Mental health

Mental health

Brain fog can happen to anyone and it's not a personal failing or a sign that you're not coping. Often, it's simply your brain's way of saying it's tired, stressed or overstretched. Remind yourself that brain fog is usually temporary and it's okay to slow down, delegate tasks or ask for help when you need it. If you are concerned then you should contact your GP.

The random and unprovoked killing of a young woman in North Carolina several weeks ago has become a viral video, a political football, and a powerful rightwing talking point even as the horror and anger her death has provoked obscures what experts say is a vital story about the failures of the American mental health system. The alleged perpetrator, Decarlos Brown Jr, 34, has a long history of problems with the law and mental health issues.

For some men, anger is the emotion they are most familiar with. Ask one of these men how he feels and you are likely to get a puzzled expression, unless, of course, he is angry, in which case he is often quite clear about how he feels. Some families have adapted strategies over the years to either avoid or manage men's unacknowledged anger.

In 5th grade, we had a class project to interview one of our grandparents. It seemed simple enough: Spend time with someone who loved you and ask them questions about their life. Looking back, I understand the real purpose of the assignment: to foster connection across generations, to learn what our grandparents' lives were like when they were our age.

Imagine the negative event or possibility in question and feel the intensity of the feeling you experience in catastrophizing about it. While keying into your negative feeling, rank how bad the event in question feels on the 10-point negative values scale. Focus now on rationally assessing how bad the possibility really is. When you think of very bad things like earthquakes and tsunamis, is this truly as bad as

Her digital seance was not cathartic, nor did it give her any closure. After an emotional two hours of hearing her father's voice from the machine, which she dubbed Dadbot, she ended the conversation, never to interact with it again. "Saying goodbye to Dadbot was surprisingly hard," she says. "When I finished and turned it off, I spent the rest of the day feeling like I had done something wrong."

As human activities alter local-to-global environments, people are reporting stress, distress, depression, anxiety, worry, psychological trauma, and other negative emotions. Phrases coined to describe these responses include solastalgia, eco-anxiety, climate change anxiety, climate fear, and ecological grief. Scientifically, all these ideas are in their infancy. To improve understanding and to really get to the basics of how human beings respond to different environmental changes, researchers are developing scales and indices, some of which are clinical and some of which are not.

"The concept of "micro-retirement"-short breaks from work to focus on personal well-being, travel, or passion projects-is gaining popularity, especially among younger generations prioritizing work-life balance. While appealing, the financial implications of homeownership can make this trend challenging. Financial experts caution that bills don't take vacations, emphasizing the importance of planning for ongoing expenses during a micro-retirement. For homeowners dreaming of these breaks, understanding their financial commitments is crucial to avoid dire consequences."

Please sit down, I begged my neighbour, who was leaning across the car gearstick, arm stretched around my headrest. My pleas for him to fasten his seatbelt were futile. Now he was jigging about, gesticulating wildly as he revealed his latest plans. He had told me before about the script he was writing for Gary Oldman. I hadn't thought too much of it, then all writers have to be a bit grandiose, I had reasoned, otherwise they wouldn't achieve anything.

Do you find yourself being harshly self-critical after you've made a mistake or failed to meet a personal goal? Familiar self-statements might be: "I can't seem to do anything right!" or "I'm just not talented enough." Maybe you falsely assume that you must be harsh with yourself in hopes of getting better results next time. What you might not know is that your self-criticism may be making it less likely that you'll succeed in the future.

John Kline is a good friend of mine, who I met through the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Connection Support Group program. We've been facilitating a local NAMI support group together for years. He has a captivating story of experiencing Bipolar I, psychotic breaks, and what emotional recovery looks like. He also tells the story of his prolific career as a paramedic, and how his experience of bipolar shaped his career and his personal life.

Itdeclares that if urban neighborhoods, mid-size and small communities, and rural areas worldwide organize local resilience networks that provide Mutual Support For All, the mental health, psychosocial, and many physical health issues generated by the C-E-B crisis can be prevented, when symptoms appear they can be healed, and people can find positive new sources of meaning, purpose, and healthy hope in life, and thrive.

Western culture has taught us that suffering is a problem to be solved, discomfort a symptom to be medicated away, and trauma something to avoid at all costs. Yet, research by psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun suggests we may have this entirely backwards. Their work on post-traumatic growth reveals that some of life's most profound transformations-positive changes in self-perception and relationships, greater self-awareness and confidence,

OCD can present with almost any fear or feeling or apparent meaning, and is not determined by the content of these fears, feelings, or apparent meanings. Instead, it is defined by two elements. First, the repetitive obsessions, which can be thoughts, feelings, or images that raise anxiety, shame, disgust, or guilt. Second, individuals with OCD experience the looping alternation of obsessions with compulsions-attempts to get rid of the obsessions or lower the level of distress.

In an era of permacrisis, what lifts your spirits? We're interested to hear from people about the small, everyday actions that have bought you joy when you've been feeling down. It could be starting a conversation with a stranger, taking a family walk, doing karaoke or spontaneous skinny dipping - the less expected, the better. Please include a sentence or two about why you were in a slump (perhaps it was after a bad break-up, or during a particularly stressful time at work?)

My dad can come in a room and be mad about something, but it doesn't change the dynamic or energy of the room. We don't internalize his feels. His feelings don't set the mood for of the room.

People in a New York prison's mental health unit are kept in their cells 24 hours a day, with the exception of an occasional "callout," and denied therapeutic services, according to a lawsuit filed this week by Disability Rights New York and Prisoners' Legal Services of New York against New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), among others.

Workers are taking more mental health leavesnow than they were in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic started. According to data collected by behavioral health services provider ComPsych, the percentage of workers taking a leave ofabsence increased by 30% from 2019 to 2024, while mental health leaves increased by 300% in the same time frame. ComPsych analyzed data from over six million global employees.

When Ilona suddenly lost her husband to suicide six years ago, she was heading the customs department of a medium-sized company. Distracting herself with work helped her to bring a sense of normality back into her life, she recalls. Ilona quickly realized that she wouldn't be able to cope with her loss alone so she sought help. A neighbor told her about a support group in Berlin. There, she met Patricia, who's been the group's volunteer leader for over 10 years.

As human beings, each of us is at once perfect and a work in progress. As we grow and expand our knowledge and understanding of the world, we sometimes experience setbacks and failures. We sometimes make mistakes. Some of those mistakes, long after we have made them, loom large in our minds and persist in our thoughts, so much so that we are burdened with regret and remorse for the hurt and harm we have caused others.

I'd look for something new to take on: a class, a language, a project, a degree. Once, in the span of a single week, I signed up for language classes, researched getting certified in something I didn't actually want to do, and convinced myself I needed to start training for a 10K. Because if I was doing something productive, I wouldn't have to sit with what I was feeling. That was the pattern: uncomfortable emotion → frantic pursuit of something "more."

My husband's father passed away two weeks ago. We are all very distraught, but my husband is facing a horrifying prospect. His mother wants him to deliver the eulogy, and my husband has a terrible fear of public speaking. It's so severe that the last time he had to give a speech he literally shit his pants. Luckily, he had planned ahead and wore an adult diaper as a fail-safe, but obviously this is a situation we would not like to repeat.

Jamie Pearson was admitted to Blackpool Victoria hospital's A&E department after taking an overdose of high-strength painkillers on 17 August 2024. An inquest heard that Pearson should have been seen within four hours by mental health specialists but was deemed low risk and was still waiting 22 hours later when he killed himself in a toilet. His mother, Julie Knowles, previously told the Guardian her son was badly failed and let down by health professionals.

Dear Eric: I retired a couple of years ago. I like many people, I think have realized that most of my friends and even acquaintances were work-related. My family doesn't live close. I've always been a loner, so this doesn't normally even bother me. I recently had a health issue come up where I needed a responsible adult to drive me home from surgery and I had a hard time coming up with someone.