You’ve probably never heard of Joseph Weizenbaum, a German American computer science professor at the world renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). You’ve probably never heard of ELIZA, either – the computer programme he created to demonstrate that machines could not replicate talking mental health therapy.

At least, that was the intention. But as students of his work would be quick to tell you, that’s not quite how things worked out.

Let’s rewind a little. The Sixties is now recognised as having been a hothouse of new trends and new ideas. Not just around fashion, music and film, but also in social consciousness (this is the age of peace and love and antiwar sentiment, after all) and in technological advancement.

Let�...

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I think I’ve heard this statement (it’s never meant as a question) in every possible format now: on the socials, from personal contacts, in the backlash from the recent Panorama investigation into how clinics are diagnosing the condition (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001m0f9) and in workplaces.

Most uncomfortably and personally, I endured a version of it in the form of a 30 minute verbal attack by my Uber driver whose starting and finishing position on the subject pretty much boiled down to: “You don’t have ADHD, you just say you do because it looks good for your clients – ‘Oh, look I can be like her. She has it’”.

I sometimes wish people wou...

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In 1939, the New Yorker published a short story titled The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Written by James Thurber, the partially autobiographical story and the expanded novel that followed three years later introduced readers to a meek and unassuming man with a wild fantasy life.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story (film versions have starred Danny Kaye and Ben Stiller), you’ll find no spoilers here. But it’s enough to say that Walter has what might be best described as an incidental relationship with reality.

During rare lucid moments when reality does intrude on Walter’s overpowering fantasy life (he believes himself to be, among other things, a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon, and a louche killer), he is confronted by a world he doesn...

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The problem with parenthood is that children don’t come with a handbook or a manual. 

Even though childhood is a lived experience for us adults, it’s not one we remember clearly – and certainly not the very early years. So we begin our journey as parents with no frame of reference.

We have to learn our child’s behaviours from a position of more or less total ignorance, aside from the natural instincts that millions of years of evolution give us.

We have to learn to understand how our child communicates, and it’s a language that is foreign to most of us – even for those of us who might already have a child.

And because it’s often hard for us to interpret this new verba...

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It’s now thought that around 70% of UK TV audiences regularly watch reality TV shows.

As statistics go, it’s at the more depressing end of the spectrum, especially when you consider that the genre itself is the ultimate misnomer: there really is nothing real about reality TV.

There are those shows – like Gogglebox, Location Location Location and Grand Designs, for example – that have their feet firmly planted in the world of entertainment. These are shows where the participants may be front and centre on our screens (and they can – and do – play to the camera), but they are not the sole focus of the programme itself.

But those that are centred purely on the human condition and have been con...

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Anyone who has experienced anxiety, or has been close to someone who has, knows how debilitating and destructive it can be.

Some commentators are quick to dismiss anxiety as a ‘modern illness’ and indeed there has been a marked increase in reported anxiety amongst the general public in the last few years, but the truth is it is a difficult condition to live with.

Of course, sometimes anxiety is a perfectly normal and useful way to respond. It is our body’s natural response to a perceived threat. When we are faced with potentially harmful situations it makes sense for our ‘fight or flight’ response to be triggered.

When this happens, cortisol and adrenaline are released into our systems. These cause our heart to beat faster, our body...

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If you’re someone who gets their daily news fix from BBC News Online you could be forgiven for thinking that people like me spent the whole of the pandemic making a mountain out of a mental health molehill.

Apparently, according to the BBC news feed this week, all that time I spent jumping up and down between March 2020 and … well, now, really … calling on the Government to take seriously the impact of its lockdown on mental health and invest more in the provision of desperately needed acute and counselling services was all just wasted breath.

Because, you see, according to the BBC the real impact of the pandemic on people’s mental health was minimal.

Quoting a British Medical Journal study, the ...

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In the 1980s (1983, if we want to be precise about it) there was a movie called War Games, starring Brat Packers Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. 

It’s a good, if fairly generic, 80s teen buddy film – and there were a lot of those about at the time – in which computer whiz kid Broderick finds a back door into a US defence computer designed to simulate various war scenarios with the then-Soviet Union – and accidentally manages to trick it into thinking the Russians were launching a real nuclear strike against America.

Ultimately global thermonuclear war is averted by programming the computer, called Joshua, to play continuous games of noughts and crosses (don’t ask, that’s what Google’s for).

So, why am I talki...

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Well, that escalated quickly, didn’t it? 

There we were, meandering gently towards the end of 2021 and looking forward to what we hoped would be a relatively normal year and before you know it we saw war in Ukraine, endured an economy in meltdown, said a tearful farewell to Her Maj and watched the UK change prime ministers more often than Imelda Marcos changes her shoes.

And that was just the big stuff. 

What we all need now is a bit of peace and quiet – time to reflect and recharge, a little oasis of calm in which to breathe, take stock and re-energise ourselves for a new year with new challenges and new opportunities.

Unfort...

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Andy Warhol once predicted that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Well, the future is now, and unfortunately – for all of us – that prophecy has now, to some extent, become a reality of regurgitated and unfiltered narcissism in which everyone has an opinion and we’re all entitled to it.  

Humans aren’t designed to be in contact with this many humans and we certainly aren’t designed to be exposed to all of their thoughts, all of the time.   

Self-help consumerism has exploded.   And like an unceasing episode of projectile vomiting...

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