How does living online affect our mental health (and more)?
With COVID-19, most services have moved online, but not just any services. Recurring lockdowns, isolations, quarantines or fear of getting sick has led to us increasingly socialising online. Social...
How has mental illness been perceived in different eras?
In the following article we present socially functioning perceptions of mental disorders and illness. Antiquity on the one hand is dominated by magical thinking, on the other hand is the time of the...
Image of the psychiatric hospital in pop culture
The mentalhospital in pop culture is most often depicted as a place of macabre events. The hospital is presented as a prison, the patients seem to be treated like criminals. On the other hand, the...
Varieties of coronavirus - are they all equally dangerous?
Almost two years have passed since the coronavirus emerged and a pandemic broke out. The virus has spread across the globe and its consequences can be seen both in terms of human health and life and...
How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected society?
Until a few months ago, the word pandemic was associated with the Spanish flu that prevailed many years ago, but nowadays the term is familiar even to the youngest children. The COVID-19 pandemic,...
Models of mental health care
The text describes two models of mental health care. The first is a model based on the institution of a psychiatric hospital, which is the main institution managing mental illness, separating the...
Is mental health just the absence of symptoms?
In the text I show that the concept of mental health includes an individual - psychobiological - and a structural - social - element. Therefore, in order to look at mental health holistically it is...
Lyme disease and the risk of mental disorders and suicide
Lyme disease is a disease whose complications can include arthritis, cranial nerve palsy or inflammation of the brain. However, the individual can also have a negative impact on the psyche of...
People with mental health disorders are almost twice as likely to die from Covid-19
It was already known from the beginning of the pandemic that some people were more likely to become seriously infected and die if they contracted Covid-19 than others. Factors such as age or...
How does the gender reassignment process work?
Many transsexual people decide at some point in their lives to undergo the process of gender reassignment. It goes without saying that this is a lengthy and rather complicated process, but there are...
Learn about culturally specific mental disorders!
In this text, I provide a brief description of six syndromes of mental disorders specific to particular cultures and geographical areas.
Does working too much influence premature death?
Spending more than 55 hours at work each week can be a serious health risk, according to a World Health Organisation (WHO) analysis. According to the WHO and the International Labour Organisation,...
Mood swings: find out the possible causes!
Mood swings happen occasionally to every human being, but they can be considered a problem when they occur extremely frequently and the patient starts to function less well because of them. Mood...
Unstable work can worsen mental health in young people
An uncertain and unstable start to working life can have a negative impact on mental health in later years. This was indicated in a study by Spanish researchers.
The psychiatric hospital as a total institution
In this text I describe the concept of the total institution of the psychiatric hospital, as formulated by the American sociologist Erving Goffman. This author pays particular attention to formalism...
What is antipsychiatry? Profiles of Thomas Szasz and Franco Basaglia
In this text, the author attempts to answer the question of what the anti-psychiatry of the 1960s is by juxtaposing the figures of Thomas Szasz and Franco Basaglia. Although both authors radically...
Lockdown in the lives of people with a history of psychiatric treatment
The current situation related to the COVID-19 pandemic represents a new and, for many, incomprehensible psychological condition. Lockdown, isolation and insecurity make mental health problems related...
Foot fetish. What causes it?
Podofiliato is a variant of fetishism involving sexual arousal during contact with one's partner's feet. Many hypotheses have been developed over the years about this type of fetish.
How were the first drugs for schizophrenia, depression and BPAD developed?
In this article I describe the history of the development of drugs for the most important (from the point of view of the history of psychiatry) diseases, namely: schizophrenia, depression and BPAD.
Sociological conceptions of mental illness
In this text I describe sociological conceptions of mental illness from two perspectives. The first is a systemic perspective relating to social roles and the second is an interactionist perspective...
