Nudge vs. #bigsociety?
Happy New Year folks, I hope you had a lovely mindapple-filled winter break. Last week I attended the launch of the Health Equalities Alliance and their inaugural debate Nudge or fudge – can a gentle push really tackle health inequalities? It was the first time I’ve had the chance to quiz members of the Cabinet […]
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Happiest Helping Together
“John Helliwell, emeritus professor of economics at UBC and co-director of a CIFAR panel looking into Social Interactions, Identity and Wellbeing, was at Harvard yesterday summarizing his and others’ recent research on happiness research, with special attention to the social context of well-being. He observed that the amount of data and experimentation regarding happiness research is […]
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Happy World Mental “Health” Day
Hello folks, and a very happy World Mental Health Day to you all! To celebrate, Mindapples have been on tour around London, beginning in Brixton on Thursday and Saturday, and culminating in installing the Mindapples Tree at CityCamp London in the Hub King Cross today. It’s been an amazing few days, stepping far out of […]
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The missing middle of modern meditation
I have a lot of conversations about meditation. And over the last few years, as the mainstream interest in meditation has grown and I’ve met more and more people wanting to learn the practice and the theory of meditation – and in particular mindfulness-based meditation – the supply to satisfy the demand of that interest […]
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Rethinking mental illness
Rethink has created a petition calling for the new UK Parliament to act to improve things for people affected by mental illness. I just signed it, and rather than e-mailing everyone, I thought I’d post it here. The pledge is simple, ‘we care about mental illness and need a government that will act’. Rethink wants […]
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A brief history of mindfulness
Hang out around mental health circles either side of the Atlantic at the moment and soon enough you’ll hear someone talking about mindfulness. And here in the UK, the status of mindfulness as official flavour of the psychotherapist’s month was secured this year when the Mental Health Foundation launched its Be Mindful project. With its […]
Continue reading Communicating ‘Mindfulness’
With Mindapples kicking off 2010 with plenty of team discussions about visualising and designing this seemed appropriate! Photography agency LPA, The Mental Health Foundation and Clear Channel Outdoor are calling creatives to generate ideas for a poster campaign to help build awareness with the general public of Mindfulness, (a form of meditation that is, the […]
Continue reading The Americanization of Mental Health
A very interesting article in The New York Times, by Ethan Watters, describe’s how the US’s view of mental health is homogenising mental health: “For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our […]
Continue reading Are resolutions good for you?
It’s that time of year when people start making New Year’s Resolutions. But according to psychologists, most of the time we just end up being unhappy at our failure to do them. We make promises that we don’t keep, which makes us feel bad, and so we do things to feel better. Like comfort eat. […]
Continue reading Nurturing Relationships
There is a very insightful article in the Guardian about how important Christmas is for nurturing our relationships with friends and family. Using some data from the new report by the Young Foundation Sinking and swimming: understanding Britain’s unmet needs, the article points to the increase in anxiety and depression and how important a renewed […]
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