Stories

We tell stories about health and human experience. Our words and pictures make connections, provoke new thinking and share lived experiences. You can pitch a story to us.

  • Serial
Part4

Chemical highs and psychedelic research

Could recreational drugs make you happy? Kate Wilkinson explores why keen clubber Simon believes taking psychedelics has helped him develop as a person.

Part of The Happiness Quest

  • Article

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.

  • Comic

Full of good things

What good things are you full of?

Part of Weewaaz

  • Serial
Part3

This is a MOOD

Adults might sometimes dismiss teenagers’ ‘moodiness’, but adolescence is a time of complex shifts in brain and body, which are intricately bound up with fluctuating feelings.

Part of The Happiness Quest

  • In pictures

The pulse of life

Your pulse is a vital sign of life. Variations in the pulse have been linked to illness, being in love and stress. You can’t live without a pulse, or can you?

Books

Get stuck into one of our books, and explore the complexities of the human condition.

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  • Comic

All the things I loved

What did you once love that you don't anymore?

Part of Weewaaz

  • Serial
Part2

What happy endings teach us in childhood

Kate Wilkinson explores why, in quest fiction, good must triumph over evil, and what that means both for childhood dreams and adult realities.

Part of The Happiness Quest

  • Article

Reclaiming my story

Sharing her story of mental illness and treatment with trainee social workers has helped Caroline Butterwick make sense of her past, and continues to be a positive part of her life today.

  • Comic

Can't have one without the other

Can you ever be happy without knowing sadness?

Part of Weewaaz

  • Serial
Part1

Happiness in time

Trying to define happiness is like trying to grasp water: it evades us, constantly changing and becoming evident only in retrospect.

Part of The Happiness Quest

  • Article

Laughing at disaster

If joking around can help us cope when the worst happens, could comedy be a useful way to connect on climate change?

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