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”.

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

Our professional identities play out in tangible ways such as our language, clothes and everyday behaviour. Our identity is the external representation of our inner feelings, beliefs, experiences and values. We all have a number of identities – personal, professional, social which reflect our day to day experiences and the environments within which we operate.

Have you ever spoken to someone and thought “OMG! I would be depressed too if I were in their shoes”? Of course you have! But have you ever met someone who despite all the bad luck and set backs has remained optimistic and been able to make the best out of what would be for others an impossible and unbearable situation?

So much medical focus is on the deficits in people that those of us who work within the medical model tend to forget to look for people’s strengths. We may eventually even fail to see and value our own strengths as they become, in our own minds, just things that everybody has.

This is a great video documentary about the new ways we have now to think about and to help manage our own mental health problems, or those of others.

Between 2007 and 2010 smoking rates in the general community dropped from 26% to 19%. For people with psychotic disorders the rate did not drop at all.

The Australian Birth Trauma Association https://www.birthtrauma.org.au/ defines birth trauma as “Psychological problems arising from the circumstances of the delivery ……...or the process” of childbirth.

In November 2017 the astronomical world was bubbling with excitement when the first interstellar object ever seen from Earth entered our solar system. Finally, after 8 months deliberation, the scientific jury decided that, despite lacking some of the usual characteristics especially the tail that we usually associate with them, this object could indeed be classified as a comet. To the great disappointment of many it turned that it wasn’t an alien spacecraft after all.

The emotional health of people living with diabetes has been receiving greater attention as we become increasingly aware of the often-unrecognised psychological distress experienced by the approximately 1.2 million people in Australia living with diabetes.