“Attitudes towards mental health issues are finally beginning to move in the right direction. Deep-seated prejudices are starting to shift and it’s a further sign that we are heading towards a tipping point in England and that there is a real appetite for change.Nearly nine out of 10 people with mental health problems have been affected by stigma and discrimination, with two thirds saying they have stopped doing things because of this.”
Posted by Lauren
Thank you to Product Designer Steph Fulke for sharing her mindapples space.
“Mindapples are trying to get people to identify their place in which they feel happy and relaxed. By appreciating a place helps you to be mindful. Here is mine. A window seat on either a train, buss or car. I drift… I daydream…Where is yours?”
Posted by Lauren
“Laura Liz Partoon is remarkable. While still at school (she’s just left and is hoping to go to Roehampton University), she set up her own campaign,The Stresses and Strains of School. Her aim, as you can see from her short video above is to promote and improve the mental health and wellbeing of students.”
“I’ve seen friends go through the pressures of school and drop out of courses because of stress,” she says. “I’ve seen other people stay on but suffer from depression because of the stress of all the work. I think there needs to be a system to help young people cope.” That’s why she does what she does…
Posted by Lauren
Curiosity means being open to the unfamiliar, and to whatever emotions may result, then arguably any strategy for achieving happiness – for guaranteeing happy feelings, rather than sad ones – is intrinsically incurious.
Train yourself to be curious and seek the unfamiliar.
Posted by Lauren
A quarter life crisis happens shortly after a young person – usually an educated professional – enters the “real world”.
I don’t know about anybody else, but the “quarterlife crisis” is as real as anything for me. I’m 29, with two degrees, £20,000 of debt, and two part-time jobs to pay it off. Neither earns me enough to live on, let alone pay off my debts, because I’m studying for a still further degree, even though experience teaches that qualifications rarely lead to good jobs. Was it all a lie we were told? Why don’t good graduates move on to the kinds of jobs that society told us would be ours? Why isn’t education the royal road to riches and why have I spent the best years of my life being frustrated in a lecture theatre? Simon Gillett, Edinburgh
“After entering adult life and coming to terms with its responsibilities, some individuals find themselves experiencing career stagnation or extreme insecurity. The individual often realizes the real world is tougher, more competitive and less forgiving than they imagined. Furthermore, the qualifications they have spent so much time and money earning are not likely to prepare them for this disillusionment.
A related problem is simply that many graduates do not achieve a desirable standard of living after graduation. They often end up living in low-income flats with roommates instead of having an income high enough to support themselves. Substandard living conditions, combined with menial or repetitive work at their jobs create a great amount of frustration, anxiety and anger. Nobody wants to admit to feeling like a ‘loser’; this secrecy may intensify the problem.”
Read more from: BBC / Times Online / The Guardian
The symptoms of quarter-life crisis may include:
Is this you? It is certainly some people in my life that I really care about. There doesn’t seem to be any advice in the research I have found. How can Mindapples help?
Posted by Lauren
The gardeners at Mindapples have been thinking about ‘mental spaces’. We want to turn Mindapples into a physical community by tagging places in cities and offices as ‘Mindapples zones’. Basically, places that make you feel more mentally healthy, like a park, a great view, or a really relaxing cupboard.
We want to find really beautiful, simple ways to mark somewhere as a place that people find good for their minds.
It may be a secret game where people can find all the places in their city that people think are wonderful and submit them to a central site where we map the “mind orchards”.
We want you to find your mind orchard, share it and mark it your own.
Posted by Lauren
Studies from the University of Bristol indicate that simply touching “friendly bacteria” in soil may alter behaviour in a way similar to that of taking antidepressants.
Meanwhile, research by mental-health charity Mind found that 94% of those taking part in “green” activities, including gardening, felt it had benefited their mental health, lifting depression.
Visit http://www.carryongardening.org.uk/ to learn more and get gardening 
By Lauren
“The study began in the spirit of laying lives out on a microscope slide. But it turned out that the lives were too big, too weird, too full of subtleties and contradictions to fit any easy conception of “successful living.” Arlie Bock had gone looking for binary conclusions—yeses and nos, dos and don’ts. But the enduring lessons would be paradoxical, not only on the substance of the men’s lives (the most inspiring triumphs were often studies in hardship) but also with respect to method: if it was to come to life, this cleaver-sharp science project would need the rounding influence of storytelling.”
The article doesn’t just consider the research, but looks in the life of of George Vaillant, the study’s longtime director. Vaillant has been the chief investigator of the lives of these men for 42 years and has also been the chief analyst of their lessons – many of them viewed through the lens of psychiatry, an influence which is very apparent.
“Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Of the 106 Harvard men who had five or six of these factors in their favor at age 50, half ended up at 80 as what Vaillant called “happy-well” and only 7.5 percent as “sad-sick.” Meanwhile, of the men who had three or fewer of the health factors at age 50, none ended up “happy-well” at 80. Even if they had been in adequate physical shape at 50, the men who had three or fewer protective factors were three times as likely to be dead at 80 as those with four or more factors.
The study has yielded some additional subtle surprises. Regular exercise in college predicted late-life mental health better than it did physical health. And depression turned out to be a major drain on physical health: of the men who were diagnosed with depression by age 50, more than 70 percent had died or were chronically ill by 63. More broadly, pessimists seemed to suffer physically in comparison with optimists, perhaps because they’re less likely to connect with others or care for themselves.”
Vaillant’s other main interest is the power of relationships. “It is social aptitude,” he writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses.
In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”
“The happiness books say, ‘Try happiness. You’ll like it a lot more than misery’—which is perfectly true,” he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?
In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.”
How very wise, the sort of wise that studying the lives of people for 42 years can bring….
Posted by: Tessy Britton
I’m currently sat in the RSA lunchtime lecture with Robert Shiller about how human psychology drives the economy.
John Maynard Keynes famously used the term ‘animal spirits’ to refer to the animating forces that drive people to action. He argued that economists were wrong to model human behaviour as rational, an emphasized that no-one can accurately predict human actions: it’s a question of gut feel. Writing as he was during the last great depression, the timing couldn’t be better to bring these ideas back into focus now.
One of my pet hates is the ‘efficient markets’ hypothesis that bases its argument on that great Enlightenment myth that human beings are rational. If you still believe that people make rational economic choices, go visit an ad agency for a day. In fact, John Nash whose game theory mathematics is the basis for much of the efficient markets theory, is on record as saying that the lesson of his life struggling with mental illness is that he was wrong, human beings aren’t rational. (Although, as the chair Daniel Finkelstein just argued, perhaps we are rational, it’s just that we’re all just trying to get laid.)
Shiller and his associates in ‘behavioural economics’ are unpicking this by investigating real human motivations. It’s a model for a new kind of economics based on a modern understanding of the human mind, and it’s long overdue. Shiller still maintains that he doesn’t understand how traditional economists think: “something about it just doesn’t sound right”!
Emotional feedback is the key argument: the fluctuations of the economy, notions of ‘fairness’ and corruption (something economists rarely mention) generate emotional responses (anger, mistrust, fear) which affect the economy. Confusion is a big factor too: even if people were rational, they need complete, comprehensible information to inform their choices.
Most interestingly, they follow some recent psychologists like Robert Sternberg in arguing that the human mind is structured around stories. Different stories emerge in good and bad times and amplify the economic effects.
This all makes sense to me. We are driven by far more than self-interest, and the way we perceive the world – our emotional reality – clearly has a massive impact our economic behaviours and the economy. It’s mystifying to me that so few economists are interested in what goes through people’s heads during economic crashes. Economics (much like my experiences of studying history actually) seems to operate on the basis that people are robots and we can and should ignore how we feel.
If Shiller and his colleagues are right, our collective mental health is critical to economic stability. That obviously means Mindapples is more important than I thought. But more than that, if we step back and look at the emotional stability of our economy, we are collectively volatile, panicky and scared. If our society was a person, it would be permanently on edge all of the time – like Woody Allen on speed.
So what can we do to make our economic system more emotionally resiliant? I just asked Shiller and he suggested that the bailouts of Northern Rock and the like were actually smart psychological moves to nip bad stories in the bud and ‘calm’ the markets. But how can we improve the system itself to be less jumpy? Do we need compulsory anti-anxiety meds for Wall Street?
One thing seems clear: by looking after our mental health we contribute to a healthier economy and a more stable society. If you want to heal the economy, heal thyself. And don’t panic: leave that to the economists.
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