lives with…
The fundamental idea behind psychotherapy is that we tend to grow mentally unwell because we haven’t been able to think with sufficient clarity about the difficulties in our past, typically in…
One of the major reasons why our lives are busier than they might be is that we come under immense pressures to ‘go out’, usually in the evening, typically to one…
One of the most common and deeply-cherished fantasies of our times is the idea that we might ‘retire early.’ Websites abound promising to help us with the dream, managing our finances,…