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How the mental health system fails Black people

Accessing mental healthcare as a Black woman can be a challenging experience. Rianna Walcott shares her story, alongside those of three other women, to reveal the barriers she faced.

Healing hard-working hands

The names we use to describe different hand injuries tell us about history, gender and class. Occupational therapist María Cristina Jiménez explores those injuries, and the changing ways we talk about them.

How writing helps me manage schizophrenia

Out of the mouth trap

After 15 years of speech therapy, Jonty Claypole decided to make peace with his stammer. He explores our fear of disfluency, revealing how accepting it could actually increase our creativity and persuasiveness.

Living in limbo when a loved one is missing

When someone goes missing, loved ones are thrown into a state akin to constant grieving; waiting for news, living in hope. Novelist Bev Thomas describes how they try to cope and carry on.

Adapting to life as a thalidomide survivor

Growing up as a thalidomide survivor meant coping with all the usual challenges of childhood and adolescence, while having to fit into a world designed for the able-bodied.

Transforming the decorative into dissent

Discover how embroidered messages by two ‘troublesome’ women in 19th-century asylums are mirrored in the therapeutic quilting work of writer Rachel May.

Blood

Discover the history, mythology and taboos around blood and menopause, and hear from some contemporary voices about their experiences of periods and the onset of menopause.

A portrait of me with my mother

A series of portraits with stand-in mothers helped Camilla Greenwell to process her grief, and then to question whether our photograph albums are ever really honest.

Chemical highs and psychedelic research

Could recreational drugs make you happy? Kate Wilkinson explores why keen clubber Simon believes taking psychedelics has helped him develop as a person.

Heating up and drying out

Menopause doesn’t have to signify old age, but when your body feels like it’s letting you down, it’s hard not to believe that your useful life may be over.

Yoga adapts to time and place

A yoga teacher in 1930s India inspired today’s transnational practice with his spectacular fusion of tradition and innovation.

Wonder years

The confusion and secrecy surrounding his condition seriously affected Chris’s mental health, blighting his teenage years. But somehow he began to hope and plan for the future.

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.

The ambivalence of air

Daisy Lafarge investigates the effects of air quality and pressure on body and mind, exploring air as cure, but one with contradictions.

’No you’re not’ – a portrait of autistic women

In this sensitive series of portraits and interviews, photographer Rosie Barnes acknowledges the voices and experiences of autistic women.