When I returned to work from maternity leave, I was struggling with weight issues and general poor health following a tough flu season. My mood also plummeted from over-work and family responsibilities. Being a clinical psychologist, I worked hard at cognitive challenging and behavioural interventions but found it difficult to maintain. One critical factor that enhanced the above-listed strategies was exercise. For the first time in my life, I began to exercise with a different focus.

In the country town where I grew up there was a GP who got very drunk at the golf club on a regular basis. His antics were a source of community amusement, and he had a lot of patients with similar alcohol misuse problems – mostly because he never talked to them about their drinking habits.

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”.

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.