Category: Health

  • Men, don’t let your friendships fade

    I wrote about male friendships for Metro with a little help from my friends. Even when we do have friends, we’re loath to tell them our troubles. Some 84 per cent of men admit to bottling up their emotions. That’s not doing anybody any good.

  • It’s world mental health day today. Here’s some advice on psychic self-defence

    It’s nearly a year since I came out as trans/NB, and about three years since I was diagnosed with depression. I’m much happier these days. Sometimes clichés are clichés because they’re true: it really does get better. To mark world mental health day, which is today, I thought I’d scribble a quick piece about the…

  • Stayin’ Alive

    About a year ago, I was diagnosed with depression. It wasn’t a surprise – it’s something I’ve experienced on and off for years – but the act of naming it, of putting up my hand and saying “I need help”, was an important part of getting better. When you hold monsters up to the light,…

  • “The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality”

    This Ted talk by Andrew Solomon is very good. I want to say that the treatments we have for depression are appalling. They’re not very effective.They’re extremely costly. They come with innumerable side effects. They’re a disaster. But I am so grateful that I live now and not 50 years ago, when there would have been almost nothing to be done. I hope that…

  • An unhealthy obsession with smoking

    Bizarre news from Scotland: Patients and visitors will be banned from using electronic cigarettes in hospital grounds across Scotland within weeks. NHS boards will be required to ensure that their grounds are smoke-free by April. Electronic cigarettes don’t produce smoke – they produce water vapour – so why are they part of the ban? According…

  • A black hole, not a black dog

    There’s an honest piece about depression in this week’s Sunday Post by the very talented and exceptionally nice Chae Strathie, whose books make lots of children very happy.  For Strathie the illness wasn’t so much about feeling down – it was about not feeling anything at all. As he puts it, it was more a…

  • Jumping at shadows

    Sorry for the relative quiet recently: it’s been a fairly unpleasant couple of weeks, and I spent most of July convinced that I had a horrible disease. Unfortunately for anyone who wishes I were dead, it turns out that I don’t. If you’re interested, here’s the story: I’ve had a persistent chest/throat problem that I…

  • Death by barbecue

    If it ever stops raining and you decide to throw a few shrimps on the barbie, make sure you don’t kill yourself with it afterwards: according to the Gas Safe Register, one in five of us doesn’t realise that bringing an expired barbecue indoors or into a tent can be fatal.

  • The Jenny McCarthy Body Count

    You can’t accuse this site of mincing its words: In June 2007 Jenny McCarthy began promoting anti-vaccination rhetoric. Because of her celebrity status she has appeared on several television shows and has published multiple books advising parents not to vaccinate their children. This has led to an increase in the number of vaccine preventable illnesses…

  • The best tech-related thing I’ve ever bought

    I’ve slipped a disc again, and for extra fun I’ve managed to do something to the sciatic nerve so there’s pain in my leg that isn’t actually real (it’s referred pain from the nerve) and that doesn’t respond to things like heat patches. It’s seriously bloody sore, and yet again I’m thanking myself for spending…