Tag Archives: mental health

There is one image from childhood that has never left me. After the Common Entrance results were announced, the school playground became a festival of joy. Children ran across the yard calling out the names of their new schools. Parents embraced one another. Teachers smiled with quiet satisfaction. Yet, away …

A few months ago, I asked an elderly patient a question I ask dozens of times each week: “How are you doing?” Her blood pressure was acceptable. Her diabetes was reasonably controlled. Her cholesterol numbers looked reassuring. “I’m fine, doctor,” she replied. Then she hesitated. The smile disappeared. “I just …

I was a fair way into my column when the call came. It was from one of the sharpest, most beautiful minds I know. He is not even forty, but he has accumulated wisdom far beyond his years—partly because he has lived a life that has been buffeted from all …

There is something quietly disarming about watching a child see a giraffe in the zoo for the first time. The pause. The widening of the eyes. The small hand tightening around yours, as though this impossibly tall, gentle creature might suddenly look back. In that moment, something happens that medicine …

There are many ways to kill a man. Some are sudden. Some are brutal. Some are mercifully brief. Crucifixion was a slow, deliberate medical death. The Romans may not have had physiology textbooks, blood gas analysis or intensive care units, but they understood something grimly practical about the human body: …

For some time, the thought of approaching a memoir as a collection of essays has been floating about. Assembling memories in the hope that they might make for useful reading means committing to candour and truth. People’s feelings have to be taken into account. What to include, what to leave …

Many women arrive in clinic apologising for their bodies. “Doctor, I know… it’s my weight.” They say it before I check their blood pressure. Before I review their blood tests. Before I ask about sleep, stress, grief, work, hormones or the fact that they have not eaten a quiet meal …

“[…] The midbrain doesn’t know the difference between a hit of cocaine and the ‘win’ of a social spotlight or a piece of band merch. It simply flags the object as a vital resource. “When that happens, the brain’s priority-sorting software gets a bug. It starts assigning a ‘survival score’ …

“[…] There is also something profoundly human about the evil eye that modern medicine struggles to acknowledge: the role of envy and comparison in illness. “We live in an age of social media, where admiration is constant and unfiltered. Eyes everywhere. Watching. Liking. Measuring. “If the ancients were worried about …

“[…] Economists call it ‘presenteeism’. This means being physically at work but mentally checked out due to untreated mental health problems. In a small island economy, this is a productivity killer—difficult to quantify with hard data. “[…] Mental health budgets cannot be viewed as charity. That would be the wrong …

He was ranting angrily about his wife of 25 years. He often came to me to vent; she did too. There was little to do but listen. They were spectacularly unsuited for each other, but the thought of getting a divorce was an unthinkable one, because according to the way …

I don’t recall ever seeing such a high level of apprehension in our space. Do you? It’s coming from a multitude of shadowed places, so many that it is difficult to put a finger on any one thing as the root. Armadas and squadrons loom on our horizon. Conflicting reports …