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Christmas Season

Christmas can be such a lovely time of year, the dark winter nights have been drawing in,suddenly there are colourful decorations and bright little lights to illuminate the long winter darkness. Normality seems to be suspended or paused, with everything mundane or normal seeming to stop for the party time of Christmas.Sadly whilst normality may pause for some to be filled with festive joy, for others, especially those in emotional pain or experiencing grief, the mental suffering never pauses. In...

Talking About Suicide and Suicidal Thoughts

This month is suicide prevention month, and for a very short while the media spotlight is firmly drawn to highlighting the rates of death by suicide in the UK, with a focus on how we should all be working together as a society to try and prevent others ending their lives by suicide. In my role as the clinical director at Teenage Mental Health, suicidal thinking and ideation are one of the common daily presentations of the patients that my team and I work with. However, as the organisations name ...

Exploring Intrusive Thoughts

What are Intrusive thoughts?Intrusive thoughts are experienced by most of the population, many people don’t even realise they have them whilst others consciously battle with intrusive thoughts on a daily basis. This blog aims to explain the nature of intrusive thoughts and touch lightly on their origins, explore ways in which someone can ease the psychological distress caused by intrusive thoughts and advise when further action should be taken.  Much like a song stuck in your head, intrus...

Exam Results Day 2022 – Stresses, Surprises and Uncertainty

In the UK this year A-level and AS level results day is Thursday, August 18th and GCSE results are released on Thursday, August 25th. Previous generations of students will remember the nerves and excitement of sitting exams, in big school halls with all their friends. They will remember the excited buzz of finishing an exam, meeting friends and family afterwards to celebrate and discuss how well they thought they had done. They might remember the encouraging conversations with teachers, and the ...

Self Care

Taking a look at the definitions of selfcare and its importance as well as ways to start and improve on the skill. This blog also includes a self care checklist and some creative ways to practice self-care on a limited budget....

Opening Up About Your Mental Health

This blog is directed at young people (or folks of any age) who are struggling in silence with difficult thoughts, emotions and feelings, or mental health symptoms such as self-harm, disordered eating, anxiety and/or depression who feel unable for any reason to open up to others. For the readers not in some form of emotional distress but concerned for others they feel might be or are known to be, this will be helpful for you too. Something to help hold in mind how important that moment is when s...

Returning to School Post Lock-Down

Returning to school another year older or starting somewhere new can be an exciting and apprehensive time for any child, but since the pandemic hit, many children have been left traumatised by their schooling experience and so returning to any form of academic establishment will present new and increasingly difficult challenges for them. This blog aims to highlight some of these challenges and the ways in which they can be managed....

Leaving School in a Pandemic

Children of all ages have faced many difficulties during the pandemic, however leaving school could be considered one of the biggest obstacles a child may have to face; leaving a familiar environment indefinitely without experiencing a transitional period to mourn its loss can conjure difficult emotions and situations that seem hard to tackle. ...

Mental Health and Exercise

Now that summer has arisen, and restrictions are lifting it is a better time than ever to get outside and be active. Whether it's going for a run, playing football in the park, or simply walking to the shops instead of driving, it's important to get out and be active. Not only is exercise crucial to your physical health but it also greatly impacts on your mental health. This is because when you exercise, feel-good hormones and chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine get released, thus lifting y...

Having A Child In Therapy

Taking the first step, although it may be small, can lead to much greater results occurring in the future. When a baby takes their first step, they are wobbly, unsure, and even conscious they may fall again but that first step still led them to start their journey of learning how to walk. In therapy, we need to take that first step and be aware that changes do not happen overnight, although it feels difficult. Smaller steps may take longer but bigger steps can be a lot more challenging. ...

Barriers to Body Acceptance

Although a culture encouraging self-love and body acceptance is sweeping the nation, many of us find the idea difficult to practice or even comprehend. Why do we find it so hard to love our bodies. Acknowledging the psychological harm that has already been inflicted by an inherently toxic society may shed light onto some of the deeply ingrained thoughts and feelings we have been taught about our bodies. This blog will be looking at the effects of body dysmorphia, bodies in the media, toxic beaut...

The Control and Coping Behind Disordered Eating

Despite common belief, disordered eating is not just about food. Food is used as a coping mechanism for the difficult emotions felt by someone with disordered eating, and the behaviours portrayed do no justice for the complex ways of thinking responsible for them. For the purpose of this blog, I will be using descriptive terms and symptoms (e.g., disordered eating, food restriction, binging) rather than labels or diagnosis (e.g., eating disorders, anorexia, bulimia) to help combat the myth that ...

Mental Health Awareness Week Reflection, 10th - 16th May 2021

Hosted annually since 2000 by the Mental Health Foundation, the importance of mental health awareness is emphasised by many across the UK. This year it falls on the 10th of May through to the 16th of May and this year’s chosen theme is Nature. The organisation’s research has shown that nature has become an immensely popular way of people trying to improve their mental health. Whether this be done by walking through the countryside, cycling or just experiencing and interacting with the wilder...

Understanding Emotions

Understanding one’s own emotions whilst being able to express and communicate them effectively can lead to healthier mental well-being and aid mental health recovery. This blog will be looking at how to improve one’s emotional intelligence through the identification of unfamiliar emotions and how to manage them. Identifying EmotionsUnfamiliar emotions can feel intimidating, this section gives insight on how to identify and reclaim one’s feelings as a first step to understanding them. The ...

Bookmark Competition

Enter our Bookmark Competition!! Teenage Mental Health are running a FREE bookmarks campaign. We are working on providing schools free bookmarks for students with helpful advice and tips for issues surrounding mental health.  We plan to have the bookmarks ready to start distribution for the Easter half term.  What the bookmarks will contain, and more information. Our plan is to start distribution with Ipswich schools and others nearby in March, and gradually re...

Communicating with an Eating Disorder

Eating disorders can create tensions within families, causing arguments about food and treatment. This blog aims to help improve the communication skills between eating disorder sufferers and their families.If you are supporting someone through an eating disorderIt is important to focus on open communication and trust when talking to a person with an eating disorder. Focus on who you are talking to, what they may be feeling and remember to remove any blame you have placed upon yourself....

Surviving Christmas with an Eating Disorder

Navigating Christmas with an eating disorder can be anxiety provoking and stressful. Your family might prepare extravagant or unfamiliar foods and you may be expected to eat in front of extended family members. Changes to your usual routines around eating in addition to the pressure to eat or ‘indulge’ can be especially tricky to deal with. It is important to remember though that Christmas does not have to be all about food, rather it is about enjoying yourself and the company of others. Bel...

Self-Harm and Communicating your Problems

“TRIGGER WARNING- This blog contains information about self-harm which may be upsetting to some people”.Self-harm is when someone intentionally inflicts an injury on their body as a way of dealing with emotional stress or anxiety. Self-harming behaviours can include cutting, scratching, burning, punching hard objects, and swallowing objects....

Why do we dream and what can it tell us about our problems?

Dreams and the UnconsciousBefore the 1900s and the birth of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic discipline, dreams were thought to come from mystical sources. People thought that perhaps they were messages from God or a warning from the devil, and any dreams that couldn't be made sense of were dismissed as being nothing of importance. However, in the late 1890s Sigmund Freud started to look more closely at the content of dreams and what they meant for the dreamer. In 1900 he published his most well-...

Adolescent Mental Health in Lockdown

The March 2020 Covid-19 lockdown saw a significant increase in mental health problems with 83% of young people surveyed by Young Minds reporting that the pandemic had made their mental health worse. (https://youngminds.org.uk/media/3708/coronavirus/ report_march2020.pdf). Now as England heads into its second lockdown, young people’s mental health is once again at increased risk....

Healthy Body and Healthy Mind

“Exercise keeps me occupied, which is good for my mental health” (Gail Porter).How do you feel when you have finished exercising? You might be out of breath or your muscles might ache, but alongside that you might feel a sense of achievement and feel really good about yourself....

Young People’s Tidal Wave of Poor Mental Health

Let’s talk. As a mental health professional, I am becoming increasingly concerned about the health and welfare of our young people at this moment in time. You might think that this is going to be another discussion about Covid19, or about the creeping tide of obesity, or the sharp increase in alcohol consumption during lockdown. No, what terrifies me most is the ever-increasing tidal wave of mental health crisis facing our upcoming generation of young adults....

Finding the Right Therapist

World Mental Health Day on the 10th October 2020 aimed to raise mental health awareness and to make a contribution to ensure that those living with mental illness can lead better lives. It aimed to raise awareness about not only our mental health, but also how poor mental health can impact those around us too. On this day, many people took to social media to raise awareness of their own struggles, or to change their Facebook profile picture to the World Mental Health Day Logo....

Helping a Child with Death Anxiety

We live in a society which denies death. Death is viewed online, on television, and videogames, but this is all a step removed from seeing death on an everyday basis. The death and killing that happens with regularity through TV and films means that we can emotionally detach from it and become desensitised to the reality of the pain and grief associated with it....

Viewing Violence Online

On the 31 st August 2020, US army veteran Ronnie McNutt sat at his desk in his study, live streamed himself on Facebook, and shot himself in the head. The footage of his death was widely shared across social media and as the video went viral social media platforms struggled to contain its spread, resulting in potentially millions of views worldwide. Many of these viewers were young people who viewed it inadvertently through TikTok’s* recommended “For You” section....