My eyes would say -- "Thank you. I see you." And their eyes would say -- "Nobody ever sees me. Thank you." Over the summer, during lockdown, I got into playing this online game, “Township”. You start with a little farmstead, and you invest time and sometimes money into developing your place into a thriving metropolitan economy. You grow produce, which you sell on to customers, or process into more sophisticated goods. (Township doesn’t seem to have a service economy, so th

I've just been watching a new documentary on BBC3: "The Voices in My Head." The programme follows three young people, Kyle, Chaz and Emmalina, and uses a novel audio overlay track, created with the guidance and help of the contributors, to recreate the soundtrack of the voices they hear, and give us a flavour of what it's like for each of them as they go about their daily lives. Kyle started hearing his voice about a year ago, after losing his girlfriend, his job and his home

"That terrible things happen to perfectly good people. That perfectly good people can make terrible mistakes. That the world can be very capricious. We know it, but it’s helpful for just day-to-day functioning to forget that, and assume that we are in control. When these accidents happen, they’re just reminders that we only have partial control. I think that’s very difficult…" Maryann Gray accidentally ran over an 8-year-old boy who ran out into the road in front of his h

The statistics are shocking. Every two hours a man in the UK takes his own life. Male suicide and mental health is a big issue that can’t be ignored any longer. It’s unacceptable that so many men are dying from suicide on a daily basis, yet so few people are talking about it. To stop people in their tracks, make them pay attention and inspire much needed conversation and action around suicide, CALM partnered with artist Mark Jenkins, and his collaborator Sandra Fernandez, to

The Adverse Childhood Events (ACE) Study began life in 1985 in an obesity clinic in California. Concerned about their weight loss programme’s high drop-out rate, Dr Vincent Felitti noticed the curious fact that that the patients who were dropping out were the ones who were successfully losing weight. Following up with the former participants, Felitti discovered that the majority had experienced sexual abuse in childhood. He speculated that obesity might, for some people, se