Anyone who blogs will tell you the key is to keep it short. OK, failed on that one. On a regular basis, as it goes (unaccustomed as I am to being anything but verbose). You’re also supposed to update often. Failed again. In fact, this may be my biggest blogging fail yet. In a matter […]
Dating & mental health: To tell or not to tell?
I’ve decided that it might be time to venture back into the dating zoo. A few weeks ago I sat down to write an online dating profile and thought ‘How hard can it be?’ After all, I’m old enough to know what my interests are (I like books, especially when they’re in colour order), to embrace […]
Single-Parenting and Mental Health
The other day my eight-year-old son caught me dancing in the bathroom. “Not that you’d ever want to, but if you did that in a nightclub you’d probably catch a man.” Hilarity filled the house, as it so often does. His daily pint-sized views on life generally guarantee that. As it’s Mother’s Day today, I’m […]
Anti-psychotic meds & ‘offsetting’: can metformin help us ‘have it all’?
Recently I’ve been teaching my eight-year-old about the principle of ‘offsetting’. “If we pay 99p for a second-hand book rather than £7.99 for a new one, you’ll still have enough money left for a small Lego set,” I tell him. He likes it because it feels like he’s constantly getting a bonus (“I get two […]
Reflections on postnatal depression
Like many adults, I seem to spend much of my time trying to remember things – you know, remembering to collect the dry-cleaning before they auction it off to the highest bidder, remembering where I put my keys (in my bag, apart from that time when the dog was sleeping on them), remembering not to […]
Mental health and laughter: a pathway out of depression?
‘Puerile’. That’s how one of my best friends recently described my sense of humour. I like to think I’m a bit more sophisticated than that, but on reflection, no – it’s a fair cop. I have a remote controlled fart machine which has probably used up more batteries than any other gadget in my house. […]
Cave-dwelling: depression, ‘wobbles’ and seeing the light
Once, as an outdoorsy, devil-may-care teenager, I went caving. Wading through the black, up to my nose in chilly water, I found it thrilling…until I had to shimmy my way along a horizontal passageway just inches wider than my body and I thought I was going to be stuck in the cave forever. I got […]
Give Bipolar UK your coffee money – please!
OK, so times are hard and very few of us have avoided being hit by the recession in some way. For us journalists, it’s the shedding of jobs and the ever-shrinking pot available to pay freelancers (one of my editors described us journalists as being ‘on top of a shrinking iceberg’). When you’re at the […]