Dr Nader Alemi, who opened the country’s first private psychiatric hospital, had received death threats before being taken on his way home from work last week
One of Afghanistan’s most prominent psychiatrists has been abducted on his way home from work by a group of armed men.
Dr Nader Alemi, 66, who opened the country’s first private psychiatric hospital in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, was stopped by seven men in a white car last week, said his family.
Continue reading...In what’s been described as a ‘paradigm shifter’ for psychiatry, Australian clinical trials are exploring the therapeutic benefits of illegal substances
It was out of desperation that Michael Raymond found himself sitting in a remote retreat in the Peruvian Andes, sipping a cup of bitter tea.
Raymond had reached breaking point. His 16-year career as an electrical engineer in high–security situations for the Australian air force had seen him deal with near-death experiences, crashes, casualties and “the aftermath of human remains”.
Continue reading...In ANU study parents report negative effect of Covid and prolonged lockdown has become ‘a lot worse’ than earlier in pandemic
After finishing her final year of high school in 2019, Amy’s* daughter had dreams of leaving Geelong, in Victoria, to travel to the UK for a working holiday using money saved from her waitressing job.
Then the pandemic and lockdowns hit.
Continue reading...Female taekwondo and karate trainers are forced to practise in secret since the Taliban takeover and fear they may never compete again
On the morning of 15 August, when the Taliban were at the gates of Kabul, Soraya, a martial arts trainer in the Afghan capital, woke up with a sense of dread. “It was as though the sun had lost its colour,” she says. That day she taught what would be her last karate class at the gym she had started to teach women self-defence skills. “By 11am we had to say our goodbyes to our students. We didn’t know when we would see each other again,” she says.
Soraya is passionate about martial arts and its potential to transform women’s minds and bodies. “Sport has no gender; it is about good health. I haven’t read anywhere in Qur’an that prevents women from participating in sports to stay healthy,” she says.
Continue reading...His 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score, has become a huge pandemic hit, topping bestseller lists this summer and becoming a meme on social media. What does it tell us about the world we live in?
When Dr Bessel van der Kolk published The Body Keeps the Score in 2014, it was a huge hit with yoga people. That is not a euphemism for “rich, underoccupied people”, it is just people who do yoga. Certain physical activities do something weird to your brain: ancient memories resurface, often with new feelings or perspectives attached; you start treating yourself with more compassion. It doesn’t make sense until you read Van der Kolk. After that, nothing has ever made more sense.
His thesis centres on trauma: the urgent work of the brain after a traumatic event is to suppress it, through forgetting or self-blame, to avoid being ostracised. But the body does not forget; physiological changes result, a “recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormones, an alteration in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant”, as he says in his book. The stress is stored in the muscles and does not dissipate. This has profound ramifications for talking therapies and their limits: the rational mind cannot do the repair work on its own, since that part of you is pretending it has already been repaired.
Continue reading...Social media firm reportedly kept own research secret that suggests app worsens body image issues
Facebook has kept internal research secret for two years that suggests its Instagram app makes body image issues worse for teenage girls, according to a leak from the tech firm.
Since at least 2019, staff at the company have been studying the impact of their product on its younger users’ states of mind. Their research has repeatedly found it is harmful for a large proportion, and particularly teenage girls.
Continue reading...‘It’s just one of those things,’ says the British celebrity snapper, 83, who is still busy with new work
David Bailey has revealed he has dementia, a life-limiting condition the British photographer described as a bore.
Speaking to the Times, Bailey, 83, said: “I’ve got vascular dementia. I was diagnosed about three years ago.
Continue reading...James Heappey, armed forces minister, says it is important to let veterans know their service was not in vain
British veterans of the conflict in Afghanistan will be feeling vulnerable and questioning whether their service was worth it as they witness the country fall to the Taliban once again, a UK government minister has said.
James Heappey, the armed forces minister and former British army officer, was forced to backtrack during media interviews on Monday over a claim he made that a soldier who served in Afghanistan had taken his own life in the last few days.
Continue reading...The 25-year-old politician talks about taking time off to address her mental health, dropping out of university because of the cost – and why she’ll always give away a large part of her salary
Nadia Whittome originally made headlines when she became the “baby of the house” in 2019, elected at the age of 23 as Labour MP for Nottingham East, in an election whose main take-home was how many seats Labour had lost. She was a firebrand or maverick – insert your favourite term for “disobedient” – from the start: hard-remain when Corbyn’s office was all about the lexiters, further to the left than Starmer has turned out to be (so far).
So she was never going to be a quiet backbencher, working her way strategically through the party ranks, but her next headlines were a long way from politics. In May this year, she announced her decision to take time off because of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In a parliamentary culture in which even MPs who have to give birth or have chemotherapy are surrounded by endless discussion about whether they can still do their job, this was a momentous act, signalling to many that Whittome belonged to a new, more honest culture. Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, said at the time that her colleague had “shown so much bravery and … will have helped so many other people”, a view shared by many Conservatives. But Whittome wasn’t thinking of the career angle. “My symptoms were getting worse rather than better. I couldn’t be the energetic, effective MP that Nottingham needs and deserves, and, also for my own health, I needed time and space to recover. I didn’t worry about my political future, I wasn’t thinking about that at all.”
Continue reading...Businesses are becoming increasingly aware that exhaustion is a ticking timebomb
This week, staff at Nike’s headquarters in Oregon breathed a prolonged sigh of relief, after learning that they were getting a week off to de-stress and recover from the pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In an open message to staff posted on LinkedIn, Nike’s senior manager of global marketing science, Matt Marrazzo, told staff: “In a year (or two) unlike any other, taking time for rest and recovery is key to performing well and staying sane.”
Continue reading...Exclusive: research finds small rise in exposure to air pollution leads to higher risk of needing treatment
Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increased severity of mental illness, according to the most comprehensive study of its kind.
The research, involving 13,000 people in London, found that a relatively small increase in exposure to nitrogen dioxide led to a 32% increase in the risk of needing community-based treatment and an 18% increase in the risk of being admitted to hospital.
Continue reading...She spent a year in her room as a teenager, and now makes heart-wrenching documentaries about people looking for safe spaces in record shops, on goth cruises – and even on the set of Game of Thrones
There are many wonderful moments in the films of Jeanie Finlay but my current favourite is in Seahorse, her intimate and profoundly moving 2019 documentary about the struggles of transgender man Freddy McConnell to conceive and give birth to his own child. The scene takes place during a party at Freddy’s mum’s house as a room full of family friends, all women, talk to Freddy about the clothes he’ll wear during pregnancy.
Continue reading...With 93,000 children in Peru losing a parent to Covid, many face depression, anxiety and poverty
When Covid-19 began shutting down Nilda López’s vital organs, doctors decided that the best chance of saving her and her unborn baby was to put her into a coma.
Six months pregnant, López feared she would not wake up, or that if she did, her baby would not be there.
Continue reading...There’s growing evidence that signals sent from our internal organs to the brain play a major role in regulating emotions and fending off anxiety and depression
If you’re sitting in a safe and comfortable position, close your eyes and try to feel your heart beating in your chest. Can you, without moving your hands to take your pulse, feel each movement and count its rhythm? Or do you struggle to detect anything at all? This simple test is just one way to assess your “interoception” – your brain’s perception of your body’s state, transmitted from receptors on all your internal organs.
Interoception may be less well known than the “outward facing” senses such as sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell, but it has enormous consequences for your wellbeing. Scientists have shown that our sensitivity to interoceptive signals can determine our capacity to regulate our emotions, and our subsequent susceptibility to mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.
Continue reading...When 18-year-old Edward Mallen killed himself, his father blamed the NHS, society – and himself. He founded the Zero Suicide Alliance to try to make such deaths a thing of the past
Not long before Christmas in 2014, Steve Mallen began to worry about the eldest of his three children. Edward, who had just turned 18, was good at everything. A gifted pianist, a talented sportsman and a nurturing big brother, he had secured a place at the University of Cambridge.
Then Edward stopped playing the piano. He became withdrawn and began to eat less and lose sleep. On 22 January 2015, he went to see the family’s GP, near their home in a village outside Cambridge. He revealed that he had suicidal feelings and had begun to self-harm, something he felt too ashamed to share at home. He had no known history of mental health problems.
Continue reading...Mental ill-health and ‘warped’ notions of masculinity among reasons mooted for rise of nearly 50% in a year
There is growing alarm in Kenya over a shocking rise in the number of suicides in the country.
Almost 500 people are reported to have killed themselves in the three months to June this year, more than the whole of 2020, according to the Kenyan police.
Continue reading...The author of an acclaimed new book tells how Hitler used works by psychiatric patients in his culture war
On a winter’s day in 1898, a stocky young man with a handlebar moustache was hurrying along the banks of a canal in Hamburg, north Germany. Franz Karl Bühler was in a panic, fleeing a gang of mysterious agents who had been tormenting him for months. There was only one way to escape, he thought. He must swim for it. So he plunged into the dark water, close to freezing at this time of year, and struck out for the far side. When he was hauled on to the bank, soaked and shivering, it became clear to passersby that there was something odd about the man. There was no sign of his pursuers. He was confused, perhaps insane. So he was taken to the nearby Friedrichsberg “madhouse”, as it was known then, and taken inside. He would remain in the dubious care of the German psychiatric system for the next 42 years, one of hundreds of thousands of patients who lived near-invisible lives behind the asylum walls.
Bühler’s incarceration disturbed him, but it also marked the beginning of a remarkable story, one in which he played a leading role. It reveals the debt art owes to mental illness, and the way that connection was used to wage history’s most destructive culture war.
Continue reading...A New Zealand study claims men and women become more satisfied with their bodies over time – bucking the expectations of our youth-obsessed culture
Name: Happy retirees.
Age: Well, as you know, people retire at different ages, typically from about 60 onwards.
Continue reading...A year on from the devastating explosion, people are struggling to sleep and PTSD is widespread – amid economic chaos
Rayan Khatoun has been dreading 4 August. She has been constantly on edge as the anniversary of the port explosion in Beirut approached.
The blast threw Khatoun into a wall as she came home from work and left her with a head injury, a fractured cheekbone and torn tendons. Since then, she has suffered from recurring nightmares, insomnia and anxiety attacks.
Continue reading...WG Sebald’s writing on the Holocaust was driven by the anger and distress he felt over his father’s service in Hitler’s army
His books are saturated with despair. Over and over again, his emotionally traumatised characters are caught – inescapably – in plots that doom them to a life of anguish. Often, they kill themselves.
Now, the psychological wounds and suicidal thoughts that blighted WG Sebald’s own life and secretly inspired him to begin writing fiction are to be laid bare for the first time in a forthcoming biography.
Continue reading...