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How homesickness inspires art

Gail Tolley looks at homesickness through the eyes of three contemporary artists and finds powerful new themes of identity and connection.

How writing helps me manage schizophrenia

When skin bleaching goes wrong

Warnings about permanent health damage don’t deter those using skin-bleaching products for years on end. Read the story of one woman who suffered from liver failure after years of striving to be paler.

Acid and the sexual psychonauts

How LSD fuelled one woman’s journey of sexual self-discovery in the late 1950s.

Synaesthesia, or when senses overlap

What’s it like to see heartbeats, taste Tube stations or hear paintings?

Audrey and her family

In working on Audrey Amiss’s archive, Elena is getting closer to understanding her. But the way her niece and nephew remember Audrey adds essential detail to the picture.

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.

Diagnosing OCD in the past

Mining the writings of and about famous historical figures, retrospective psychologists try to diagnose their mental health problems. But, inevitably, partial evidence is open to misinterpretation.

How electromagnetic therapy inspired me

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

Mary Morris-Knibb, a woman of courage and ability

A Jamaican election banner reveals the story of a pioneering women’s rights campaigner who continues to inspire 80 years on.

Close encounters of the spiritualist kind

When it comes to practical and emotional advice, Daphne heeds the words of her lost loved ones. Find out how a spiritualist medium helps her stay in touch.

The meaning of trauma is wound

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

The men who meddled with nature

The ‘acclimatisation societies’ of the 19th century sought to ‘improve’ on the natural world by releasing non-native species into the wild. The effects were disastrous.

Eels and feels

For Georgian Londoners, the allure of electric animals was both intellectual and sensual.

The Key to Memory: Use art to articulate

Danny Rees explains what William Utermohlen’s self-portraits can tell us about how and why we remember.

Sarah Carpenter on making time for herself through creativity

Art provides a refuge for Sarah Carpenter, allowing her to utilise her energy and keep up the momentum of her recovery.

Celebrating our soft toys

After cuddling a teddy bear cured her insomnia, Elspeth Wilson was inspired to speak to four other autistic and disabled adults, who praise the roles soft toys play in their lives.

Born different

For Chris North, being born intersex in the 1940s meant his many childhood hospital visits, tests and operations were not explained or discussed. As he reveals, doctors encouraged strict secrecy.

How the Peckham Experiment inspired my fiction

Find out how an unruly mass of archive material from a 1930s radical health centre has inspired brand new writing.

Seeds for the future

Indigenous groups have a key role as guardians of biodiversity, and their knowledge could help us all preserve our world. To survive, we all need to collaborate, reject prejudice, and share what we know.

How to stay together while keeping apart

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

Our endless quest for eternal youth

From poisonous 16th-century cosmetics to the latest “vampire facelift”, discover the fashions in unsavoury methods for improving our appearance.

This is what changed my approach to interior design

An interior designer examines how emotions and cognitive activity influenced her designs, and argues that spaces reflect the people within.

Why the world needs collectors

Those who collect play an important role as “facilitators of curiosity”, says Anna Faherty.

The spectacle maker

Born into the eyewear business 80 years ago, Lawrence Jenkin still designs and makes glasses, while supporting and inspiring the generations of designers following him.