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The unexpected parallels between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Wellcome Collection

With the news of a sequel in development, Russell Dornan explores parallels between ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and Wellcome Collection.

Shame’s long shadow

What is shame and why is it so powerful? A violent sexual assault left Lucia Osborne-Crowley suffocated with shame, but she’s now determined to understand how this overwhelming emotion works.

Trust me, I’m a patient

Artist Rachel Rowan Olive is an expert in the way her mental health condition affects her. Here she explains how it helps if doctors understand that.

How architecture builds a profession of stress

Architects might produce buildings that enhance our health, but at what cost? Kristin Hohenadel explores architecture’s pressurised and stressful culture.

Titans in the landscape

When depression is worse than physical illness

Chronic physical illnesses can be accompanied by troubling depressive symptoms. Elly Aylwin-Foster urges doctors to treat every aspect of her condition with the same care.

Butch drag in the builders’ caff

Two men in a café dressed in practical workwear might seem indistinguishable, but closer inspection reveals layers of complex, nuanced identity.

Belonging, babies and self-belief

As a first-time mother living abroad, it seemed too exhausting to truly connect with new acquaintances. Instead, Tanya Perdikou began to make a kind of peace with herself.

Rocking psychiatry with R D Laing

Turn on, tune in, drop out. Discover how six rock songs from the 1960s and 1970s link the ideas of famous therapist R D Laing with the era’s counterculture.

Inside the mind of Living with Buildings curator, Emily Sargent

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

In the tracks of Derek Jarman’s tears

Researcher E K Myerson shares her moving encounters with the personal papers of artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman.

Birth, babies and boxes of memories

With memories of her baby in neonatal intensive care still fresh, Erin Beeston decides to unearth the poignant objects her family kept following births, going back as far as Victorian times.

We who can’t believe

Unless she falls to the floor unconscious, Anne Boyer has always ignored signs of illness. Cancer, however, made her face her fallibility.

On contagion

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.

Tragic artists and their all-consuming passions

Does having a debilitating disease help or hinder creative genius?

Equality in genetics

Genetic counsellor Sasha Henriques harnessed her energy and resolve to tackle the racial biases she saw in her profession – with positive and promising results.

The hell of hay fever

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.

The secret lives of Britain’s first Black physicians

Dr Annabel Sowemimo explores the web of connections between early Black British doctors, the role of empire in West Africa and the pernicious reach of scientific racism.

Air of threat

Novelist Chloe Aridjis vividly describes the suffocating atmosphere of Mexico City, as a combination of topography, crowded neighbourhoods, and reckless political diktats create a downward spiral.

Performing my disability

Caroline Butterwick explores the idea of disability as performative, and the pressure to act out what we think others expect.

Portraits, from a distance

Join photographer Michelle Sank on her daily walk around Exeter. Strength, frustration, resilience and eccentricity all show in these candid images portraying life under the constraints of coronavirus lockdown.

Two health centres, two ideologies

Two futuristic, light-filled buildings aimed to bring forward-looking healthcare to city dwellers. But the principles behind each were very different.

Acid and the sexual psychonauts

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

The girl with no name

When a now anonymous teenager sold her tooth for transplant, she couldn’t have predicted that she’d end up at the heart of a troubling story about 18th-century beauty ideals.

Why even plastic surgery can’t hide you from facial recognition

Once upon a time, plastic surgery allowed a few notorious criminals to evade the law. But today, sophisticated facial-recognition technology has turned dreams of anonymity to dust.