This is a good way to describe Fidji Simo’s story. She was born in Sète, a small town on the coast in the south of France. She was the first person in her family to finish high school, and she went on to get a management degree from HEC Paris and finish part of her program at UCLA. Eventually, she ran one of the most important product divisions in Silicon Valley. She was the CEO of Instacart when it went public on Nasdaq and one of the top leaders at OpenAI by the time she was 40. It only bends…
Author: Jack Ward
Imagine a gray Tuesday morning in Manchester or Milton Keynes at a general practitioner’s office. The waiting area is packed by 8:30 a.m., appointments take ten minutes each, and a dozen patients are carrying items they can hardly identify. They’re having trouble sleeping. They are no longer interested in anything. They no longer have the willpower necessary to get out of bed. After listening and nodding, the GP goes over the standard PHQ-9 screening questions before writing a prescription. Depression is the diagnosis. A box of SSRIs and a referral that will take four months to process are given to…
The term “tired” is insufficient to describe it. Not the kind of exhaustion described by ME/CFS sufferers, where taking a shower necessitates a period of rest, where a quick stroll causes days of collapse, and where the brain is unable to recall words that were previously automatic. It’s not a fleeting annoyance, but exhaustion as a state of being. For years, medical professionals were unable to explain, frequently relying on the notion that individuals experiencing these symptoms were depressed, anxious, or somehow psychologically responsible for their suffering. As it turned out, that assumption was harmful as well as false. However,…
Most people can identify this moment: the anxious nausea before something you’ve been dreading for weeks, or the morning of a challenging meeting when your stomach turns before you’ve said a word. We have always used gut metaphors to describe these experiences, such as “gut feelings,” “gut-wrenching moments,” and “a knot in the stomach,” and we have quietly assumed that these metaphors are merely figures of speech. As it happens, no one realized how literal the language was. The dense, bidirectional network of nerves, hormones, and immune signals that links the digestive tract to the central nervous system is known…
If you walk into any therapist’s waiting room in Chicago, Sydney, or London, there’s a good chance the person there has received CBT training. It will most likely be identified by the diplomas on the wall. It may be described in the intake paperwork. It has become so ingrained in Western mental health care that challenging it can feel almost rude, similar to voicing concerns about antibiotics during a medical conference. However, a thorough reading of the research reveals a more nuanced narrative than the one typically summed up in clinical brochures. Certain aspects of CBT have been proven beyond…
Imagine a quiet, dimly lit therapist’s office with a box of tissues on a side table. The patient is asked to follow a moving hand with their eyes while keeping in mind their worst memory, rather than going into detail about it. No extended exposure to words. No manila folder containing homework was sent home. That precise back-and-forth motion, repeated in sets, until the brain starts to change. On the surface, it seems like something created during a weekend wellness retreat. That’s how the scientific establishment treated it for years. Most likely, that era is over. More than thirty published…
In the fluorescent-lit hallways of psychiatry clinics, where patients shuffle in with years’ worth of unfulfilled prescriptions and dwindling hope, a silent frustration grows. Antidepressants are essentially ineffective for about 30% of individuals with major depressive disorder. Not at all. Nothing. Additionally, half of those who experience some relief during the first few months will relapse. For a class of medications that are prescribed to hundreds of millions of people worldwide, the actual sustained recovery rate from SSRIs alone is around 25%. This statistic is shocking when you consider it. For decades, the majority of physicians have relied on a…
The Abbott Elementary fan community has a Reddit thread that occasionally comes up, and it consistently elicits the same kind of slightly perplexed energy. The title essentially asks, “How is Lisa Ann Walter 62 and looking like that?” The comments range from sincere admiration to mild conjecture, and occasionally someone mentions “surgery” and observes the volume of responses. It’s the kind of thread that reveals something genuine about how the public views women on television as they age, especially those who refuse to fade into obscurity as the years go by. The discourse surrounding her appears somewhat different from the…