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A creative collaboration with compulsion

Discover how artist Liz Atkin has channelled the compulsion to pick her skin into an imaginative outlet for her feelings.

Daria Martin on ‘Sensorium Tests’ and ‘At the Threshold’

The ‘epileptic’ in art and science

From scarred outsiders in literature to the cold voyeurism of medical films and photography, people who experience seizures and epilepsy are rarely shown in a compassionate light in popular culture.

Tragic artists and their all-consuming passions

Does having a debilitating disease help or hinder creative genius?

Performance art, frozen in time

For over a year, live performance art with an audience present has been largely impossible. But still images continue to allow artists in this sphere to inspire audiences at home.

The relationship between science and art

Often seen as opposites, science and art both depend on observation and synthesis.

The power of unicorns

Discover the unlikely connection between pharmaceuticals and unicorns.

How the magician’s assistant creates the illusion

Without breaking the spell, performer Naomi Paxton reveals the subtle ways the magician’s assistant helps the audience to keep believing.

John Walter on ‘Alien Sex Club’

I’m a painter, but I make worlds.

Chemotherapy-day drawings

Undergoing treatment for bowel cancer, artist Clare Smith produced around 70 abstract drawings while sitting in the chemotherapy chair. She reflects on how creativity can bring respite in a crisis.

Sacred cows and nutritional purity in India

Apoorva Sripathi explores the complex reasons behind India’s recent boom in all things dairy – beginning with a 1970s Western food-aid programme.

Air of threat

Novelist Chloe Aridjis vividly describes the suffocating atmosphere of Mexico City, as a combination of topography, crowded neighbourhoods, and reckless political diktats create a downward spiral.

How to play with drunk people

Lower your inhibitions and join Holly Gramazio for fast-paced games made even more fun by alcohol.

Designing better mental health wards

Bringing colour and natural light to tired, grubby mental health wards has a measurably positive effect on patients. A few groundbreaking projects are showing the way.

On nature cures and taking the waters

When chilly outdoor swims began to chip away at her depression, Jessica J Lee was drawn to a closer study of the complex natural world around her.

Cracks that let the light in

Rai Waddingham lives with voices other people cannot hear. Here she describes how she has come to accept, understand and calm her voices, and to acknowledge her strength.

You know the drill

Richard Barnett opens wide the true meaning of a healthy mouth.

In search of the ‘nature cure’

Under the competing pressures of modern life, many of us succumb to mental ill health. Samantha Walton explores why so-called ‘nature cures’ don’t help, and how the living world can actually help us.

The joys and failures of audio description

Audio description enhances the experience of watching a film or TV show for people with a visual impairment, but it's not widely available in the UK. Alex Lee explains why.

Fantastic beasts and unnatural history

Find out how a 17th-century compendium of the natural world came to present fantastical beasts –like dragons – as real, living creatures.

Why the 1918 Spanish flu defied both memory and imagination

The Black Death, AIDS and Ebola outbreaks are part of our collective cultural memory, but the Spanish flu outbreak has not been.

The history of brainwashing

Is it possible to control what other people think? In this abridged extract from his book ‘Brainwashed’, psychoanalyst and historian Daniel Pick offers us a new history of thought control.

My important, ridiculous nose

The nose is a much-maligned appendage, but it’s a powerful organ capable of invoking powerful emotions from past memories and sexual attraction.

How electromagnetic therapy inspired me

Poet Sarah James explores how repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation treated her depression and influenced her art.

Ayurveda: Knowledge for long life

The story of medicine in India is rich and complex. Aarathi Prasad investigates how it came to be this way.