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Psychology

Essays and videos offering insights into the self, relationships, cognition and neuroscience
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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

The therapist who hated me

Going to a child psychoanalyst four times a week for three years was bad enough. Reading what she wrote about me was worse

Michael Bacon

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 yellow orchid flower in a vase is lit by sunlight from a side window in a living room. The background is out of focus
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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Psychosis and psychedelics

In the 1960s, psychedelic research was driven underground. Now it’s re-emerging – with lessons for the study of psychosis

Phoebe Friesen

A flock of birds fly over a wide expanse of marshland and a river at dusk.
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Biography and memoir

Flat places

Whenever I stand in a flat landscape, I feel myself becoming weightless, taken out of my childhood full of painful nothing

Noreen Masud

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Mood and emotion

When grief doesn’t end

Suffering the sudden death of a loved person leaves some survivors stuck in grief. Can they win their lives back – and how?

Martin W Angler

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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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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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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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video

Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Pondering the peculiar one-sided intimacy of the client-therapist relationship

3 minutes

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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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Self-improvement

The art of listening

To listen well is not only a kindness to others but also, as the psychologist Carl Rogers made clear, a gift to ourselves

M M Owen

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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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Mood and emotion

When hope gets in the way

Hope is usually seen as a positive agent of change that spares us from pain. But it can also undermine healing and growth

Santiago Delboy

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Subcultures

The dropout: a history

The dropout was not just a hippy-trippy hedonist but a paranoid soul, who feared brainwashing and societal control

Charlie Williams

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Mood and emotion

The meaning of anger

Is anger like energy, forever changing form but never dissipating, or part of our repertoire of desires, the cry of a need unmet?

Josh Cohen

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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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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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Human rights and justice

Asylum

Patients and psychiatrists at Saint-Alban in France fought against fascism side by side. What can we learn from them?

Ben Platts-Mills

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Philosophy of mind

The mind does not exist

The terms ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ are messy, harmful and distracting. We should get rid of them

Joe Gough

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Neurodiversity

After neurodiversity

We live in a world that must move beyond identity politics and embrace new models of the mind. Enter psydiversity

Bonnie Evans

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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

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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Rewiring your life

A radical therapy based on eye movements can desensitise painful memories, heal hurts and aid transformation at warp speed

Deborah Korn

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Mental health

The seed of suffering

The p-factor is the dark matter of psychiatry: an invisible, unifying force that might lie behind a multitude of mental disorders

Alex Riley