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45 results
  • Book extract
  • Book extract

The 200-year search for normal people

| Sarah ChaneyMaïa Walcott

Sarah Chaney poses the question we’ve likely all asked at some point in our lives: 'Am I normal?’, and explores whether normality even exists.

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Wonder years

| Chris North

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.

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How can we prevent violence?

| Laura BuiJessa Fairbrother

Evidence shows that strategies to prevent some types of violence can be very effective, while other, less well-acknowledged forms continue unabated. But hope can still guide us into a more peaceful future.

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Believe yourself better

| A R Hopwood

There’s more to recovery than medication. In future, our unconscious minds could be recruited to put a positive spin on our health problems, helping us feel better faster.

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Homesick for planet Earth

| Gail TolleyMaria Rivans

Find out how homesick astronauts spend their free time, and how recreating home cooking from freeze-dried ingredients can cheer them all up.

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Wonder Woman’s wonder women

| Elissavet Ntoulia

Discover more about the women who inspired an icon: Wonder Woman’s story of bondage, bracelets and birth control.

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The healing power of breathing

| Effie Webb

The healing powers of different breathing methods are said to help with a range of health challenges, from asthma to PTSD. Effie Webb traces their spiritual origins and explores the modern proliferation of breathwork therapies.

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Electrical epilepsy and the EEG Test

| Aparna NairTracy Satchwill

The EEG (electroencephalograph) literally electrified the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy. But for Aparna Nair the dreaded EEG tests of her adolescence were a painful ordeal.

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Disability, education and prejudice

| Ruth BlueHollie Chastain

In the 1960s and 1970s, thalidomide survivors had to fight for a proper education. If they weren’t brought up in institutions, they were often viewed as objects of curiosity, encountering verbal and sometimes physical abuse, both at school and in the world beyond.

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Is fake news killing fictive art?

| A R Hopwood

Parafictional artists create projects where the imaginary interacts with real life. But the growth of so-called ‘fake news’ is providing a new challenge.

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The unimprovable white cane

| Alex LeeIan Treherne

Recent technological additions to the white cane aim to make the world easier for visually impaired people to navigate. Alex Lee explores whether new is really better.

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Dating on dopamine

| Pete LangmanSimon Paulson

Drug treatment for Parkinson’s can come with an unwanted side serving of compulsive behaviour, as Pete Langman discovered. Read about his dating journey in a dopamine cloud.

  • 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.

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A history of mindfulness

| Matt Drage

Matt Drage questions how an ancient religious practice became a secular cure for stress.

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What is structural violence?

| Laura BuiJessa Fairbrother

Structural violence is seemingly invisible. But its tentacles have invaded every part of many people’s lives, thoughts, experiences and expectations, shaping them in ways they don’t even realise.

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Is shoegaze the loneliest genre of music?

| Christine Ro

Christine Ro explores the connection between shyness and shoegaze.

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Finding a cure for homesickness

| Gail TolleyMaria Rivans

While technology can mitigate some aspects of homesickness, other components of home are harder to replicate. Find out how 21st-century studies are helping homesickness sufferers find silver linings in their new situation.

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Why the 1918 Spanish flu defied both memory and imagination

| Mark Honigsbaum

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

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Rethinking the placebo effect

| Anjuli SharmaSteven Pocock

The placebo effect has long been harnessed for both legitimate and fraudulent use, but we’re only just discovering how and why our bodies respond positively to dummy drugs, as Anjuli Sharma reveals.

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Exceptional talent and the trouble with IQ tests

| Anna Faherty

Is a high IQ really a mark of genius, or does something else explain the exceptional?