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How electromagnetic therapy inspired me

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

Charged bodies

Electrified humans brought education and performance together with a spark in the 18th century.

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.

Electrical epilepsy and the EEG Test

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.

How to cure the eco-anxious

Could community activism be the key to overcoming a fear of environmental collapse?

The conditional child

Deanna Fei asks what it means to sustain a life, drawing on her own experience of having a premature baby as well as an 18th-century essay.

How hospital care fails disabled bodies

Hospitals aim to make sick people well. But if the sick person is also disabled, the unbending nature of monolithic hospital systems can easily worsen the situation. Here Jamie Hale writes from painful personal experience.

My ADHD titration diary

After her ADHD diagnosis, Verity Babbs wondered how well medication would work. Her diary details the controlled process of trying different doses, and how her body reacted.

Titans in the landscape

The current that kills

In the 19th century, electricity held life in the balance, with the power to execute – or reanimate.

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.

Belonging and why we long for it

Tanya Perdikou’s upbringing emphasised conventional respectability, but other influential family members embraced the bohemian life. Caught between two sets of values, she questions where, if anywhere, she fits in.

You know the drill

Richard Barnett opens wide the true meaning of a healthy mouth.

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.

Dress and the magic of touch

Fashion, of course, is largely about appearance, but the feeling of clothes on your skin is a complex sensory experience. Shahidha Bari contemplates the human connections in the business of creating and wearing clothes.

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.

Illuminated manuscripts, illuminating medicines

From rare bugs to exorbitantly priced plant parts, find out more about the artistic and medical uses of pigments from the past.

How can I stop fainting?

Fed up with the faints that bolstered her fragile young snowflake image, Gwen Smith sought expert medical help to keep her upright in trying situations.

The indelible harm caused by conversion therapy

With first-hand evidence from two powerful testimonies, neurologist Jules Montague explores the destructive history of conversion therapy, a punitive treatment designed to ‘cure’ people of homosexuality.

Caring for our Disabled daughter in lockdown

Jane Holmes talks about the challenges of caring for her Disabled daughter while working and trying to stay safe during the pandemic.

Believe yourself better

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.

Refugee health on a pound a day

Two refugees living a hand-to-mouth existence in the UK explain how trauma has affected their health, and how a little kindness is bringing them hope.

A dispatch from the frontiers of man and machine

Harry Parker’s life changed overnight when he stepped on a bomb and lost his legs. He argues that being an amputee doesn’t make him an outlier; we are all hybrid.

When wounds replace words

For the many thousands of refugees waiting in Greece, the process to establish the truth of their tragic personal histories is often extremely upsetting. But a group of medics and legal workers is working together to make the system more humane.

A story of death, trauma and austerity

Marienna Pope-Weidemann, whose teenage cousin Gaia died after going missing, advocates a rethink of our systems, which currently fail many in mental distress.