Category Archives: Mental health

Lockdown cabin fever? 56 tried, tested and terrific ways to beat the boredom

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Shaun Ryder keeps chickens, while Mel Giedroyc organises chutney tastings. These small, affordable suggestions won’t end lockdown misery – but they might help

If you live with someone else, draw each other. My boyfriend, a professional artist, has a gross advantage – so I hold the most atrocious pose possible to challenge him. Then I challenge the foundations of our relationship by trying to depict him in a fashion that won’t result in him dumping me. Our relationship survived the last time, although we almost died laughing. Laura Snapes, Guardian deputy music editor

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Covid linked to risk of mental illness and brain disorder, study suggests

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One in eight people who get coronavirus also have first psychiatric or neurological illness within six months, research finds

One in eight people who have had Covid-19 are diagnosed with their first psychiatric or neurological illness within six months of testing positive for the virus, a new analysis suggests, adding heft to an emerging body of evidence that stresses the toll of the virus on mental health and brain disorders cannot be ignored.

The analysis – which is still to be peer-reviewed – also found that those figures rose to one in three when patients with a previous history of psychiatric or neurological illnesses were included.

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Teenagers can ‘catch’ moods from friends, study finds

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UK study investigates impact of individuals’ moods within shared social network

Teenagers can “catch” moods from their friends and negative moods appear to be more contagious than positive, a study has found.

The study by Oxford and Birmingham universities investigates “emotional contagion” among teenagers, to see the impact of individuals’ moods within a shared social network.

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I thought my eating disorder was my protector, but I have been anorexia’s prey | Melis Layik

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With university online and no job to go to thanks to Covid, it has become easier to spend hours in front of the mirror berating my appearance

Name: Melis Layik

Age: 21

I increased my dosage of antidepressants today. With the loosening of Victoria’s Covid restrictions and the surge of New Year’s weight loss marketing, my eating disorder has once again overwhelmed me with feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing.

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Covid restrictions on visits to detained children and parents are ‘cruel’, MPs told

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Prison, care home and mental health institution visit limitations failing to consider impact on family life, campaigners say

Children with parents in prison have been forgotten during lockdown, campaigners have told MPs.

The cross-party human rights committee is looking at the impact on the right to family life, with a focus on people in institutional settings including prisons, care homes and mental health facilities.

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Authorities had four warnings about Reading attacker’s mental health

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Refugee support chief warned of Khairi Saadallah carrying out ‘London Bridge-type scenario’

• Reading attacker Khairi Saadallah given whole-life prison sentence

Repeated warnings were given that Khairi Saadallah, who murdered three men in a Reading park last summer, could carry out a “London Bridge-type scenario” shortly before the killings took place, the Guardian has learned.

Documents reveal that Nick Harborne, chief executive of the Reading Refugee Support Group (RRSG), who had had dealings with Saadallah since 2016, made four specific warnings to health and probation professionals between 4 December 2019 and 12 June 2020 that Saadallah could commit a violent crime if he did not receive appropriate support.

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Why it’s time to stop pursuing happiness

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Positive thinking and visualising success can be counterproductive – happily, other strategies for fulfilment are available

Like many teenagers, I was once plagued with angst and dissatisfaction – feelings that my parents often met with bemusement rather than sympathy. They were already in their 50s, and, having grown up in postwar Britain, they struggled to understand the sources of my discontentment at the turn of the 21st century.

“The problem with your generation is that you always expect to be happy,” my mother once said. I was baffled. Surely happiness was the purpose of living, and we should strive to achieve it at every opportunity? I simply wasn’t prepared to accept my melancholy as something that was beyond my control.

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I teach a course on happiness at Yale: this is how to make the most of your resolutions

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Forget tough love. Adopting a positive mindset and being kind to yourself is a more effective way to make a change

To say that 2020 wasn’t the best year is an understatement. For many of us, it felt like a giant global dumpster fire. Not surprisingly, the stresses of living through a pandemic have had a terrible impact on our collective mental health, with rates of depression and anxiety skyrocketing. Many of us feel we can’t say goodbye to last year fast enough.

And that means we’re entering 2021 with high expectations. With the promise of a vaccine and the potential for a return to normality, the start of this year has given us something we’ve been missing for a long time: hope. Starting over after the year we’ve just had feels more exciting than usual. It’s a brand new chapter in our lives, in which lots of positive changes are possible.

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Silence your inner critic: a guide to self-compassion in the toughest times

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Is your internal monologue friendly, calm and encouraging – or critical and bullying? Here is how to change it for the better

Tobyn Bell still remembers the precise moment when his self-compassion practice paid off.

He had just arrived home from work and was turning over in his mind the mistakes he had made that day, what he could or should have done – the kind of self-critical thoughts he had struggled with for years. Then, unexpectedly, another voice piped up in response, calm and steadying, addressing Bell by a fond nickname from his childhood.

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Doctor Who’s Sacha Dhawan on his battle with anxiety: ‘Getting help was scary’

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The young actor, who plays the timelord’s arch enemy The Master, talks about his meaty new role in The Great – and reveals how he overcame the fears that used to leave him traumatised in his trailer

When Sacha Dhawan learned that he had been chosen to play Doctor Who baddie The Master, it should have been one of the biggest moments of his career. “My agent was ecstatic,” he says. “The BBC was ecstatic.” But he wasn’t. “I put the phone down and I couldn’t have felt more sad,” he says. The reason, it turns out, is a hidden battle with anxiety that Dhawan had been waging for years.

The opportunity was too big to pass up, but at that moment its scale felt insurmountable. “I would be the first British South Asian actor to play The Master,” he says. “So I’m kind of representing not only the Whoniverse but my community. And if I fuck this up, they aren’t going to be casting another South Asian actor for this.”

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‘I’d sunk, lost all confidence’: the charity helping young people into work

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Georgina George and Jamil Mungul credit UK Youth-supported programmes with helping them find a new direction

  • Please donate to our appeal here

Georgina George had a tough time at school and struggled for years afterwards to work out what she wanted to do with her life.

Then just before the pandemic hit, it all came together: she discovered a passion for aviation engineering and found a job in the sector that she loved. Shaking off the problems from her past, the 23-year-old began to forge ahead.

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Guardian and Observer charity appeal hits £1m

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More than 9,000 readers contribute to charities supporting young people through Covid crisis

  • Please donate to our appeal here

With more than a week still to go, the Guardian and Observer 2020 appeal has raised an amazing £1m for its three partner charities supporting disadvantaged young people living in communities hit by the Covid pandemic.

More than 9,500 readers have donated to the appeal since it launched in early December, including hundreds who called journalists to donate through the annual telethon shortly before Christmas. The funds raised will be shared among the charities UK Youth, YoungMinds and Child Poverty Action Group.

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Robin Williams’s widow: ‘There were so many misunderstandings about what had happened to him’

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Susan Schneider Williams watched her husband suffer with undiagnosed Lewy body dementia before he killed himself in 2014. Her new film tries to educate others about the condition – and put to rest assumptions about his death

After Robin Williams died in August 2014, aged 63, a lot of people had a lot of things to say about him. There was the predictable speculation about why a hugely beloved and seemingly healthy Hollywood star would end his own life, with some confidently stating that he was depressed or had succumbed to old addictions.

Others talked, with more evidence, about Williams as a comic genius (Mork & Mindy, Mrs Doubtfire, The Birdcage, Aladdin); a brilliant dramatic actor (Dead Poets Society, Awakenings, Good Will Hunting, One Hour Photo); and both (Good Morning, Vietnam; The Fisher King). One thing everyone agreed on was that he had an extraordinary mind. Comedians spoke about how no one thought faster on stage than Williams; those who made movies with him said he never did the same take twice, always ad-libbing and getting funnier each time.

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New Year honours 2020: citizens awarded for response to pandemic crisis

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Among those honoured are health and social care workers, Covid response volunteers, virus experts and fund-raising centenarians

Hundreds of key workers and community champions who battled the pandemic have been recognised in the New Year honours list for the UK which celebrates people’s extraordinary response to the Covid-19 crisis.

Lewis Hamilton, the Formula One driver, and the cinematographer Roger Deakins are among the celebrities knighted, while the architect David Chipperfield gets the Companion of Honour. The actor Toby Jones and Jed Mercurio, creator of the TV series Line of Duty, are given OBEs for services to drama. On being made a dame for services to drama the actor Sheila Hancock said she feared she was “slightly miscast”.

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Giving birth seemed to spell disaster for my mental health. Were my anxieties unfounded?

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I feared isolation, sleep deprivation and an end to the activities that had been keeping me well. I never expected to be filled with such love and wonder

I hadn’t expected to have a baby. But when I turned out to be wrong about that, I found myself expecting the whole thing to be a disaster. It wasn’t just that people tend to be rather negative about what early parenthood entails, focusing on the sleepless nights and endless nappy changes. It was also because I had a mental illness that I thought would make it impossible for me to cope at all, let alone enjoy motherhood. Neither had I expected to be giving birth in the middle of a pandemic, in which I would be cut off from much of my support network.

In the three years since I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result of a serious trauma in my personal life, I had spent a great deal of time trying to work out how to manage my illness. I planned my weeks around activities that research told me would help mend my mind a little. I knew that cold-water swimming, for instance, appears to help us control the fight-or-flight instinct that often goes so awry in mental illness. I knew that running could encourage the body to produce chemicals that lift the mood. I had discovered that birdwatching and looking for wild flowers were much more effective for me than mindfulness apps, with their calls to sit in silence in a room. I had just written a book about the healing power of outdoor pursuits and was starting to feel mildly in control of my life.

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Covid poses ‘greatest threat to mental health since second world war’

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UK’s leading psychiatrist predicts impact will be felt for years after pandemic ends

The coronavirus crisis poses the greatest threat to mental health since the second world war, with the impact to be felt for years after the virus has been brought under control, the country’s leading psychiatrist has said.

Dr Adrian James, the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said a combination of the disease, its social consequences and the economic fallout were having a profound effect on mental health that would continue long after the epidemic is reined in.

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‘A mental health emergency’: no end to trauma for refugees on Lesbos

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Mental health problems are spiralling among adults and children at ‘Moria 2:0’ camp as winter sets in and security tightens

Nadia hasn’t slept. The mother of five spent last night trying to soothe her seven-year-old son, Matin, who is autistic, while heavy rain fell on the family’s tent. He was crying and asking for the noise to stop. “I tried to explain to him that the rain is not in our control,” she says, “but in these moments, you can’t reach him any more.”

The family, originally from Parwan province in Afghanistan, are living in the new refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos that was built in three days, after the fire that razed to the ground parts of the infamous Moria camp.

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The Guardian charity telethon – talk to your favourite journalists

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Help disadvantaged young people by calling Marina Hyde, John Crace, Jonathan Freedland and others on Saturday

  • Please donate to our appeal here

It’s your chance to discuss this extraordinary year, one-to-one, with your favourite journalists. Marina Hyde, John Crace, Jonathan Freedland, Anushka Asthana, Owen Jones and others will be taking your calls and donations at the Guardian and Observer 2020 charity appeal telethon this Saturday.

This year’s appeal cause is disadvantaged young people, and we are raising money for three charities doing fantastic work at the sharp end of the Covid-19 social crisis: UK Youth, which funds grassroots youth work schemes; Young Minds, which helps young people with mental health support; and the anti-poverty campaigners Child Poverty Action Group.

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Has a year of living with Covid-19 rewired our brains?

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The pandemic is expected to precipitate a mental health crisis, but perhaps also a chance to approach life with new clarity

When the bubonic plague spread through England in the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton fled Cambridge where he was studying for the safety of his family home in Lincolnshire. The Newtons did not live in a cramped apartment; they enjoyed a large garden with many fruit trees. In these uncertain times, out of step with ordinary life, his mind roamed free of routines and social distractions. And it was in this context that a single apple falling from a tree struck him as more intriguing than any of the apples he had previously seen fall. Gravity was a gift of the plague. So, how is this pandemic going for you?

In different ways, this is likely a question we are all asking ourselves. Whether you have experienced illness, relocated, lost a loved one or a job, got a kitten or got divorced, eaten more or exercised more, spent longer showering each morning or reached every day for the same clothes, it is an inescapable truth that the pandemic alters us all. But how? And when will we have answers to these questions – because surely there will be a time when we can scan our personal balance sheets and see in the credit column something more than grey hairs, a thicker waist and a kitten? (Actually, the kitten is pretty rewarding.) What might be the psychological impact of living through a pandemic? Will it change us for ever?

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‘Lonely repetition and growing nihilism’: how the pandemic impacts youth mental health

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While Covid-19 has revealed weaknesses in the mental health system, unemployment for young people poses a threat to wellbeing

Lauren McNamara* says the last year feels something like a dream.

The 22-year-old from Werribee graduated university in 2019 with a degree in game design and were looking for work in their field. They had started a new relationship and had a holiday to Europe planned.

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