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.

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.

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”.

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.