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Summer is here, and how. We’re experiencing heatwave conditions, then the weather’s settling down, then it’s due back up and off the scale again within the next day or two. It was ever thus. If you were about in the summer of 1976, I’m tempted to say you’ll recall this still isn’t a patch on…

Even his toughest critics must have thought President Trump sounded sensible. He was talking from the White House Oval Office about the situation in Ukraine and Russia where he seems to have taken a step back from the mediation role he was at one time contemplating. His remarks likening the two states to “children fighting”…

I was recently given the task of looking after a cat I’d never met before. Potential for all sorts of problems, I felt. It’s a complicated story but the gist of it is that its owner had gone away for three weeks and, according to the person who tasked me with the role, the cat…

The psychiatrists’ handbook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), has recently added “prolonged grief” to its list of disorders. It’s definition of the newly recognised PGD is “trauma and stressor-related disorder” characterised by intense and persistent grief following the death of a close person, with symptoms lasting at least 12 months in…

This is the month which announces the arrival of Spring, the time of rebirth, regrowth, new buds and the annual hope of better times ahead. There’s a saying that if March comes in like a lion, it goes out like a lamb. The moral of the story is that it’s a changeable month. It’s hard…

There seems to be some confusion among the wider world about what having mental health issues really means. Are there, as we professionals would imagine, nuanced definitions and understandings that can help with treatment. Is it a one-size-fits-all categorisation or, perhaps the worst possible scenario, is it a condition that means whatever is done can…

An old friend once told me that all that mattered was: “Behaviour, behaviour and behaviour”. I was younger then and even more foolish than I am now so I didn’t entirely understand. I think I’m beginning to get it. What my friend was trying to explain was that, no matter what someone said, the key…

We’re just over halfway into Advent now, the period between the fourth Sunday before Christmas and Christmas Eve. If you’re UK-based, you’ll probably have been aware of preparations for Christmas from around the end of October but this period is the one when it gets serious. You can’t miss it. If you’re concentrating on the…