Being Well

Men are from Mars …or are they?

February 19, 2019

Men and women are different from each other. What a profound statement that is! Also one that could get me into a lot of trouble, particularly if it led to a discussion about whether that difference was genetically or culturally determined. I’m going to say it anyway, because I’m thinking about depression and suicide and the ways in which men and women express their distress differently.

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Bots and ‘digital humans’ in mental healthcare – the next wave of technology?

February 05, 2019

Are you having difficulty getting your head around the use of technology in mental health care? The idea that computer programs might interact with humans in a humanlike way has been around for decades but ideas about implementation are getting more and more sophisticated.

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The Status Symbol of Being ‘Busy’ Comes at a Cost to Our Wellbeing

January 22, 2019

I was called in by my Head of Learning and Teaching to discuss my ‘workload’ recently. My first thought was “oh no, they will add more to my workload as they’ve discovered that I’ve been working under my contracted hours”.

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PUFAs for Anxiety?

January 08, 2019

Do you know what a PUFA is? I assumed at first that this was a new term for an asthma inhaler – new terminology does keep sneaking up on me like that! However, it turns out that PUFA stands for omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids

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Better than a Thousand Words

December 11, 2018

A friend of mine came to have coffee with me recently. She was very anxious and upset about her husband’s upcoming prostatectomy. He had developed a fairly aggressive cancer that needed immediate action.

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