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Psychology

Essays and videos offering insights into the self, relationships, cognition and neuroscience
A colour illustration of a pool of water in which many people are swimming, glimpsed through trees, against a city skyline background
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Mental health

The right to bathe

Water is a great healer. Can New York’s public pools and ‘blue spaces’ be engineered for collective hydrotherapy?

Rebecca Hayes Jacobs

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Stories and literature

Saved by Infinite Jest

Bereft and suicidal, I lay on my sofa. Only David Foster Wallace’s novel kept me tethered to life, and still does

Mala Chatterjee

A blurred view through a car window at night with distorted bright lights
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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Trauma on a loop

I was the victim of a carjacking. The trauma from that experience was unendurable. Then I discovered eye movement therapy

Madison McLoughlin

A woman helps another woman to her feet in a clearing among flowers.
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Mental health

People not professionals

Training individuals to support one another through difficult times is a profound step forward in our mental health crisis

Arjun Kapoor & Jasmine Kalha

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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Analysis for the people

Group therapy promised to be both democratic and radical, but it failed to take hold. Has its time finally come?

Jess Cotton

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Art

Negative capability

When it comes to our complicated, undecipherable feelings, art prompts a self-understanding far beyond the wellness industry

Aparna Chivukula

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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Tōjisha-kenkyū

This radical movement makes space for people with mental health and other challenges to study (and celebrate) themselves

Satsuki Ayaya & Junko Kitanaka

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Neuroscience

A thickness in the air

The spooky sensation that someone or something else is right there haunts us all. But what does this felt presence mean?

Ben Alderson-Day

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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

The space between us

In order to understand and heal mental distress, we must see our minds as existing in relationships, not inside our heads

James Barnes

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Bioethics

Selected before birth

Embryo risk screening could lower the odds of illnesses ranging from depression to diabetes. Can it be ethically done?

Todd Lencz & Shai Carmi

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Mental health

Secrets hurt their holders

Holding back the truth can take a huge toll on your relationships and your mental health. Why? And is there a better way?

Michael Slepian

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Mental health

Under the mkone tree

When I returned to Kenya, where I grew up, I found biomedicine and traditional medicine in conversation about mental health

Priya Basil

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Mental health

The helpful delusion

Evidence is growing that mental illness is more than dysfunction, with enormous implications for treatment

Justin Garson

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video

Addiction

From back pain to addiction – one man’s struggle with opioids, as told to his sister

14 minutes

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Addiction

Why we crave

The neuroscientific picture of addiction overlooks the psychological and social factors that make cravings so hard to resist

Zoey Lavallee

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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Bad therapy

Some psychotherapeutic approaches are not only ineffective, they’re actively harmful. We’re now starting to identify them

Yevgeny Botanov, Alexander Williams & John Sakaluk

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Consciousness and altered states

Pivotal mental states

Spiritual highs and mental breakdowns are both products of the same evolved brain system granting us the power to transform

Ari Brouwer

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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

The humane asylum

As a society we are failing people with severe, persistent mental illness. It’s time to reimagine institutional care

Madeleine Ritts & Daniel Rosenbaum

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video

Mental health

When crushes become crushing – how to know if you’re in a ‘limerent episode’

4 minutes

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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Chairwork

It is a powerful, liberating therapy that lets you (literally) shift perspective on who you are, and who you could become

Scott Kellogg & Amanda Garcia Torres

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Family life

An artist grapples with the loss of his brother, and the problem of canine abduction

7 minutes

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Public health

When two punk bands came to a psychiatric hospital, beautiful chaos ensued

27 minutes

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Mental health

World wide open

Deep brain stimulation not only treats psychiatric disease – it changes the whole person, boosting confidence and openness

Julian Kiverstein, Erik Rietveld & Damiaan Denys

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Mood and emotion

Radical acceptance

The painful feelings you avoid grow twisted in the dark. By facing your sorrows and struggles you can take back your life

Joshua Coleman