Anyone can have a mental illness, and anyone can develop one at any time. This is why it’s so important to take care of your mental health as much as possible; the more time and care you take with it, the less likely it is that you will start to Read more…
Mental health is something that has become much more talked about in recent years – and this can only be a good thing. However, I find that most of the discussion is around helping people who already have poor mental health. In fact, it could be argued that the entire Read more…
I’ve been living with anxiety for most of my life – but I never actually realised it was anxiety. I thought everyone was ready to get off the bus or train five minutes before they needed to be. I thought everyone practised conversations before having them (even what to say Read more…
In my experience, mental health is not as straight forward as physical health. If your leg is broken, you get a cast put on and usually that does the job. If your appendix is… whatever an appendix does badly, you have an operation and they take it out and it’s Read more…
I’ve come to believe that many people (myself included) do not know how to deal with difficult feelings, and so we avoid them. We eat too much. We scroll through social media. We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have, all trying to fill a gap to Read more…
When someone has hurt you, it can be tempting to hold feelings of anger and resentment – perhaps even revenge. But perhaps you could forgive them instead. We have all been in situations where someone’s words or actions have hurt us. That could be something large or relatively small; it Read more…
Mindfulness seems to have become ubiquitous lately; it’s everywhere, mentioned in relation to just about everything. It’s the buzzword on everyone’s lips. But what is it, and can it help your mental health? What is mindfulness? The short answer is that mindfulness is being aware of the current moment – Read more…
Mental health is being discussed more and more in the mainstream in recent years, and the discussion has widened so that it’s not only for people who have “serious problems.” More and more people are beginning to realise that you don’t need to have a diagnosed mental health condition in Read more…
In the UK we are now in our third lockdown – and this one is during the winter, a time when a lot of us can struggle with our moods anyway. I decided early on that I would need to do as much as I could in order to safeguard Read more…
The thing about mental health is that it’s not just a case of “one and done.” In my experience, you don’t get depression, get it fixed and then go on your merry way. For those of us who have experienced any sort of mental health problem, however large or small, Read more…
Things have been fairly strange for everyone lately, but any time of stress or uncertainty can take its toll on our mental health. Now more than ever, it’s really important to keep an eye on our wellbeing and to do what we can to protect our mental health. Here are Read more…
When you think of a prepubescent children’s counselor, you may imagine a school counselor who gives your kid advice and who listens to them a bit should they need to vent. That is one aspect of children’s counseling, but there are many types of counselors and many services they can Read more…
I wrote a whole book about having a nervous breakdown… but the truth is that there’s no such thing. Wait, what? No such thing as a nervous breakdown? Yes, really. There’s no such thing. When I had a breakdown/lost my mind/went mad the official diagnosis on my sick note was Read more…
Often when I ask this question, people will respond with answers such as “an evening watching Netflix with a big tub of ice cream” or “a bottle of wine after dinner.” Those things are nice, and they definitely have their place – but I don’t think they’re necessarily self care. Read more…
One of the biggest problems with any kind of mental health issue is that we often can’t bear to leave the house in order to get help. Some days we just can’t face going out of the front door, and so it can be hard to get any sort of Read more…
When you’re struggling with any kind of mental health issue, some form of counselling or support can be really helpful. Often one of the main problems with depression and/or anxiety is that we don’t like to burden our friends and family with our problems. When I was ill, I felt Read more…