Stories search

Social isolation and the search for sanctuary

Threatened with deportation, Furaha Asani turned to her church for support. Met with silence and disinterest, she walked away, but argues that churches should do much more for migrants.

Graveyards as green getaways

Stressed city dwellers have been visiting cemeteries in greater numbers since the start of the pandemic. Discover how, despite the constant reminders of death, graveyards bring visitors a sense of renewal.

Families fighting for justice

In 1962 a group of parents whose children had been affected by thalidomide began a decades-long battle in the law courts, the media and Parliament in order to win fair justice for all thalidomide survivors.

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.

Walk, interrupted

By listing all the things that get in her way, Caroline Butterwick wants to create an embodied experience of disability and convince you that inclusion is everyone’s responsibility.

Naked, not nude

Classicist Caroline Vout argues that it’s time to take the dust covers off the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and to encounter their bodies not nude, but naked.

Dancing for joy

Dancing is a mood enhancer, it increases social bonding and it improves creativity. Maybe you really can dance all your troubles away.

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.

Desperate housewives and suburban neurosis

Discover how a pioneering health centre replaced housewives’ supposedly empty home lives with a social space that encouraged healthy child rearing.

The Garden

We explore ideas of belonging and colonial legacies, guerrilla gardening in response to a tragic event, and the link between an urban nature reserve and a GP’s surgery.

Death and our digital ghosts

When we die, our data lives on. And as companies are increasingly spotting money-making opportunities from digital legacies, now could be the time to think about – and control – yours.

People against pollution

Alice Bell reflects on what happens when communities help solve environmental problems, and whether citizen science can help fight industrial pollution today.

Are people born violent?

Laura Bui explores how the nature vs nurture debate applies to those who commit homicide.

Where does violence come from?

The popular understanding of certain ideas in psychology have become so embedded that it’s easy to blame the parents when a young person commits a crime. Laura Bui looks to the past for evidence.

“Everybody desires a degree of independence”

I’m 26, and building a network of friends and my career. Unlike most people my age, I’m entirely dependent on carers to achieve this.

Tracing the roots of our fears and fixations

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

Going viral in the online anti-vaccine wars

‘Anti-vaxxers’ are taking their message online using powerful images as well as words. But is the pro campaigners’ response any better?

Losing touch

In these pandemic times, when touch has become taboo, Agnese Reginaldo explores the importance of physical contact to our wellbeing.

How to stay together while keeping apart

Vivek Murthy explores how we can keep physically distant while staying emotionally connected.

Can our sexual desires be transformed?

In the 1950s, many psychiatrists thought that homosexuality could be reformed. One found that it couldn’t – and his discoveries led to a change in the law.

A history of gestation outside the body

It’s been over 400 years since a Swiss alchemist theorised that foetuses could develop outside the womb. Claire Horn examines incubator technology past and present, and explores the possibilities recent prototypes might bring.

My illness made me an activist, but now I’m exhausted

Emily Bashforth’s illness made her an advocate but now she’s battling burnout. She argues why we all need to be mental health activists, not just those with lived experience.

Is it really OK to not be OK?

Our mental healthcare system is still the poor relation of services that treat physical illness, and the pandemic has shone a spotlight on this situation. Campaigner James Downs argues for fundamental change.

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

Providing care across languages

When medics are taught in English but their patients speak other languages, effective communication becomes fraught. Niyoshi Shah explores the linguistic gaps between patient and doctor.