Almost no one discussed having a private assessment a few years ago. You held off. You added your name to a list, eventually received a letter, and the entire process took place gradually within the public system, as these things were meant to. That has changed, and since there was no announcement, it has changed in a way that is simple to overlook. It gradually spread, one person at a time, until all of a sudden half of the people you know appear to have either paid for an evaluation or are secretly considering it. The figures that support this…
Author: Jack Ward
When a patient describes feeling everything too much, a certain expression appears on a clinician’s face. The eyes tightened a little. The next question is followed by a pause. Sometimes, during that pause, a quiet decision is made that the patient won’t find out about for weeks, if at all. The term “borderline” is recorded. Additionally, once a word appears in a chart, it usually stays there. These days, it’s difficult to ignore how frequently this occurs. You can find waiting rooms full of people who have been told at some point that their emotions indicate a personality disorder if…
On weekends, a certain type of fatigue persists. At eight in the morning, you can see it in coffee shops with laptops open, AirPods in, and a half-eaten oat-milk muffin left on the side. During the third Zoom of the morning, you can see it in a colleague’s somewhat dazed expression. It’s a fatigue that lurks behind the eyes, and it’s starting to affect a whole generation of workers informally. The so-called “hustle culture” did not appear out of nowhere. We bought it. Productivity was first marketed as a virtue, then as an identity, and finally as something akin to…
I first became aware of it at a small clinic in a peaceful area of north London, where a therapist casually mentioned that three of her new clients that month had come in discussing wildfires they had never seen firsthand. not a loss. not a divorce. not at work. fires. Speaking with clinicians these days gives me the impression that the types of distress that patients present with have changed. It’s difficult to diagnose climate anxiety, or eco-anxiety, as some still refer to it. The DSM does not include it. However, therapists in North America and Europe consistently report the…
The picture of a woman crossing the finish line of the New York City Marathon in November 2023, her husband waiting to embrace her, and neither of them explicitly stating what they already knew is almost intolerable. Only a few weeks prior, he had received a glioblastoma diagnosis. Carrying that weight, she ran 26.2 miles before grinning on television the following morning. Sheinelle Jones got up early, drove to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, sat on the Today show couch, and laughed at her co-hosts’ jokes for almost a year. After that, she and her husband, Uche Ojeh, got back in a…
For years, the term “Vanessa Paradis’ illness” has been subtly rising in search results, but oddly, it doesn’t really lead anywhere. According to all reliable accounts, she is doing well. working. traveling. Seated in the front row at Chanel in Paris in October, she appears to be a woman who intends to stay for some time. Nevertheless, the rumor continues to evolve, fueled by YouTube channel thumbnails that claim she is “between life and death,” only to present thirty seconds of stock footage with a voiceover that defies the headline. Because no one ever finishes reading it, this type of…
The limp wasn’t the first thing that people noticed. The face was the culprit. Something didn’t seem right when Tyrese Haliburton sat down in front of the cameras during the Pacers’ exit interviews in April. His eye appeared swollen. There seemed to be a missing portion of an eyebrow. His quiet, slightly worn-out appearance didn’t quite match the carefree, beaming guard who had almost led Indiana to a championship the previous season. Then there was the weight. The body that participated in Game 7 against Oklahoma City was about thirty pounds lighter. The mean little monikers had already done their…
For many years, insomnia was confined to a peculiar area of medicine. Patients talked about it almost apologetically, as if it were something to manage rather than treat, similar to how they would talk about an old knee injury or a sore back. Physicians prescribed melatonin, advised avoiding caffeine after 3 p.m., and may have written a brief prescription for zolpidem if conditions worsened. The weather was viewed as unpleasant, sometimes severe, but generally something to wait out. Silently, that framing is disintegrating. If you walk into a psychiatric clinic today, you’ll see a different dialogue emerging, one in which…