The Mindapples campaign

This is a pic of a Mindapples meeting: relaxed … illuminated. Sigh, not really. But a very nice image never the less, from the Temporanea 08 Exhibition in Milan.

Mind Plan

I spent the weekend at Social Innovation Camp helping the Owngrown team do interesting things with real apples. Amongst the team was the lovely Jim Rokos, and meeting him properly reminded me to post a link to this. As Jim puts it: “The main food-groups of a balanced diet are well known. However, the essential […]

How mad are you?

Thanks to everyone who wrote in telling me to watch the BBC2 documentary ‘How Mad Are You?’ A really fascinating study of the fine line between ‘mad’ and ‘sane’, and quite sensitively done (if you can overlook the strange Joe Millionaire production style). The stories of those who had recovered from serious illness were incredibly […]

Recreational mental health

I’ve had some good chats with Stian Westlake and Yvonne Roberts of the Young Foundation recently, and we were talking amongst other things about ‘prevention’ and ‘cure’ in mental and physical health. The physical health community has been directing a lot of energy towards ‘preventative’ healthcare recently, and the mental health community has naturally followed […]

12 steps to happiness

Here’s another take on the “things you should do to be happy” riff, this time from the Care Services Improvement Partnership. Interestingly they reference the economic crisis – which is funny because the economic crisis is also referencing us. Here’s a summary of their, erm… twelve: In situations of sustained social, economic and psychological stress, […]

Helping people

If helping people is one of my five (and it is sometimes…), then receiving nice e-mails about Mindapples is a great way for me to feel more mentally healthy. This is my favourite so far: “Just wanted to say, Mindapples is a great idea – good luck with it. I’ve been going through a bit […]

Exercise cures everything!

Spark just arrived through my letterbox and I am going to talk about it even before I have read it. We have had over 500 responses so far to the Mindapples Test. *THANK YOU*, and one or two people mentioned exercise. This book I hope will explain all. John Ratey is a clinical associate professor […]

Mark Johnson on emotional education

In today’s Guardian Mark Johnson has written an article entitled Forget Sats: lesson one is a basic emotional education. It is very interesting to read Mark’s thoughts on the subject, as he school experience was difficult. He is author of Wasted, which describes his experiences growing up with violence, alcohol and drugs, often crime. Mark’s comment in […]

Headroom

The BBC have launched a new campaign called Headroom which aims to promote wellbeing widely. There are programmes, questionnaires, information of particular difficulties such as OCD and AHDH and depression. Well worth a look. Well done BBC. “Life is full of ups and downs. So the BBC has created Headroom, a campaign to encourage you […]

The RSA Journal plants some Mindapples

My friends at the RSA have very kindly included a piece about Mindapples in this month’s RSA Journal. It’s the back page article (always the best place to be), and you can read it online. There’s also a summary of the project on their main website. Thank you!