- Article
- Article
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.
- In pictures
- In pictures
A history of art in hospitals
Art historian Anne Wallentine examines art in hospital settings – from its Christian devotional origins to its healing role in modern healthcare buildings.
- Article
- Article
How hospital care fails disabled bodies
Hospitals aim to make sick people well. But if the sick person is also disabled, the unbending nature of monolithic hospital systems can easily worsen the situation. Here Jamie Hale writes from painful personal experience.
- Article
- Article
A reflection on art in a mental hospital
Artist Beth Hopkins explains how she used her experience of researching the Adamson Collection to create an embroidered wall hanging.
- Article
- Article
Hands-on healthcare
A young hospital volunteer feared her contribution was a long way from the serious business of real healthcare. But time spent painting patients’ nails proved to be a valuable contribution to life on the ward.
- Article
- Article
Reclaiming my story
Sharing her story of mental illness and treatment with trainee social workers has helped Caroline Butterwick make sense of her past, and continues to be a positive part of her life today.
- Article
- Article
The father of handwashing
Doctors performing autopsies and then delivering babies – with not a hint of soap in between – was the grim recipe producing a lot of motherless offspring in the 1800s. But one man’s gargantuan efforts to upend accepted medical thinking turned the tide.
- Article
- Article
In the tracks of Derek Jarman’s tears
Researcher E K Myerson shares her moving encounters with the personal papers of artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman.
- Article
- Article
Birth, babies and boxes of memories
With memories of her baby in neonatal intensive care still fresh, Erin Beeston decides to unearth the poignant objects her family kept following births, going back as far as Victorian times.
- Article
- Article
Mary Bishop and the surveillant gaze
Writer and artist Rose Ruane explores the paintings of Mary Bishop, created during a 30-year stay in a psychiatric hospital, which speak of constant medical surveillance and censorious self-examination.
- Article
- Article
Born in the NHS
Despite underfunding, strikes and scandals, the first two decades of the 2000s has seen the British people’s love of and loyalty to the NHS soar.
- Podcast
- Podcast
Tranquillity
Moya Lothian-McLean asks: when was the last time you felt utterly tranquil?
- Article
- Article
Confusion, guilt, and the battle to breastfeed
Most new mums are told that breast is best. But breastfeeding doesn’t always come as easily or naturally as you might imagine.
- Article
- Article
Pain and the power of touch
As a new physiotherapist, Fiona Murphy quickly learned that her patients’ pain was unpredictable and very personal. But using the right words became the key to helping them.
- Article
- Article
Happy Joy Smile
Drawn from real-life experiences, this short story depicts a character negotiating the UK’s current mental health system. Discover what happens as they encounter waiting lists, sketchy healthcare and punitive government bureaucracy.
- Article
- Article
Dying at home and the doctor’s role
Our anonymous GP talks about the bittersweet rewards of supporting a patient when he chose to die at home.
- Book extract
- Book extract
A dispatch from the frontiers of man and machine
Harry Parker’s life changed overnight when he stepped on a bomb and lost his legs. He argues that being an amputee doesn’t make him an outlier; we are all hybrid.
- Podcast
- Podcast
Resolve
Bidisha chats to her guests about their personal experiences of resolve, and considers its complicated relationship to happiness.
- Article
- Article
Thalidomide babies
In a time without scans or antenatal tests, neither medical staff nor parents were prepared for the damage to the foetus caused by the thalidomide drug.
- Article
- Article
The birth of Britain's National Health Service
Starkly unequal access to healthcare gave rise to Nye Bevan’s creation of a truly national health service.
- Article
- Article
How writing helps me manage schizophrenia
For Erica Crompton, writing is much more than a career. It’s an essential component of her mental health toolkit.
- Article
- Article
The building as tool of healing
When we’re ill, it’s not just medical care that helps to treat us. Architects have discovered that the right environment can play an important part too.
- Article
- Article
The leukaemia diagnosis I didn’t see coming
Treatment for leukaemia kept journalist Hannah Partos in isolation, like the female prisoner whose image inspired her to write this piece.
- Article
- Article
Ways appear
While his sense of body shame meant the personal side of his life was unfulfilled, Chris’s career was rewarding. His own childhood experiences gave him profound empathy for the children he worked with.
- Article
- Article
NHS strikes and the decade of discontent
When the social unrest of the 1970s spread to the NHS, dissatisfied staff challenged the status quo for the first time in quarter of a century.