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96 results
  • Article
  • Article

Migraine, creativity and me

| Lydia Ruffles

Novelist Lydia Ruffles explores how migraine has made her mind stretch, shrink, widen and change, and how it’s influenced her art.

  • Article
  • Article

Care, creativity and a connected world

| Christine Ro

Find out about the challenges Wellcome Collection has faced during the last very demanding year.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

My important, ridiculous nose

| A L Kennedy

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

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

Tracing the roots of our fears and fixations

| Kate SummerscaleTim Robinson

Kate Summerscale explores the history of our anxieties and compulsions, and the new phobias and manias that are always emerging.

  • Interview
  • Interview

Inside the mind of Living with Buildings curator, Emily Sargent

| Gwendolyn Smith

Curator Emily Sargent reveals why council estates and a Finnish TB sanatorium were chosen for the ‘Living with Buildings’ exhibition.

  • Article
  • Article

Autistic togetherness during lockdown

| Kate FoxColin Potsig

While lockdown has presented autistic people with greater challenges than life pre-COVID, many have found strength and comfort in the situation. Autistic writer and performer Kate Fox explains how.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

You know the drill

| Richard Barnett

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

  • Article
  • Article

Living with invisible illness

| Hannah TurnerMaryam Wahid

What happens when the signs of your illness are invisible to the rest of the world? Hannah Turner describes the daily struggles of living with invisible illness.

  • Article
  • Article

On contagion

| Daisy LafargeNaki Narh

Reading descriptions of the way humans become infested by parasitic flatworms, Daisy Lafarge experienced painful physical symptoms. Perhaps the very creature she was studying had invaded her body.

  • Article
  • Article

Picturing mental health

| Lalita KaplishSolomon Szekir-Papasavva

Ron Hampshire created artworks while resident at Netherne psychiatric hospital. What can we learn from them?

  • Article
  • Article

How electromagnetic therapy inspired me

| Sarah James

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

  • Article
  • Article

The hell of hay fever

| David JesudasonSteven Pocock

After years suffering in silence, David Jesudason finds speaking out about his pollen allergy gives him hope for a future where his hay-fever symptoms are under control.

  • Article
  • Article

The blood notebooks

| Rupert Thomson

Novelist Rupert Thomson explores his unusual behaviour during a time of self-imposed isolation.

  • Article
  • Article

NHS strikes and the decade of discontent

| Cal Flyn

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.

  • Article
  • Article

Getting the measure of pain

| Jaipreet VirdiAnne Howeson

In the 20th century doctors tried to find a way to measure pain. But even when ‘objective’ measures were rejected, an accurate understanding of another’s pain remained frustratingly elusive.

  • Article
  • Article

How music opens the doors of memory and the mind

| Philip Ball

People living with dementia can often still listen, perform or move to music. What does this tell us about how memories are formed?

  • Article
  • Article

How to talk to kids about race

| Pragya AgarwalJoelle Avelino

When her daughter decided blonde was best, a red flag went up for Pragya Agarwal. In this essay, the behavioural scientist discusses childhood development, race and representation.

  • Article
  • Article

When you don’t belong, you drink

| Tanya PerdikouNaomi Vona

In the third part of her exploration of belonging, Tanya Perdikou unpicks the addictions that have shaped her past and uncovers the connections that make recovery possible.

  • Article
  • Article

Cataloguing Audrey

| Elena Carter

Work begins in earnest to restore order to the archive Audrey Amiss kept of the minutest happenings in her life. Like detectives, the archivists search for subtle clues to chronology in the mass of materials.

  • Article
  • Article

Pain, politics and the power of photography

| Giulia Smith

Art historian Giulia Smith explains what she most admires in the work of Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery, and how their approach makes illness political.

  • Article
  • Article

A story of death, trauma and austerity

| Marienna Pope-Weidemann

Marienna Pope-Weidemann, whose teenage cousin Gaia died after going missing, advocates a rethink of our systems, which currently fail many in mental distress.

  • Article
  • Article

Mary Bishop and the surveillant gaze

| Rose RuaneMary Bishop

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

The meaning of trauma is wound

| Daisy JohnsonBenjamin Gilbert

Daisy Johnson recalls her difficult journey to being diagnosed with vaginismus, and why women are so good at turning bad things into a joke.

  • Interview
  • Interview

How to design an HIV awareness campaign

| Paul Steinberg

Using carefully crafted, colourful graphics is one public health team’s creative approach.

  • Article
  • Article

The food diary and the power of unhealth

| Virginia HartleyAnna Keville Joyce

Food diaries might appear to present a strictly factual record of dietary choices, but what they don’t include is the more revealing story, as Virginia Hartley suggests.