You’re at work one day when your company’s “wellness” department begins handing out “emoji” stickers with words like “frustrated”, “overwhelmed”, and “stressed” printed below their creepy yellow faces. No one uses them, of course. But the message is clear: “[Insert …
Ukraine’s new cure for the horrors of war: Ketamine and MDMA
Can ketamine and MDMA help Ukrainian soldiers cope with the horrors of war? Given the urgent nationwide mental-health crisis, the Ukrainian government is warming to the radical idea. And some army units are already experimenting. The nation could soon find …
Why children are skipping school
Lily was among the growing number of so-called ghost children — the ones who aren’t in school. I never met her; I only met her mother, Jane, because Lily didn’t feel ready to talk to me. Lily had been off …
The trouble with attachment theory
I’ll tell you up front: I am an avoidant partner. I frequently withdraw into myself and become uncommunicative. In fights I get quiet rather than angry, saying less and less, making a partner feel like they have no ability to …
The psychological battle over trauma
We live in traumatised times. Over the past few years, our social media channels, reality TV shows, and even playgrounds have become saturated with therapy speak. Instead of feeling uncomfortable, people now feel “triggered”; listening to a friend is now …
Not every anorexic can be saved
In the summer of 1995, I watched a woman starve to death. I was 19 and L was in her mid-30s, having suffered from anorexia since the age of 15. She looked unlike any person I have seen before or …
The student mental-health crisis is a myth
It’s easy to fall off the radar at university. Exactly 20 years ago — 17 years old, awkward and terribly uncertain of myself — I did just that. Too young to drink legally (and apparently too ill-connected to procure a …
Why CBT won’t set you free
One of the more entertaining parts of my training in Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy — an austerely philosophical style of CBT — was how tribal our course leader was about its merits. He got particularly exercised about psychoanalysts. If a prospective …
Is liberal society making us ill?
As rates of Covid-19 infection started to dwindle, there came signs of a much stranger pandemic: long Covid and its host of long-term complications. You might think that, since men and older people suffer the most complications from the virus, …
The truth about acid casualties
Bankruptcy is not the only thing that proceeds gradually, and then suddenly. While Syd Barrett may have appeared fine in an interview in May 1967, his teetering mental state would change drastically by the summer. Locking himself in his bedroom …
The death of the momblogger
Heather Armstrong didn’t mean to become a “mommy blogger”. In 1997, she taught herself to code, and began working at a Los Angeles tech start-up. When she started writing about her life online, her focus was Dilbert-style office politics. The …
Is trans the new anorexia?
When teaching freshman composition in New York colleges in the mid-Eighties, I picked up a peculiar pattern in one-on-one conferences with my female students. With improbable frequency, they’d confide that they were anorexic. The term had only entered the popular …
Adderall is not an identity
It’s 2am here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I’ve just finished writing 7,500 words of corporate marketing copy. I then turn my attention to this piece. But my attention is glitching. So I do something I haven’t done since I took …
Who decides if you’re mentally ill?
Abby walks into my office, sits down, and tells me she has been struggling with “sex addiction”. When I ask about this, she tells me of sleeping with a handful of people in the past few months at college. I …
How Big Pharma monetised depression
We are, if you believe the headlines, living in the midst of an unprecedented mental health crisis, exacerbated by the stress and isolation of the pandemic. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at the end of …
